A science museum needs interactive exhibits, and this is an exhibit that can easily be extended, is easy to setup and install, is robust and safe and easy to maintain. Exhibits can easily cost tens of thousands of dollars, but this one can grow to any size budget but the top of the line is…
Category: Personal Projects
Anglerfish for Bikes
Originally intended for Burning Man, this device has usefulness more and more in our world as people embrace biking. Cars have had this feature for years; push the button on your keys and the car honks and the headlights flash. Why can’t we have that for bikes? This devices use a long range Bluetooth Low…
Side project – Mallards Fast Pitch
My hackerspace Sector67 was approached this winter with a problem; the local minor league baseball stadium (Madison Mallards) fast pitch sign was old and no longer working, and they wanted some help fixing it up. In exchange for our expertise, they promised significant advertising and publicity, and they would have us be special guests at a…
My ONE post on gun control
This post is about my attempt at a technological solution to gun problems. I built a working prototype, but ultimately I believe that this is not a solution to the problem of mass shootings. There is no technological solution that will prevent someone who is sufficiently motivated from doing significant harm yet still afford us…
A Kalahari Christmas
After Erin took me on a ski trip to Salt Lake City for Christmas 2010, I was far behind in the Christmas Karma. For 2011 I planned to take her to a resort in Wisconsin Dells, which is sort of like the Las Vegas of Wisconsin, except with water parks instead of casinos. Of the many resorts,…
Fast Scanner
Since I’m moving in a few months to an apartment of significantly reduced size, I am starting to reduce the size of my collection of stuff. One thing I’ve been carrying around is everything from my college career. I have every syllabus, paper, homework assignment, handout, midterm… in total it was three boxes full of…
Mouse Modding
Last night I made some changes to my mouse; we’ll see if they’re improvements or not. Originally I was dismantling it to clean it. Something had gotten inside the wheel and was causing it to scroll inconsistently. Once I got inside, though, I saw an opportunity to tune it. First was the clicking on the…
Laser Pointer Interface
A while ago I built a computer input device using a laser pointer and regular usb web camera. It was a pretty simple setup, and I used a lot of existing tools as a jumping off point. Here’s a writeup of my work and details for how to replicate it and what I learned. First,…
Broken Car Lock
It’s no secret that I love my car. It’s been extremely dependable, has treated me very well, has a good personality and an adventurous attitude, and doesn’t ask for much (it’s a 2000 Chrysler Neon, and yes, I mean Chrysler). I’ve had it for almost 10 years and put over 100,000 miles on it myself…
Partially Failed Cheesecake
Saturday I had a party for work, so I thought I’d throw together a cheesecake. I used the recipe I’ve used a few times in the past. Better Homes and Garden, by the way. Rather than melt some semi-sweet chocolate, I went instead with a bottle of Hershey chocolate sauce. I was getting to the…