Halloween

Amazing what some make-up can do !

Spread-on special-fx wax, and flesh-coloured face paint, then a liberal helping of golden syrup mixed with food colouring. That scared some of the children when they rang on our door-bell after dark tonight !

Wordle tag display

I came across Wordle today.  Cool. Then I realised I’ve seen such tag cloud displays myself already, now I know where they came from.

I created one of my own, from the contents of this blog :

Wordle of techcobweb.wordpress.com as of 21st October 2009

Cool tool.  Shame it doesn’t create image maps to search results on the selected tags. Check it out at http://www.wordle.net

Connecting an ATMega168 on a breadboard to my AVR-ISP500 programmer

My AVR programmer has a 2×3 connector which I needed to connect to my breadboard. So I had to make my own connector:

GameClockDuino : Game timer

I play Go. It’s a really great oriental game played between two people. Takes about 90 minutes to play, has a handicap system to allow better players to play beginners, with each having a fifty-fifty chance of winning. It’s easier to learn than Chess. Computers are rubbish at it. It’s huge in the far east, on the internet and of course at some local clubs.

I’m fed up with the lack of a byo-yomi/fischer timer for blitz games played at the local club with mechanical clocks… Time to get inventive…

Here’s how it turned out…

Click on to find out more on how this was made…

SlotCarDuino : Slot Car Racing Lap Timer

SlotCarDuino : Create a lap timing system. Minutes, Seconds, tenths of a second to be displayed with 7-segment LED digits. Race starter lights being an optional extra.

Here’s how it turned out :

Read more after the break…

Packaging the twittering cat door

… the saga of the twittering cat door continues…

(you may find it helpful to refer to previous articles in this series : Twittering Cat Door and  Enhanced twittering cat door)

With the prototype working and tested, and a steady stream of tweets being produced by the cat, I’ve got to the point where I need to hide all the wires, and tidy up the physical installation. It has to look clean and professional, or I won’t feel that i’ve “finished” the job.

Enhanced twittering cat door

… the saga of the twittering cat door continues …

Now that I have the basic prototyped twittering cat door working, I really wanted to make some improvements.

Where to get arduino/electronics kit in the UK

This is where I get my kit from :

Twittering Cat Door

I just read “Making Things Talk” by Tom Igoe , and wanted to have a go at a physical computing project.

I thought I’d make our cat door “twitter”.  Ok, it’s not original, there are a few projects already done and published out there, but I thought it provide a fairly easy path into several topics I’ve not explored before :

• Electronics, components, soldering
• Arduino microprocessors http://www.arduino.cc/
• Twitter programming interface http://apiwiki.twitter.com/

I’m not complete on this project yet, but you can read how I’ve got on after the break…

Home Automation … the story so far

First blog. First post. Here goes…

Ok. So I’m not the first to dabble and tinker in a bit of home automation, but I’m interested, and see it as a chance to learn some new stuff and have some fun.

Inspired by colleagues at work and other notables on the web, I’ve taken the plunge and got stuck in.

Here’s the story so far…