Continue reading for all the details and a video of it in action!

After this test I strapped the box on top of my nitro RC truck but the vibrations and lack of reverse made it almost impossible to drive via the video feed. That’s when I decided to add wheels and propulsion to the actual box.

It basically turned into a test to see if I could use tape and glue to make a fun-to-drive vehicle. A ghetto-bot if you will. I had an extra brushless motor and propeller already so it seemed like a quick way to give this vehicle propulsion without having to come up with a drive-train for wheels.

Here’s a rough list of what went into it!

Somewhat surprisingly it turned out to be very fun to drive and the rear steering affords quite a good amount of maneuverability. Best of all you can drive it from either the onboard video feed or by looking at it like a traditional RC car, both work out really well! The camera has a pan/tilt mechanism that makes it easy to look around while driving.

Check out this video of the bot in action!

Like the video says, I can’t decide what to name this thing, so if you have an idea then post it on the YouTube page! Thanks for looking! questions or comments? Leave a comment below!

It uses the MICROCHIP ENC28j60 Stand-alone Ethernet Controller. This project is an attempt to make a low-cost generic ethernet-attached relay box with a web interface. It will allow me to control physical devices from my iPhone or any internet connected device with a browser. It can control things like the garage door, air compressor, exhaust fans, or basically anything else that can be switched on and off.

Continue reading for all the details, photos, and a video of it in action!

All of the ethernet functionality is handled by the ENC28j60 chip, which is controlled by an ATMEGA328. The AVR micro controller communicates with the ENC28j60 via a SPI connection. The device receives and responds to UDP packets that contain instructions such as ‘RELAY 1 ON’ or ‘RELAYS OFF’. Here is a photo of the working prototype:

Once I had it working I built a schematic in Eagle. The component count is pretty low for a project like this, and Eagle already had every part I needed in it’s libraries.

From there I designed a board to fit inside of this box. I use Eagle 5.10 for designing schematics and boards, it tends to have most common parts in it’s library.

Once I had it all traced out I send it off to SparkFun’s BatchPCB. And then, we wait. It can take about four weeks from placing an order to delivery, which is scary when you don’t know if something is routed wrong. If it doesn’t work I’ll have to fix it and reorder, and wait another month to try again. What’s worse is that the mag-jack connection is pretty susceptible to magnetic interference so the only way to know if this particular routing configuration will work is to try it in real life. Here is the finished board, BatchPCB does a great job, they print some quality boards!

It’s an exciting day when a delivery from BatchPCB shows up! The boards look great. I blew it with the silkscreen on the bottom though, everything got covered by the big pads on the bottom.

The top silkscreen turned out perfect though, all the labels and placement markers came out legible and unobstructed.

Above is the full parts list. It has every part listed, including the enclosure and the PCB. Forty dollars to build a single box isn’t so bad at all, considering the new Arduino Ethernet boards sell for $60 without an enclosure. All the listed prices are for a quantity of one, so producing these in numbers would drive the price way down.

Here is the populated board! Didn’t take too long to solder up. I bought the wrong voltage regulators, the pinout is different, so it’s all sideways in the top right corner.

A photo showing off the MagJack ethernet port.

Here’s the board in the the bottom of the enclosure, I’ve wired up the relays to the electric door operator switches. One relay ‘presses’ the open button, the other ‘presses’ the close button.

I just mounted it right next to the control buttons

I’ve been using it daily, and it been working great! Check out this video of it in action where I open the door with my iPhone.

As you can see the controls are just on a webpage in the browser. That way I can get to them from any device or computer, LAN or WAN. Also notice the quick response time! It averages 50ms round trip, very snappy.

Thanks for checking out this post! Let me know what you think in the comments below!

A friend of mine was asked to make a prop that looked like a home made bomb for a movie that was being produced. I helped out by designing and building the countdown timer display circuit. As you can see it has a bit of a home made look to it, which is what the director was looking for to fit within the context of the story.

This project used parts I got from Digikey and Sparkfun. It’s built on two separate pieces of perfboard and uses only two ICs to operate the display, a LED Display Driver (MAX7219) and an Atmel ATTiny4313. Click continue reading for more photos, descriptions, and a video of the finished timer!

Above is the control board. There was a specific size constraint on this project so I had to do two separate boards, which made it hard to get all the wiring right. Here you can see the Atmel micro-controller and the 7-segment display driver. The uC tells the display driver what numbers to show on the 7-segment display, and the display driver handles all the hard work of cycling through the digits and figuring out which segments to turn on. I’m particularly proud of the recursive function I came up with to decrement the amount of time on the display:

void decrement(unsigned char *digits, int i)
{
    if(i==NUM_DIGITS) return;   //Last digit, finished recursing

    if(digits[i]==0)
    {
        //This digit rolled over, it either becomes a 9 or a 5 depending
        //on which digit it is! (Think 99 vs 59 on a clock)
        if(i==3 || i==5 || i==7)
            digits[i]=5;
        else
            digits[i]=9;
        decrement(digits,i+1);    //This digit rolled over, recurse to next digit
    }
    else
        digits[i]=digits[i]-1;    //Decrement this digit
}

The above segment works efficiently because it only recurses for the digits that need to be changed. Therefore, most of the time it doesn’t even need to recurse.

The back side of the LED display took forever to solder together. It’s hard to tell in this image so click here to see it fullsize. All of the segments of the LEDs had to be linked together and then connected to a pin on the MAX7219 along with all of the common pins (one for each digit). It was tedious and I don’t want to ever do it again!

After the timer was finished we started putting together a bunch of fancy looking crap to make the ‘bomb-bag’. It’s just a bunch of old phone circuit boards along with some power supply stuff.

It’s gonna blow! Where’s Jack Bauer when you need him.

You can see the radioactive orb has some wires going into it. It’s just a welded steel ball but it looks pretty good as a warhead.

Add a duffel bag for good measure and you’ve got yourself one theatrically believable homemade bomb.

Check out this video of the timer in action! It looks great while it’s counting. You’ll notice that I programmed the # key as a start/pause button and the * key resets the timer to programming mode. Also as an added touch the timer flashes 00:00:00:00 when the countdown expires.

Got anything to say about this? Leave me a comment! Anybody want to see some source code?

(Watch in HD on vimeo.com!)

I recently got the chance to film a wedding for Mr. and Mrs. Wright, and it was a blast. I shot it handheld with the Canon 7d and primarily used the Sigma 18-200mm OS. The stabilization on this lens works surprisingly well for shooting handheld video even at longer focal lengths. Initially I was worried about the 12 minute time limit on the 7d, but in the end my clips averaged about only 30 seconds long so 12 minutes seemed like forever.

I put together a wedding day highlight video and embedded it above. Check it out and let me know what you think in the comments!

During the process of (re)building this site in WordPress I was trying to come up with ideas for the sidebar. I used to have a widget that showed a random image from a folder, which was cool but a little limited. What if it could be expanded to pull an image from the entire internet? Introducing the Completely Random Widget. This is the first project I have submitted to the WordPress Plugin Directory. You can see it in action on the sidebar of this site. In essence it is a sidebar widget that uses Google images to find a totally random image from the web and display it on your site. You can check it out it’s page in the Plugin Directory, give it a try on your site! This site is running a custom version that archives each image that gets displayed, and I’ve set up a Random Image Archive Page so you can see every image that the widget has ever displayed on this site! Give this plugin a try and let me know what you think!

Recently I was helping out with the Customer Dish learning center where we needed to embed some HD YouTube videos. We wanted to embed them as HD so the user did not have to hit play and then select the better quality. Turns out the hd=1 option does not work anymore, the new player automatically selects the ‘best’ resolution for the size of the embed, which is 480p or lower when your embed size is less than about 850px wide.

But there is good news! The old player is still avaliable and allows you to embed in HD regardless of size. The new player is version 3.0, you want 2.0. Here’s how to get it:

1. On your video hit Share to get to the embed code
2. Check Use Old Embed Code and Play in HD
3. Copy the code and put it on your site
4. Replace both instances of version=3 with fs=1 in the code

Now you should be good to go! Your videos will load in HD automatically and also have a full screen button. If you want to skip the work you can plug in the video ID in the box below and I’ll generate the code for you!

There you have it, YouTube videos embeded in HD regardless of the embedded size.

If this helped you out be sure to comment or like!

So I was curious about when the best time to post something to Facebook was. So I created a script that spoofs my browser information and logs into Facebook. Then it scrapes the number of friends I have online from the chat bar at the bottom of the screen. The script runs every 5 minutes, 24-hours a day, and stores the number of friends I have online in a database.

I used the first week of readings to create the graph above. I find it fascinating! Every day follows the same basic shape with Monday and Tuesday seeing by far the most activity. Then it steadily decreases until the least popular day, Saturday. I’m really interested to see what next week looks like, will it be similar? I have posted the page that shows the real-time data here, so check it out if you want to see more!

I just got my Square Inc. card reader in the mail. Basically it’s a little device that can be plugged into the bottom of an iPhone or iPod touch. It allows you to swipe credit cards through it, enabling you to accept credit card payments anywhere! I was trying to decide where I was going to stash it so that it would always be with me, it’s too big for a wallet, but it would work on my keys! However, I didn’t want it to be attached to my keys when I was using it, it needed to be releasable. After pondering how to do this I realized it’s already made to be attached and released. With that in mind I went looking for a spare female headphone jack.

I found an extra 2.5mm headphone adapter, and after a little dremel work to chop the top off, and one small hole I had a perfect quick release Square pay card reader on my keys. Took all of five minutes once I found the adapter. Now I can accept credit card payments anywhere (Lookout world!).