Long range video surveillance robot

Written on by Thomas Renck

The title of this post isn’t entirely accurate. It’s more of a very strange remotely controlled vehicle, a kind of land drone. You’re probably wondering why it’s made out of a shipping box, well here’s what happened… I bought a 1000mw wireless video transmitter with the intention of learning about it and eventually putting it on an RC plane to fly around. It was shipped to me in that very USPS box pictured above. The first thing I wanted to do was power it up and see how long the range was, of course! So I taped all the components to the top of the box so they would stay together and handed it to +Steve Melton who then proceeded to run far away while I watched the video feed. The camera works great, it gives a good picture for quite a long distance (tested to 1900 feet on flat open ground) and is resistant to objects in the way like buildings and trees.

Continue reading for all the details and a video of it in action!
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Ethernet controlled garage door

Written on by Thomas Renck


I just finished installing an electric opener on a big steel roll-up door so that we can park our car inside, away from the dirt and sun! But since it is an old industrial opener there was no way to open it remotely, like from inside the car. The photo above is my finished circuit board for controlling the door via ethernet.

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!

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Bomb Timer Movie Prop

Written on by Thomas Renck


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!
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Jake and Ashley wedding video

Written on by Thomas Renck

(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!

WordPress plugin: Completely Random Widget

Written on by Thomas Renck

 

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!

Embed YouTube videos as HD

Written on by Thomas Renck

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!

A week of Facebook friends

Written on by Thomas Renck

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!

Square Inc. card reader keychain (DIY)

Written on by Thomas Renck



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!).