Month: October 2008
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Petty Joule Thief
You might be familiar with the original Joule Thief, a simple, homebrewable step-up converter often used to drive LEDs (with Vf of several volts) from a single 1.5V battery, or extract the last remaining juice from a battery that’s too dead for use in most real-world gadgets. The basic Joule Thief can suck power from…
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Weatherball
Last night I finished throwing together a workable version of the Weatherball, currently displaying a color code at the end of my flagpole to indicate whether tomorrow holds any interesting weather. Apparently cities and radio stations have been doing it since the 1950s, but now I have my own! The data is grabbed from the…
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Hiking in the Middlesex Fells
Some pictures from our hiking trip a couple weeks ago (Krista, myself, Jane, and Matt). Holy crap, is it fall already? How did that happen?
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Some stuff on Paypal
I’ve been using Paypal as the payment-handling service for my trance vibe project, and overall it’s not too bad. I can even print my own postage for domestic shipments, sticky on a label and not have to drive to the post office to send out an order anymore. But there are a few things about…
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Assembler Interpreter for microcontrollers – sane?
I’m thinking of how much work it would be to write an assembler interpreter in PIC assembler. Probably sounds like the dumbest idea in the world, right ;-) I’ve been toying with this idea lately for sort of futureproofing microcontroller-based designs, and adding some new possibilities for specific applications (polymorphic / self-modifying code, security applications,…