Happy New Year At Home Imagineers!
Well New Year... New Resolutions... New Site!
The new web site design is not exactly as I would like to have it look, but I think it is a great deal better than what we had before. I view AtHomeImagineering.com kind of like Disneyland. As Walt said about the park...
"It's something that will never be finished. Something that I can keep developing, keep plussing and adding to."
This year I wanted to bring additional content to AtHomeImagineering.com so that fellow At Home Imagineers would have a reason to visit more often. I also wanted to be able to upload content to the site more easily myself, since that has been one of my main reasons for not updating AtHomeImagineering.com more regularly. With that in mind, I have linked the site directly into my personal blog at kevin.fonner.net. Whenever I post At Home Imagineering related updates to my projects on my blog, they will automatically be posted to AtHomeImagineering.com.
This will allow me to bring fresh content to AtHomeImagineering.com and my blog at the same time! I have also set the site up so that in the future I will be able to tie it into other at home imagineer's blogs as well, bringing a great deal more content into the site. So any of you other At Home Imagineers out there that decide to start blogging about your projects, be sure to let me know!
Also for you imagineers out there that wonder where in the world are my progress updates... hopefully this year will be better. Now that I have the site setup better and have simplified uploading content, this will allow me to post updates a great deal easier. I have also made it one of my new years resolutions to put an update about one of my projects that I'm working on at least once a week. Since I am putting this update out two weeks into the year... well I have kind of already broke that resolution. ;) But, from this week forward lots of new content will hopefully follow!
- Posted bykevinon05/07/2008 - 04:27
Ok.... This was a big deal for me. For some reason it took me a while to get a TWI (I2c) interface up and running properly and it held me up from doing some blog posts. But it's working now! Here I have two simple avr platforms up and running. The one on the left is the master and the one on the right is the slave. To control 300-500 LED lights I decided that it was a job for more then one microcontroller. So I will have a master LED controller and several slave LED controllers. The master will push the animation frames down the bus and each of the slave controllers will control a bank of shift registers connected to 64 LEDS.
Here is a close up of the Master Controller. Not really much different circuitry then before. I will be posting the code up here eventually. That is where most of the fun is! Don't be fooled by the connector up to the top left. It's not Ethernet. That's actually a serial connection to my computer for debugging. I use Ethernet patch cables instead of serial cables often now because I can make my own cables then. Just slap a couple of custom RJ45-DSUB-9 adapters onto an ether cable and you have a serial cable. I picked that up from Make Magazine (Issue 01). Pretty Handy.
It's great to be a geek!
- Posted bykevinon04/27/2008 - 04:25
I added a a serial output to my development board to help with debugging the chip. The tutorials at sparkfun were really helpful!
- Posted bykevinon04/21/2008 - 04:20
Alright! We have a mountain base. I will be erecting the wood frame of the mountain on top of these concrete supports. When I started this project I was not entirely sure how many bags of concrete this would take.... 62! I purchased 62 bags of concrete, loaded them in my car, unloaded them, loaded them 3-4 at a time into a concrete mixer in my driveway, poured that into my wheelbarrow, wheeled it around to the back of my house, and then shoveled it into the footers... all in a period of 24 hours. Needless to say my arms were ready to fall off! (I should have just had a truck come in, but I was unsure whether I could time everything right)
Here is another shot of the mountain base.
Here is nice shot of the construction site. I should have one of those signs that says "Pardon our pixie-dust, we are re-imagineering this site for your future enjoyment." just like Disney. Perhaps that will be a nice small future project.
