I’ve grown tired of those $6 Radio Shack specials. After decades of cheap soldering irons, it’s time to buy the real deal. Read More...

Why, yes... that is a matched pair of 2TB drives. What ever should I do with them? Read More...

Since my old UPS bit the dust, I needed a new one. I threw a new APC 1500 on my Amazon wish list. My wife was more than happy to oblige and buy it for Christmas. Read More...

I’ve always wanted a Dremel Workstation. I never got around to buying one so I added it to my Amazon wish list.

My wife comes through again! She got me one for Christmas. Read More...

The first attempt at a stand wasn’t that great. I needed to try something a little heavier than acrylic. Let’s try wood… Read More...

Save yourself the headache and buy your Atmegas with the bootloader pre-loaded. Read More...

I have all my parts. I have my PCBs. I have a new Dremel. It’s time to put this bad boy together! Read More...

Woo hoo! I’m back in business. My new Dremel came today. Time to drill some holes! Read More...

Jameco wanted .89 cents for a white LED. That’s insane when you need 100 of them. eBay to the rescue! I grabbed 200 LEDs from a seller in China for $9 bucks! Let’s just hope they work. Read More...

While I wait for all the final pieces to fall into place with my Arduino LCD Clock, it’s time to start up another project: a Word Clock. Read More...

Woo hoo! The boards I designed for my Arduino LCD Clock have finally arrived! They look awesome! Read More...

Looks like one of the hard drives in my Drobo just gave up the ghost. Read More...

Hum? I wonder if I can hack one of these Staples “that was easy” buttons? What makes it tick? Read More...

Yes. It farts. That’s pretty funny. Read More...

I took a trip to Staples to buy an acrylic photo frame or sign holder and was very happy to see that they had 3”x5” acrylic sign holders for only $3 each. Read More...

My Arduino LCD Clock PCB is complete and ready to be fabbed. Read More...

The ChronoDot DS3231 breakout board didn’t arrive over the weekend like I had hoped. I had to wait a few more days for it. Delays! Delays! Delays!
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I wish I had enough foresight to install an 8-pin DIP on the last breakout board I ordered. That way I’d have a way to test the chips I ordered from Jameco. I can’t tell if I killed the chips, or I’m just hooking them up incorrectly. In any case, I ordered another breakout board from Adafruit to test them out, Read More...

With the clock code complete, it was time to hop online and order my parts. With the parts in hand, I’ll have an easier time laying them out on the PCB and getting the spacing right. Read More...

I finished the code for the clock. I would have been finished a week ago, but Hurricane Sandy hit my town pretty hard and I lost power for 8 days. What a setback. Anyway, power’s up and it’s full-steam ahead! Read More...

I reached another milestone today. I figured out how to read the state of a pin and react to its state. In other words, I can tell the Arduino to “do something” based on whether or not the pin is HIGH or LOW! This is awesome. That means I can now hook up a switch to a pin and press it to set the clock. Read More...

I got the DS1307 up and running. It was pretty easy to interface it with the Arduino. You just hook the SDA and SCL pins to the Arduino’s analog 4 and 5 inputs, import the RTC library and you’re done.

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My first project is going to be a clock. So I’m going to get my feet wet with a simple LCD project using the Arduino.

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As I said on my last post, I plan on building a digital clock using an LCD and an Atmel328. For now, I just plan on getting my feet wet with a simple LCD project. Sooner or later I’m going to need a pretty reliable RTC to store the time and date. Ideally, I’d like to build a clock that grabs the time from a GPS satellite, but I’m not there yet. Adafruit and Sparkfun both sell cheap $9 RTCs as a DIY kit. Since I was ordering my Arduino board from Adafruit, I figured I’d add the DS1307 Breakout Kit to my cart too.
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I’ve been meaning to pick up an Arduino board for years. I’ve always been amazed by the fact you can write a program and write it to a chip and have it “do something”. I’ve always wanted to make a clock out of a microcontroller instead of old school 7490 TTL chips. Counting clock pulses with 60Hz seems so “archaic” by comparison. There has to be a better way! After all, every clock you buy nowadays runs off a single chip. How do they do it? Read More...

I’ve always wanted to find a praying mantis, but they seem to be so rare. There I was standing on the front porch when I looked over to see a giant praying mantis just sitting there. Read More...

You can read about it in books all you want, gloss over it in science glass, but there's something deeply satisfying/moving about being able to witness the whole process first hand. It really is something beautiful.
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