A nice and concise set of CSS injections I add to specific websites for better browsing experience.
An old wall of flip dots at work fell into disrepair, and the panels were being parted out. I was able to snag a few of them and recreate the wall in a miniature version! It even uses a depth camera to show your silhouette in real time as you move in front of it like the original.
I found some art online that inspired me to try out making faux neon signs out of led strips tucked inside of diffuser tubing. The end result speaks for itself!
The altimeter is a must have instrument every time you go skydiving, so why not make it cool? I savaged several KW-105AL diplays from avionics equipment an the good ol' BMP280 barometer to make an altimeter with.
Finding even 4 of these displays anywhere online literally took months of scouring.
The QR code goes to qrtatt.ooo, and can do some very fancy stuff! Click the link in the upper right to go to the full page I dedicated to talking about the tattoo.
I like the tap-to-pay features of smart watches, but don't want a fully featured smart watch that needs to be recharged every single day to work. Now that contactless payment via NFC chips is much more common, I wanted to make my own ultra lightweight contactless payment watch. I attempted to make it with favorite cheap digital watch - the Casio A168WEM, a custom NFC antenna I had printed on a flex PCB from Oshpark, and a NFC chip that I got by melting down one of my credit cards in acetone.
Outside of the watch, the NFC chip and custom antenna worked like a charm!! However, I get too much parasitic capacitance or other interference when nestled in the digital watch case. I'll need to figure this out to solve it and call it done.
A road bike is to a mountain bike, as a skateboard is to a mountainboard. Their height of popularity was in the early 2000's along with the X-games. Some compare it to the sensation of snowboarding, but like most analogies it's a little bit of a stretch.
This was a major project where I learned about good battery design, some machining skills, and a lot of patience.
Wanting to make another watch after finishing the nixie tube watch, I decided to try working with some retro dot matrix displays. These are REALLY neat to look at if you can get your hands on them. They're very early gallium-phosphate LEDs; the only application I've seen them used in are for commercial airplane cockpit displays. Because these were used in avionics, they are ceramic case-bodies and the top layer is sapphire. I was able to write these display drivers for it based on these xerox scans of old datasheets from the 1970's.
This was one of my first exposures to hardware design beyond simple arduino proto boards that drove small motors or read from simple sensors. I heavily based my schematic off of an existing one I found online by David Forbes. The main difference is that mine uses four IN-17 nixie tubes instead of just two B5870L tubes. I accounted for this doubling of tubes by swapping out his PIC18LF22SS with an atmega324pb, which has around 30-ish GPIO pins. I directly drove every filament in use with a GPIO pin and a darlington transistor. As this was my first 'major' hardware project, I didn't want to deal with extra IC components like a serial to parallel shift register to complicate it any more.
