Category Archives: probably boring

In praise of useless information

Posted on December 13, 2019 by paulwallich

About a year ago, back when we were still doing laser night at Local64, C did a nice backlit laser-cut sign for me to put in the door downstairs, using a font that wasn’t properly speaking a stencil but still … Continue reading →

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Vindicated

Posted on June 12, 2018 by paulwallich

About two years ago, for no really good reason, I designed a 3D-printable setup for coupling those standard gearmotors to Lego bricks and axles, and posted it at Youmagine. Hardly anyone liked it or downloaded it. Then, last week, Adafruit, … Continue reading →

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Burning down the house by remote control

Posted on March 9, 2018 by paulwallich

A few weeks ago I blew up my Octoprint installation by adding and deleting too many extensions at the same time. Before reinstalling, I thought it might be a good time to upgrade a bit.  So now there’s a cute … Continue reading →

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Arduino on Windows: not ready for prime time

Posted on July 10, 2017 by paulwallich

I’ve been teaching a little middle-school mobile robot workshop at the 12-year-old’s school, and it’s been a mess. The kids did pretty well assembling the bots and wiring them up, but clearly I needed to spend much more than the … Continue reading →

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A really stupid feature set

Posted on November 14, 2016 by paulwallich

In the process of getting solar panels, we talked ourselves into a heat pump with a couple of split heating/cooling units (gotta find something for all those nice renewable kilowatts to do). But it turns out that Mitsubishi designers are … Continue reading →

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What time is it?

Posted on February 25, 2016 by paulwallich

My next kit build is an Ice Tube clock from Adafruit. Which brings back lots of memories, because one of the first kits I built and wrote about was a nixie clock from Jeff Thomas, who was pretty much the … Continue reading →

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Progress is Bad

Posted on February 1, 2016 by paulwallich

I’ve been working for a while on a wearable accelerometer/datalogger project, and I came up with a nice breadboard prototype using a spare Seeduino Stalker plus a bunch of other parts. But that’s kinda big to actually wear. Next up: … Continue reading →

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Right Hand, meet Left Hand

Posted on January 9, 2016 by paulwallich

I am trying desperately not to use the word “stupid”, especially in conjunction with intensifiers such as “incredibly”, “unbelievably” or “predictably”. My delightful spouse got me a new camera for christmas this year. It’s waterproof, shockproof and a bunch of … Continue reading →

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Blinkinlabs Rocks

Posted on December 21, 2015 by paulwallich

I’ve liked Blinkytape ever since it came out. Sure, you can hook up LED strips with an arduino or whatever easily, but sometimes having the controller built into the tape just makes things so much easier no wiring, no mounting, … Continue reading →

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Fat Marvin

Posted on November 5, 2015 by paulwallich

While I was fiddling with the acceleration settings on my Printrbot JrV2 to get less shaking and perhaps more accuracy, I discovered that reducing the acceleration below 1000 mm/sec^2 pretty reliably caused the machine to stop working  partway through a … Continue reading →

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