Posts tagged ‘Weekend Project’

Es ist Mittwoch.

Sometimes blog posts just have to sit in the drafts for a while. This one had the opportunity to mature for about a year. The actual project lies back about two and half years by now. The pictures I have of it haven’t got any better in the meantime, so I might just as well hit ‘post’ on this split-flap calendar I built for a friend.

Most of the time, it doesn’t do much. Once a day, it advances by one flap and ⅐ of the time, it announces the day of the week, Wednesday.

Building a Camera with a Rather Undersized Microcontroller

Disclaimer: This project was hacked together more or less in a weekend. Not much documentation is available besides the source code. If you want to build this (in the off-chance that you got your hands on one of these printer modules), you’d have to extract the schematic information from pinning.h and supply your own stepper motor driver and level shifter circuit.

I had these thermal printer modules, 4 of them, after I bought them because they were cheap and seemed interesting. For years they physically were somewhere in a drawer; in my mind though, they were taunting me. Something had to be done!

Arachnouphobia

Catchy title aside, this one is actually about deterring spiders. This small project started with my mother’s observation that a corner of her basement was spider-free since I had set up a NAS there. Rather than assuming that the vibrations/noises generated by the hard drive put the spiders off (like I would), she made a connection the Banana Pi’s irregularly flashing LEDs. That had to be investigated.

Pb Power bank

In preparation for being off-grid for a few days, I quickly built this ‘power bank’ around a 12 V 7 Ah lead gel battery. The circuit is simply pushed onto the battery’s 6.3 mm contacts and provides 3 USB ports. Charging circuitry is not included but the battery terminals are still accessible anyway.