I use a china hutch from my grandmother’s old house as my entertainment center. I never really liked displaying all of one’s electronics and wires and stuff where everyone can see them, so this suits my needs quite nicely. HOWEVER! This particular piece of furniture doesn’t have very good ventilation for all of my heat-producing …
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Just for Fun
So I decided I had had enough of practical, useful projects, and I built this: The circuit is called a Slayer Exciter. It is a hand-wound air-core transformer (it took me about two hours to wind the transformer; the red cylinder in the picture is actually about 400 turns of 34-gauge magnet wire) capable of generating a …
Lamp Sunset Timer
It seems like I have a lot of posts devoted to lamps… anyway, my latest one involves programming a Raspberry Pi to switch my living room lamp on approximately a half-hour before sunset. My previous design for switching my lamp involved using an old Pentium 3 that I have since replaced with a newer computer. The …
Automatic Bathroom Fan Switching
It’s been a long time since my last post, but I have a legitimate excuse! I bought a house and have been moving in and getting the place comfortable. Then the Christmas holiday came, and I had to move more stuff from my parents’ house, then I bought a car so I’ll have something to …
Listen to the Radio from ANYWHERE
Since I moved to South Florida I’ve noticed that there aren’t any appropriate radio stations anywhere down here. They’re all mindless Clear Channel-type Top 40 or country stations. Unacceptable. There weren’t this many country stations when I lived in South Carolina or Tennessee. Anyway! I thought maybe I could build a radio that would get …
Halon Alarm
I found this halon alarm in the garbage a long, long time ago and I finally have some time to goof off. Believe it or not, this relates to my ongoing solar panel build. To build a maximum power point tracking circuit will require the construction of a special switch mode power supply topology, and …
Holy oscilloscope, Batman!
I bought an analog Hewlett-Packard oscilloscope today. It was designed in the 70s, built in 1985, and decommissioned by the US Navy in 1993. Still going strong apparently. It’s about two feet long (which is not evident in the picture, but it does not fit on my recliner). I don’t have any test leads yet, but this …
Outlet Control Pictures
I took some pictures while I was making a permanent enclosure for my web-controlled power outlets. These are going in the kitchen and are attached to the old Gateway that plays my fridge music and serves up my tunes. I made it work in a way that each plug on the outlet can be independently …
Desk Lamp Web Control
Once I got the web server working from the last post, it was time to get the parallel port to do something useful. As its first task, I decided to hook it up to my desk lamp so that anyone in the world could turn the light in my apartment on and off. If you …
Progress on the “Turing” Slow Cooker
I have successfully managed to control the pins on a parallel (printer) port over the internets. I now document my efforts. I already have this working on my personal desktop (which is apparently old enough to still have a parallel port in it?). For the purposes of writing this without flaws, I will be re-creating …