Shed Building
I recently wanted to add a shed to our backyard. We were going to take the easy route and get a Tuff Shed from Lowes and have it all installed and built for us, but our HOA is a little restrictive and denies any sheds that are over 6′ tall (a weird restriction, maybe so…
Raspberry Pi Weather Station Mk2
Back in 2015 I built a Raspberry Pi Weather Station based off a version I saw a Professor do for Students on the Raspberry Pi site. I tried to build as many parts by hand and it is was one of my first serious forays into the Pi world. I even wrote an Instructable about…
Adventures in PCB Burning
In some of the projects I’ve been working on I’ve had to design a basic to intermediate circuit to control the electronic components of the project (typically a bunch of LEDs, which you don’t want to use a Raspberry Pi for because the resulting current of multiple LEDs will be too much for the board,…
What’s in the Box?! Inventory of my Sparkfun Dumpster Dive
Sparkfun does an inventory clean-out/Dumpster Dive event once per year, it’s like Christmas for the Maker. They come in two variants, a 1.5lb box and 0.5lb box, and sell out pretty quickly. This was my first year but I’m a fan of the various Sparkfun contests and “unique” events they hold so I figured this…
Semi-static Website Hosting in AWS S3 Buckets: SanAngeloSheep.info
Amazon Web Service’s S3 object storage is a fantastically easy and robust way to host a simple website. The only catch is that it’s an object storage so you can’t use any server side scripting like php or python; Simple object storage also means you can’t use any databases either so your data must reside…
Articles
Foot Pedal Camera Release for Nikon z 7
I’ve been trying to do more photography during the projects I’ve been working on and I was looking for some hands free solutions, and I came across this instructable: https://www.instructables.com/id/Canon-EOS-Foot-Pedal-Shutter-Remote/. I thought it was definitely a good idea and gave it a try, in the process I learned a couple of things about my Nikon […]
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Linux Tips I Wish I Knew Long Ago: Postgresql & Python
This one isn’t strictly Linux per se, but I really went down the rabbit hole and wasted about a half of day trying to track this one down! Spoiler: the answer was in the documentation the whole time, of course! The scenario is this: I have a python script, it queries an API periodically and […]
Pi Fish Tank Sensor Proving Ground
I have a soft spot for sensors and data, seems I’d much rather work on projects to collect data then anything kinetic (it probably harkens back to my days as a Data Analyst, in the days before they were called “Data Scientists” at the Center for Astrophysics). And so I built a weather station a […]
Finished Project: Scrappy Science Caddy – First Hackster.io Project
After a long delay I finally finished a new project, this is my Scrappy Science Caddy, a basic data acquisition box powered by a raspberry pi and the MCP3008 an Analog to Digital Chip. I created an instructable for the project, viewed here (which got selected as a featured project): http://www.instructables.com/id/Scrappy-Science-Caddy/ and this is my […]
Linux Tips I Wish I Knew Long Ago: $_
This is one I constantly forget, but $_ in a bash shell (and other languages like Perl and I know it’s in Windows Powershell but may have a different usage) is a special parameter, it gives the last argument to the previous command. This comes in handy all the time when editing and executing on […]
Project: Data Box – Wiring an IDE Connector for GPIO
This past weekend I continued working on my Data Acquisition Box, now renamed to the Scrappy Science Caddy (inspired by The Venture Brother’s character Henry Killinger’s Magic Murder Bag https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=hNqZ7qsWpJc). In order to connect the LCD, MCP3008 A/D Chip, and all the various buttons to the Raspberry Pi I reused an old IDE cable, which if […]