Sunday, December 22, 2013

Traffic Light

[Editor's note. This is a post that I started almost 3 years ago, I'm making an effort to purge or polish some of the unfinished or unworthy posts on Bytecruft]

This is a traffic light I made for my kids. It's got a ATtiny 13 driving the leds. It also features a "soft" on-off circuit   driven by a tactile momentary push button.

I know, another AVR LED based project. They're so easy. I swear, I work on more than LEDS and with chips other than AVR's. It's just that the AVR ones tend to get 100% finished. Part of my hopes for this blog is to provide motivation to finish a couple of the unfinished projects I have. Actually, looking back, it's not so much a problem of motivation, but time. I usually "multithread" my projects, work on several at once, to keep form getting burned out or over-obsessed with one. Sometimes, before I know it, a project hasn't been touched in a couple months.

This is a project I did for my kids, it was another one of those "in between" projects, where my goal was to make a small project that would be lightweight after working on something big.

Present-day action shot, I finally replaced the 3+ year old batteries
during the teardown/photo shoot for this.

The real neat trick with this project, in my opinion, was the power management.

Sunday, December 1, 2013

Eggbot hack

I was preparing today for an upcoming Eggbot demonstration, when I noticed a lot of play in the pen arm.


This wooden piece had a lot of play because it had
loosened from the bushing it was glued to.