Here are a collection of hardware and software things that I have made over the years and I feel like sharing them with the rest of the world.
As you'll no doubt notice the hardware stuff is all ancient as I haven't tackled a soldering iron since I joined Philips, but things like the twinkley Christmas lights and the Ah-Yeah! box just have to be put out there for public consumption :)
| The Ah-Yeah! Box | |
| Those old enough to remember the early 90's will remember all house/dance/disco songs had to have a sample of a black-guy shouting 'ah-yeah'.
I decided I needed a box that could go 'ah-yeah', allowing me to punctuate conversation at will with the saying. Also it comes in handy when you want to prentend to be a DJ in your bedroom. | |
| Lowcost automatic surveillance camera | |
| Use any old low cost piece of crap film camera to make a low cost surveillence camera.
Might even be adaptable for these new fangled digital cameras ... provided you can find a way to push the shutter release button. | |
| Twinkley Christmas Tree Lights - Low Power | |
| Christmas tree lights that simply flash on and off always bugged me. I wanted something more soooooothing. A gentle fade in and out. This was my first attempt at such a circuit. It uses a string of LEDs driven off a power op-amp providing a sawtooth waveform ... incase you were interested!
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| Twinkley Christmas Tree Lights - Mains Powered! | |
| This Christmassy project gives you twinkling christmas tree lights. Rather than using fiddly LEDs I went the whole hog and used triacs to control strings of standard, cheap fairy lights. | |
| Control your home over the phone | |
| In this project I create a unit that can be coupled to the home phone line (accoustically in my case).
The design allows DTMF (aka 'touch-tone') signals to be sent to the home and the interpreted into commands to control devices in the home, e.g., start a VCR recording through an IR bridge, turn on some light via X10 or control a PC. The circuit design incorporates security, namely, the first four digits entered are an access code, to prevent unauthorized control of the home. | |
| Photocasting for a Palm TX or Palm LifeDrive | |
| Late in 2005 I was trying to find some kind of WiFi enabled digital photo frame. I couldn't find anything - not at a reasonable pricepoint at least.
Then it was pointed out to me, I could just write an application to run on a Palm TX that does what I need; connect to a server once a day and retrieve some pictures to display as a slideshow. Took me a few evenings, but this is what I came up with! There's one running at my mums house right now, showing her pages from my slideshows, changing albums on a daily basis. | |
| Published Patents | |
| The granting of my third patent on March 29, 2005 reminded me that I should also be blowing my trumpet here about crazy ideas that I didn't even build to get published ;-)
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| Generate nice chimes using transistors | |
| Almost as much as I hated flashing (on-off) christmas tree lights, I don't like things that go BEEP with a harsh square wave.
This cunning little design uses a number of transistors to generate a 'ping' tone with a more appealing envelope. | |