tl;dr The ESP-12F ADC pin appears to consistently read higher values at times when the processor is not as busy. I worked around this by taking the average of multiple reads, and discarding any averages where the number of samples…
I built a framework for robot wheels a while back using OpenSCAD and used it to create a few different wheel styles. I recently decided to combine them all into one massively configurable wheel model, and add a number of…
Here’s a 3D printed T10 lamp shade that I designed and printed last night. A few weeks ago while searching for LEDs, I noticed an ebay listing for very inexpensive 12V automotive lamps that combine nine bright white LEDs. I…
He we’re test-driving the our latest robot creation for the first time. It’s the boy’s design and made mostly of wood. The tires are o-rings, and there’s a 12V AA batter pack sandwiched between the two pieces of plywood. The…
Here’s an Arduino-compatible GI-SP0256-AL2 speech synthesizer module that I’m finishing up. It’s a great 1980’s-era allophone speech synthesizer chip that was used in Intellivision expansion modules and sold at RadioShack stores for years for about $12. You can still find…
Here’s a small, inexpensive, modular, and easy-to-customize motor controller I’m working on that incorporates the Modern Device RBBB ($13), and Pololu’s TB6612FNG Dual Motor Driver Carrier ($8.50). If I fry or want to retask the brain or the driver or…
Here’s a little SQL gymnastics used to parse and query against a predictably-formatted long text field. The challenge: We have a single text field that contains a list person_id-to-area mappings, and we need the query the database for a list…
The goal was to crawl on the cheap, and what’s cheaper than popsicle sticks craft sticks and fishing line? Next we’ll wire up a 555 circuit so it can roam untethered, but until then, here’s how to make one of your…
To mark the 63rd anniversary of the first stored computer program to run (June 21), I rewrote the original code in C# last night, both using the original algorithm (that was never intended to be efficient) and using a more…
We were using a web service that wasn’t quite up to interoperability standards. When attempting to use the service from .Net, we saw a number of errors and warnings related to the how the response is deserialized. In particular, .Net seemed…