A while ago, thanks to the joys of eBay and manufacturing in China, I ordered some low-cost 16×2 LCD character screens, and they finally arrived. Yeah, now I can get down to trying to output some text to the LCD screen, just one of the pieces of the puzzle for creating a metro ‘next train’…
The Quadcopter didn’t fail, I did. After a successful first trials, I took the Quadcopter out for a second spin, hoping to get some good footage. I had lots of space to play with, but when it is up high and far away, you lose some of the spatial awareness. So I got it stuck…
There really is something cool about flying. My batteries arrived for my recently acquired quadcopter, and today was a beautiful sunny day…. so perfect time to test out the quadcopter and do some first trials. I met up with my friends Hussein and Julia before heading to DC’s Meridian Hill park, to put it through…
There is something cool about flying. A short while ago I decided to order an extremely entry level quadcopter so that I could learn a bit about how to fly one. Not that I really have a purpose – although I anticipate that being able to take video with it will be quite fun –…
If they had this when I was studying electrical engineering, I never would have switched to civil. Because making something blink has never been so exciting. This weekend, I decided to finally pull out my Arduino board and see what I can do with it…. and it turned out to be quite a bit of…
How many lines of code can you program in hour? A new campaign in the US that is spreading around internet is called “Hour of Code”, with a great video ad with celebrities and folks of all ages learning to code, and Obama giving a little encouragement. I checked out HourofCode.org to see what it…
I was nervous when I arrived on Saturday morning. Sitting in the spacious offices of Shopify, consuming my breakfast of provided scrambled eggs and bacon, I was asked “So, if you aren’t a coder, why are you here?”. Good question. Why was I sitting here, about to start my first ever hackathon? What did I…
Christmas is coming, so I was wondering if there was an interesting project that I could do that could be a gift or just be entertaining during the holidays. As luck would have it, ModLab had a day-long workshop called Hack UR Baubles, run by Ottawa hackers Michael Grant and Megan Smith, to construct a…
It was a candy store, and I was 7. Or rather, it was a recycled electronics store, and I was a geeked out 30 something. Up until now, to use my Pi I have had to visit the ModLab in Ottawa, where they have monitors, keyboards, etc. that I can plug into my Pi. However,…
If the Raspberry Pi plays an audio file, and I can’t hear it, is it working? My objective this week was to make the Raspberry Pi play some sound out of its 3.5mm audio/headphone jack. Last week I was able to get the Pi to boot up and run a program, but this week I…
Discovering my makerself 