Irons in the Fire

Hey there. It's me. I don't have a second project this month. Things with school have been busy and whatnot - I just haven't had much time to make any meaningful progress on anything. It's sad, I know, but I'm fairly close on several projects. I just wanted to write an update about all of my concurrent projects going on and write where I am on them - perhaps more for me than for you.

I'll try to order these in some fashion. Maybe from most complete to least complete to "just ideas given the garbage I've accumulated."

Hard Drive Turn Table
Remember this one? Because I had to remember this. Basically, all of this is written, built, but not assembled. I just have to do that. I'm not sure what's stopping me - I think it's the fact that I can't figure out how to make it look good.

Audio Chromecast from Broken Chromecast
I have the parts and have confirmed the device works. Using a chromecast with glitchy graphics is perfect for this purpose.

Calvin
Calvin needs to be assembled first and foremost. I'm part of the way through that. I also want to add the ability to play music with it from Google Play. I know how to do it, but I haven't implemented it. This is complicated by the fact that it isn't easy to work in that speaker box.

My File Vault
I built one for my parents, but now I have to make mine with 6 times the hard drive. That's really all it'll take. It's basically the same as the one I made for my parents.

Older Test Bench
I have that other computer I salvaged from the garbage that one time to use. I'm going to build a pseudo case (just two pieces of wood, really). This motherboard is from a great period - it has a Pentium 4, SATA connections, but also an IDE connection and onboard graphics. This is perfect for testing because of all of these different things.

Lab Power Supply from ATX PSU
Not original, but I want to make one. Again, I've had the parts for a while, but I'm finally designing the thing.

RayMarine Screen Streamer
Raymarine's electronics are not very secure. This is no secret, but there really isn't a drive to reverse engineer or hack them. But the way they're selling their high end solutions for a large amount of money is ridiculous. So I decided to try and imitate what (I think) is one of their more expensive features: viewing the MFD on a TV screen. I have everything reverse engineered, but I need to make a power supply for the board.

WiFi Enabled Alarm Clock
I was using an ESP8266 and that display board from the Elan box. It was kinda working, but it's hard to work with WiFi and high speed signals that require special timing.

More "Turning a not-computer into a computer" stuff
I have some devices I want to try. These are probably fairly easy to do, but compiling stuff for MIPS is a nightmare.

Reverse Engineering a Laptop Touchpad
I have a laptop trackpad from my friend's broken laptop. I want to try to get absolute touch coordinates from it. Wish me luck.

Hard Drive Arm Stabilizer
I have a lot of small hard drives that are useless. I want to part them out. If I take three of them, maybe I can make a camera stabilizer. This is just an idea at this point. I need to look into how these voice coils work. I also get the motors from the hard drives so that's nice.

I have some parts for which I'm trying to find projects for, but I'll spare this post that list. I'll slowly tick things off of this list, I promise. But for now, I need to work on homework. I hate filler posts, but I was kinda forced into this one.