WiFi Enabled Alarm Clock - Part 1

Alarm Clocks are simple devices - they beep occasionally at a specific time. So it's probably not hard to make one. But what if we had a WiFi connected Alarm Clock? Something that would make "Internet of Things" an actual buzz word. Get it? Alarm clocks buzz... ha... okay, I guess not. Let's just get on with the build.

Remote Audio Transmitter with an ESP8266

The motivation for this project was to have a wireless way to listen to my building's intercom remotely, be it from another room or from another state. Having the ability to do this doesn't necessarily add security to my residence like cameras would (maybe keep an eye out for a post on that), but it's interesting nonetheless. So what we can do is capture the audio over WiFi with an ESP8266 and capture it on a server. All with the power of Docker, of course!

Dumping and Decompilation of Old Stereo Firmware

Remember that game console that I made a while back out of old computer parts and a stereo enclosure? It still had the motherboard intact. I desoldered everything from it and got some interesting (and somewhat usable) parts. There were some parts that I didn't dive into though, and I'd like to take the time now to shallow dive into one of them now: the EPROM.

Building A Temperature Based Fan Controller

Cooling is important. I know this, because in the file vault I built myself there is hardly any airflow with 8 hard drives in close proximity to each other. This causes the hard drives to approach their safe temperature limit. In an enclosed space, they exceed it and shut down. This isn't good, as it wears the hard drives more than regular usage. So we need to add a fan to them. I want to build my own temperature based fan controller because I'll need one for another project I'm working on. The payoff on that one will be pretty cool, too. So stick around.

Building a Communications Standard from the Ground Up

Before you read this, just know that this is by no means a good way to do any of this. Hell, it's probably wrong. But it's how I'm doing it for a school project. There are probably many ways and standards in existence that do what I already want to do and do it better, but that's no fun, not a waste of time, and doesn't make for a very good blog post.

Reusing a VCR Remote

They don't make things like they used to anymore. Technology has certainly advanced, but things just don't last long because they're cheaper to make than to make well. That's why it's so much fun to work with old devices. They're durable and they're simple. I'm going to work with a VCR remote with a jog wheel on it in order to make a sort of handheld video editing control board for some of the programs I use. It's time to get in over my head with USB HID devices!

DJ Hard Drive Turn Table Part 3 - Playing Audio

So now the turn table is writing output to the serial connection off of the Arduino. This is very good. But what good is it if we can't play audio with it? That's what this part is all about: translating the signals from the turntable into audio modulations that we can hear. In this case, we're speeding up and slowing down a audio track. Let's get started!

How to make your Android Phone Really Wake You Up!

This project requires a some hardware. Despite this being a software blog, I figured we could mix the two together eventually. Let this be the first cross over into metal! Huzzah!

Basically, because I work better at night than I do during the day, I had trouble waking up for my 8:00AM class. I also had this LED light strip hanging over my bed. Not only did this thing have 16 fantastic colors on it, but it also had another set of LEDs that were bright white. Like, really really bright white. I figured I could get these to wake me up! So I set out on a mission to get my phone alarm to trigger something to make these bright beasts turn on to get me out of bed.

The easiest bridge I could think of (seeing as my phone, the Nexus 4, doesn't have an IR Diode on it) was an Arduino. I have experience with DFRobot's Blunonano and I love it. It's about $35 on their website (which is where I got mine) which isn't bad considering the regular Arduino Nano is $30 from this seller on Amazon. Of course, you can use any Arduino you want with some sort of Bluetooth Shield, but I think it's easiest to use the Blunonano. That's what this tutorial is written for.