Richi's blog

Category: Projects

  • sniffing i2c with the BusPirate

    I received my BusPirate v4 a while ago, but didn’t really use it so far. That’s a cool analysis/debug tool for serial buses such as uart, spi, i2c and the like. For me i2c is the most interesting. From time to time, the communication doesn’t work as it should, and so far, I worked it […]

  • AtTiny Advent Wreath

    An advent wreath in late spring, you ask? Yes, the timing is a bit off, and that’s not just because the coldest spring in ages has not finished yet. While browsing for the topic of my last post, I discovered a nice little one-evening-project: Geeky advent from tinkerlog. I had all the required parts here, […]

  • AtMega breadboard header

    A while ago, I ordered some AtTiny breadboard headers from tinkerlog.com. Unfortunately, they didn’t have any boards for AtMega’s left. The ones for the AtTiny’s are very handy, and I used them whenever prototyping something with an AtTiny. In fact, I used it almost whenever flashing an AtTiny. Many times I wished I had one […]

  • Jaguar headliners repair

    Remember the Asterix & Obelix comics, and that the only thing they feared was that heaven would fall on their heads? That happened to me lately. But it was not as bad as that might sound. Well, the joke doesn’t quite work in English. In German, we call the headliners of a car “heaven”. Last […]

  • Variable fan speed for the camper

    The T3 VW camper vans came with a three step fan speed switch. Maybe it broke just like that, or maybe it was due to the kids playing with it endlessly. No matter what, the broken switch was a good opportunity for an upgrade. I ordered a 15A PWM motor speed controller which I thought […]

  • tinkering with the kids

    This Easter weekends the weather was really crap, so we stayed home. We had lots of time to spend with the kids, and we all enjoyed that. The boys are still a bit too young for the projects I usually do, but we just did our first electronics lession.. Even if Levin didn’t fully understand […]

  • BitCoin hits CHF 100 mark

    Yesterday one BitCoin was, for the first time, worth more than CHF 100! When I first learned about BitCoin in early 2011, CPU mining was still enabled in the default client. I mined for a few days, but it was probably already too late for the CPU. GPU’s took over before that. Last year, you […]

  • Adding a display to rfid time tracking

    More than a year ago, I blogged here about using RFID to track presence times in the BORM ERP system. I used the system a lot since then. But the BlinkM was really limited as the only immediate feedback channel. To use it with multiple users, a display was needed. The default Arduino compatible displays […]

  • minimalist lasershow

    For a long time I marvelled at sites with self built laser shows. There is truly amazing stuff out there. But most of them look like really lots of work. And with simple commercial units getting cheaper, I don’t know if all that effort can be justified. So I had a look at the commercial […]

  • my first package in the official debian repository

    I have created deb packages for a couple of years now. Primarily for software that I created myself, or was somehow involved. But sometimes I also packaged stuff that I just used, and wanted to be able to conveniently install and upgrade on different systems. One of these was printrun, a host software for reprap […]