Projects
I enjoy tackling interesting projects and here are a few that I've made some limited attempt to document. As many of these were carried out purely for fun, code quality and documentation may vary enormously. You have been warned.
Word Clockie A 3D printed word clock for my wife.
Word clockie is a (yet another) word clock made as a first aniversary gift to my wonderful wife, Ann-Marie. It is a spiritual successor to Clockie, a count-down clock I made when we were living far appart when we had just started going out. Instead of counting down to our next meeting, Word Clockie counts up the time since we got married.
Line of Life A UV+Glow-in-the-Dark Cellular-Automaton Display
Line of Life is an unconventional computer display consisting of a large, slowly rotating glow-in-the-dark drum which is 'charged up' using 120 ultraviolet LEDs. The display has been donated to the School of Computer Science at the University of Manchester and is intended to explain the principles of celular automata to random passers by.
A(T)Tiny(85) Piano Taking a Birthday Card Way Too-Far
My brother recently turned 21 and to mark the occasion it seemed appropriate to send him a birthday card. My first idea was to make him a singing birthday card which plays Morning Mood by Grieg. Since he is training as a teacher, and this particular piece of music haunted us in every assembly we attended in school, it seemed like an appropriate wind-up. As I object to buying cards (albeit with a custom tune programmed in) I set out to make one using one of the aptly-named 8-pin ATtiny85's I had lying around. Unfortunately making small, battery powered electronics is hard so I decided that if it was going to be bulky anyway it might as well feature a fully playable piano keyboard...
Clockie
Clockie is a really simple clock I made for my girlfriend, Ann-Marie, when she moved away for her master's degree. It is based on an Arduino and a simple LCD character display and features a countdown until we next meet (d'awwwww). The time (and the date of our next meeting) is set by holding it up to a web page which literally flashes the time at a light sensor on the back of the clock.