Artistic picture of Sophie
I loved how well the last image of Miles turned out, so I created one of Sophie. The intention is to get them printed now and have some artistic photos of our babies on our walls 🙂
Archive for March 2006
Artistic picture of Miles
I found this cute picture of Miles and decided to photoshop it a touch and try my hand at being artsy. I think it came out quite well.
I saw one of these today…
I was driving Lauren home from class today and saw one of these fly by overhead…
Let’s just say it’s wicked hot and much larger than I had expected (it dwarfed the two prop-plane trainers that were following it). If the rumors are true that they are stationing a squadron of them around at the Air Force base in town, I’ll have many more opportunities to see them in the future.
My new DIY project… Binary LED clock
Though the idea is not new to me or the rest of the world, creating a real time binary clock does provide quite an interesting embedded systems problem to solve while, at the same time, producing an interesting piece of functional electronics. I’ve picked this as my next project because it’s relatively simple to implement and design, and I want to use it as a ramp-up to using Atmel AVR microcontrollers.
I’ve designed, on paper, what I want to build and am currently waiting to receive the microcontrollers and hardware programmer. While waiting, I’m going to be looking into designing the casing and pc board that will house the clock. I’m also thinking of learning how to etch my own boards so that, for simpler boards like this one will be, I can save money by making them myself instead of paying to have a board fabricated.
More details and schematic pictures to come as the ideas are lifted from paper to pspice.
To see what this could eventually look like, check out the production versions at Think Geek and Discovery Cannel
(side note… I’m probably not saving any money building it myself, but that’s not the point of taking on a DIY project… the knowledge gained will be worth more than the cost of the project any day)