I want to ride my bike

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BikeBlink Part III

Once I started to wire the bike light into my 3D Box I quickly learned that while I learned a lot my box was clunky and would have too many wires. That’s around the same time I learned about custom circuit boards.

The first thing I did was watch a few videos and download the free version of EAGLE. I had the advantage of working with this circuit for a while and pretty much having it memorized. Once In EAGLE I created the schematic and board layout. From there it came down to printing and making though my pull though components would work as expected.  I also used the Trinket EAGLE file found on GitHub.

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schematic

I then ordered the boards from OSH Park which I highly recommend. Their website is easy to use and provides a board preview which really helped me make sure my screen printing was in order. The boards arrived and everything works as expected.

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Now that I have a much more compact cleaner version of my board layout next up will be revisiting the enclosure. For the curious, I’ve released the boards as Open Source Hardware.

 

 

I want to ride my bicycle

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BikeBlink Part II

Now that I had working code I started thinking about waterproofing. I decided to order a waterproof cable and print a 3D Box. As this was my first time 3D Printing I had no idea what I was doing. I designed a box in AutoDesk 3D and headed to my local maker space to have it printed. Over all I’m pretty happy with how the box turned out. My original idea was to solder everything into the box. However, I learned this was not as easily done as I was hoping so I’ll be going another route in terms of enclosures.

3Dcasebox_solder

Bicycle Bicycle

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BikeBlink Part I

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Monkeylight m204 spoke light from Monkeylectric

About 10 months ago I had a friend who got hit by a car while on a bike. This lead to stepping up the visibility game. One of the improvements were bike spoke lights. They serve to increase side visibility while riding.

When I first saw this I was just getting into the maker space and said to myself, perhaps stupidly, “I can make that.” Then went to work.

I started researching and landed on the Adafruit Trinket as my microcontroller of choice. It’s small, powerful enough and has everything I needed to run my LEDs.

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The Trinket has ~5.25K bytes of space available for use, and 512 bytes of ram. These limitations would be a good to work with as a challenge to write more efficient code.

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After some time I got a working test which flashed though 4 different LED modes switching modes at a press of the button. As an added bonus I added the mode into E2PROM(non-volatile memory). This allows the device to turn on in the mode it was using when power was disconnected.

The code is up on GitHub.

 

I’m thinkin’ about my doorbell

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Laser Cut Doorbell enclosure for Flic

I recently bought a set of Flic buttons for my home. At my house these are mostly used to control my music or easy turn on/off my lights. Another great feature was being able to place one outside to be used as a doorbell.

When clicked once a bell is sounded though the Flic app using a tablet. I had a friend recently buy one for this purpose at his home and we were talking about a way to enclose it. Enter this laser cut enclosure.

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Things didn’t work out perfectly with the sides but the enclosure still works without sites. The bell can be rung by pressing the button though the case. I have uploaded the EPS file if anyone want to use it as a base for their design. They are released under Creative Commons Share-Alike. Included are two files both of which may not be perfect. The one printed is the one marked printed.

P.S. I do realize this is the first time I’ve posted in over two years. As I find my place in the maker/creator space expect more post in the future.

I’m an Automattician

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I have been holding off on posting this because it just seems too good to be true. This October I joined the amazing staff at Automattic full time. This is the bunch of people who are behind WordPress and WordPress.com.  I’ve joined as a Happiness Engineer on the Store team. I hope this means that I’ll have a little more time to work on my plugins and attend WordCamps.

MobileESP for WordPress 1.5.3 released

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I recently released MobileEPS for WordPress 1.5.1 which came with MAJOR changes. The slogan for this revision was “minor version number, major changes.” I later learned that one of these changes broke the plugin for people who weren’t using PHP 5.3  or above. So I released 1.5.3 to fix that issue.

I strongly recommend everyone who is using the plugin upgrade to this version.

Some major changes are the plugin now uses the  template_redirect hook instead of no hook. What this means is you can now access your admin page with the plugin installed and that it’s being more “smart” about when to check for the redirect. For security it also now sanitizes the user input when setting the cookie and looking at wp_options.

I also added a new banner image to the repo page. Thanks much to my friend Felix who let me use is drawing as the main image.

Check it out and let me know if you have any questions or problems.

 

 

Smile – BandonRandon.net get a cleaner logo

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My photoblog BandonRandon.net has been around for about a year. It’s a place for me to share photos of cool things I encounter. From the very start I wanted to do a revision of the BandonRandon Logo but give it a photography spin. My first attempt was, let’s just say poorly done. It’s been bugging me for over a year.

Well now I can say I’ve given it another go and this time I believe I’ve come up with a cleaner icon. The camera is a modified version of the camera from the wonderful Genericon set and the text typeface is Proxima Nova.

br_net_logo_cleanupLet me know your thoughts in the comments.