Blog de Joe Freeman

I have no skills when it comes to making nice cabinets. I can't cut, shape, or make anything neat. Everything I build looks like it was done on chemicals with a chainsaw. I wanted to use Neopixels for notifications in my alarm clock hack. Glossy photographic paper can give a finished front but I still have to cut it to let the NeoPixels shine through. It turns out can see light through the Photographic printing paper I have. So I printed the dial and LED frame on the photographic paper and mounted an 8-light Adafruit Neopixel stick behind the paper. The dang things are so bright that the colors are easy to see and it hides all the bad cuts in the case. This is the template I printed on the paper. The Neopixel stick is hot glued into a section of the clock face that was cut out. The square window sits over the LEDs. There are a bunch of markings that I used as guides when laying out the gauge and the NeoPixel window. I just glued the dial printout over the top of the existing Ike...

After some group success with the Continuous Integration build lights, I wanted an "extreme feedback"  way to graphically show our production traffic either through transaction metrics or through server utilization. People understand gauges and alarms so I wanted to incorporate both of those features into some type of device. The end result is a USB controlled dial gauge with real alarm bells and a single red/green LED status light. The total build cost about $53. It contains a text command console that accepts ASCII strings over the COM port.  The command console extends control over the LED, the servo motor and the bell motor to the connected host.  Hardware Design I know how to do the basic electronics but nice packaging has always been a problem. Ikea came to the rescue here with the $7.00 Dekad alarm clock with a metal case and alarm bells with an external hammer. The case is pretty good size was originally made for their wind up clock. It i...