Photo by Pinguino Kolb

I think I had this idea of stuffing LEDs down the stripes of track jackets many years ago but the technology wasn’t there at the time. I was probably assembling my LED matrix hoodie and wanting a way to keep the LEDs captive and straight. With the package size of addressable LEDs shrinking we now have ones that are small enough to to fit inside factory sewn stripes. My friends and I have built a few of these now and I wanted to share some of the techniques we use to make a hopefully robust glowing jacket. (tl;dr at the end) Continue reading →

This year we celebrated Ninjapenguin 13 by throwing a Hackers (1995) themed party. In the movie, they visit a club called Cyberdelia where in one scene the two main characters take turns fighting for a high score in Wipeout. One of my contributions to this year’s party was to recreate that experience. Continue reading →

With the removal of Philly’s 30th street station Solari split-flap display putting mechanical signage back in the news I thought it was a good time to revisit my countdown project and share some resources. Continue reading →

I work with Teensy dev boards and LED strips fairly often. Connecting the two to each other seems to be something I’m constantly reinventing. Here’s my most recent attempt at a board I could use for both quick prototyping and permanent installs. While I mill a lot of prototype PCBs, this is only the third board ever that I’ve had professionally manufactured. This time via Oshpark. Continue reading →

I built this infinity mirror in the Spring of 2017. Like the Tardis before it, I wanted something different than a standard rectangular infinity mirror. I went with an isometric grid of glowing triangles. At the time I was wondering about LED displays that weren’t just giant matrixes. Luckily I had most of the materials required already on hand. Continue reading →

Updated: November 2022

Rarely does an idea take hold of me so strongly that I’m compelled to build it immediately, but that’s what happened when I saw this tweet about @kuwala’s awesome Hypnobucket. From my previous time playing with Brain Machines I knew that the effect would be interesting. The robot face doodle and the desire to make people put buckets on their heads really took it home for me. Continue reading →

I’ve recently been dealing with a lot of arcade controls at work and wanted to talk about how much I like All Fight Sticks product. I’ll also take the time to talk about some of my past and future arcade projects. Continue reading →

I got to work on an interesting project for Toyota’s Make Your Mark campaign for the new Corolla. We built 2 robotic turrets with 3 paintball guns on each. The pan and tilt movement is driven by 2 Tormach rotary tables; these usually act as a 4th axis on a CNC mill. The paintball guns already had solenoid driven triggers but we adapted them for remote control. We also monitored the gun ball sensors to determine if a paintball was in the chamber. The guns are driven using G-code like any CNC machine. You can see a video of it in action below where it’s painting every time it receives a tweet. More photos from the event are on Flickr. Continue reading →