Christmas Lights

I recently finally found the time to do something with these 2 strips of WS2801 LEDs that I had laying around for years… and what better / more obvious idea given the time of the year, than build some over-engineered Christmas lights ?:)

Autonomous Army Truck – 1. Mechanics

This is the 6 wheels drive toy army truck that I bought several years ago (for fairly cheap) for one of my kids.

When reading the specs (6wd, 3 differentials, independent suspensions on each wheel, etc. … ) it sounded too good to be true for the price… and indeed, I remember being disappointed when I received it : the rubber of the wheels kept coming off, the battery was really bad, but most importantly both the steering and the main motor were simply on/off not *proportional* !

At the same time, I was impressed by the modularity of the design, how everything was screwed rather then glued in place and how easy everything was to take apart, ready to be modified / upgraded…

And I *knew* I could do better… sooo much better !

Here’s what it can do *now*, after the 2 main mechanical upgrades:

Rotary Dial Phone Revival – 3 – The Headset

This is the next piece of work after step 2 that dealt with the ringing bells, and now it’s time to look into the headset and how we can connect this to the new brain of the phone.

Game of Life on a Raspberry Pi (and a LED board)… in Haskell

This is a quick post about, re-purposing my Raspberry Pi + Peggy2 art installation, which already re-purposes a 8-9 years old Peggy2 LED board, to play Conway’s Game of Life.

Physical Face Following with OpenCV on Android

Here I am again, less than 2 days after my latest post… this must be the shortest delay ever between 2 consecutive posts.

 

First of all I hope you guys will approve of my choice of face to follow ! 🙂   The English title is “All about my mother” by Almodóvar, which I’ve never actually seen, but my wife tells me it’s a really good movie… !

 

SPOKA Night Light & Android – RETURNS

Here’s a quick follow up to my previous post on this topic, to showcase the work of Frank, who inspired by my project (wow… I feel good 🙂 ) went on and created a similar SPOKA light.

Short movie to download