01-14-10
It’s 5:40 am and I just got out of the robotics club. I’ve got class in a couple hours so in the interest of being able to retain information tomorrow, I will forgo a blog post for tonight and instead write something tomorrow.
Today (very) briefly: Got wireless working, cut out a whole Arduino, fully planned jacket stitching, finished new laser mount (version 3.0), went to a cool tech talk, looked into cheaper communications packages.
01-10-10
Today (err, yesterday now) was the first day of Build18 and the official start of my project.
Look at all these sweet parts!
All of the products I ordered from Sparkfun came in (the lasers from Amazon were delayed due to weather problems) so I decide to get started on making the jacket portion.
Although I wasn’t able to get the XBees working, I did make pretty good progress on the rest of the programming needed to run the turn signal jacket. It’s a pretty simple program right now, just blinking the left or right side LEDs and turning on the associated indicator LED. I plan to add the wireless functionality and possibly a few more advanced blinking settings after classes today.
For those interested, here’s the code so far. Don’t forget to auto-format (ctrl-t) after you’ve copied it into the Arduino IDE.
Tomorrow I’ll post a circuit you can use to unit test parts of the code.
How to: Make Money on the Internet is a short series on utilizing various resources on the Internet to supplement your income. Be forewarned: it’s neither fast, nor very time-efficient. If you have some free time, though, you can earn a little extra income on the side.
Others in the series: Intro
There are many survey sites on the Internet, the most reliable I’ve encountered has been consumer testing through Pinecone Research. The pay is only $3 per survey, but there are often perks if you’re in a wanted demographic which is just perfect college students.So far, I’ve gotten cans of yet to be released Red Bull and boxes of Macaroni and Cheese in addition to the regular $3 per survey. Registration is very similar to Demonoid.com, you’ve got to sign up during special “open registration” events which happen every once in a while. Sites like Free Stuff Times often post links when Pinecone is looking for new members. You can try this link, but I’m not sure if you’ll get in because it may be old. Each survey takes approximately 10-15 minutes which equates to approximately $12 an hour on the low end. Not too shabby for some mindless survey filling. In the two months I’ve been doing surveys with Pinecone, I’ve gotten about $30-40. Not too shabby.
Pittsburgh in winter in definitely not bike-friendly. Snow, ice, and salt are all enemies of the bike. The first two can be overcome with the help of better riding techniques and ice tires, but the third brings up categorically different problems.
Salt is a steel bike frame’s worst enemy.
I built my bike for free at FreeRide. Unfortunately, the only frame available that fit me was almost completely sanded down. This presents a problem because metal without a finish + salt = rust! (Yes, rust factorial). I plan on painting my bike, but I won’t be able until the summer when paint will actually dry.
The problem: rust. The solution: electrical tape.
First, you’ll want to put a couple rounds of electrical tape over any brake-line holders you may have on your bike. This is just to make sure no salt or water gets in through any gaps that may arise because of the bumps.
After you’ve covered the brake-line holders, you can now proceed to covering the frame with electrical tape. You will probably want to cover the top tube first because it’s the easiest. Start from one end and do a couple of loops before beginning the wrap. You’ll want to make sure the tape lays flat on the tube. Electrical tape is great because it has a certain degree of stretchiness which will help keep a nice flat surface. You will want to overlap the tape about half the width with each turn.
Once you’ve done the top tube, go ahead and continue with the rest of the frame. I would recommend removing your tires and chainring before taping the frame because it makes things a lot easier. Unfortunately, I did not have the tools available to do so.
The finished product:
As you can see, I didn’t cover the head lug because it was really more pain that it would have been worth and every try came out looking bad.
General tips:
Unlike the majority of picture frame hacks on the internet, this guide from Hack A Day teaches users how to build and program a digital picture frame from scratch. This is a great tutorial because it not only teaches the reader how to build the frame, but also teaches some useful functions like reading from SD cards, PIC programming, and working with common graphical LCDs.
“We set out to build a 100% DIY, scratch-built digital picture frame. Our frame has a 12bit color LCD, gigabytes of storage on common, FAT-formatted microSD cards, and you can build it at home.”
This project presents bit-twiddling and PIC programming in a more accessible fashion than many other tutorials on the net with a great end result.
Additional fun with digital pictures frames can be found here.
As a budding fixie rider, I’ve often found myself searching Craigslist daily for the best deals on parts for the bike I’m building. This is kind of cumbersome because I have to scan through a whole bunch of posts before I find something that’s actually close to what I’m looking for. I figured that there had to be a better way for me to keep track of what was popping up in craigslist.
The answer is RSS feeds.
An RSS feed is sort of like the updating headlines you sometimes see on news websites. We will be using RSS feeds to keep an updated list of a certain search term on Craigslist. This method can be applied to any RSS feed in particular, but a tutorial on this use was requested of me. To start, go to your local Craigslist site and type in the search bar what you want to keep track of. For this example, I’ll use turntables.
First go to your local craigslist site and type in whatever you’re looking for in the search box to the left.
Then scroll down to the bottom of the page and click the orange RSS button on the lower right. Also, if you wanted to track only those items in a certain price range, you could do so by typing in your range at the top of the page before clicking the RSS button.
You will then be brought to a new page that will look a bit different than the normal Craigslist page. Make sure you’re using Live Bookmarks, then click the “Subscribe Now” button.
A small window will pop up asking you what you’d like to name the feed. I’d suggest something short, but descriptive because you will only be able to see about 16 or 17 characters once it’s in you toolbar. Finally, check to make sure that the folder selected is the “Bookmarks Toolbar” folder. This way, you wont have to dig through your bookmarks to find your feed.
Click subscribe.
Congratulations, you now have an auto-updating Craigslist RSS feed!
