Complete geodesic dome page Construction photos (using hand tools), assembly diagram, etc. (28 July 02007)

Artworks for Nintendo Gameboy (4 "games"! now with custom PCBs! (updated: 28 Jan 02007)

Bought a Kenwood TH-D7A(G) radio. Installed David Nestling WL7RO's very cool THD7.pm perl module for controlling it. A few catches though. First, my USB->Serial device shows up as "/dev/tty.usbserial-*", but the module has a line which removes any non-word characters, like hyphens. Doh! This ends up giving errors like "Can't call method "Receive" on an undefined value at blink_lamp.pl line 12." Just change the line that reads "$tty =~ s/[^\w\/\.]//g;" to read " $tty =~ s/[^\w\/\.-]//g; " instead (i.e., just add a hyphen in the regexp) and it should work. Here's a little sample program that will blink the display lamp.

The manuals for the Casio TK 7500 cash register are horrible! Unfortunately I had to program one recently. Here is my guide to programming them, along with a little perl program to make entering the names (which are ascii codes plus some weirdness for spaces and punctuations) easier, just in case you want to open a bar.

Here's a little movie of an LED belt buckle that I designed (Links to Frjtz and Cama websites). Originally I was going to make an entire belt, studded with surface mount LED "rhinestones", but I decided this would be a little easier. I've put online the PIC assembly code that runs the thing, a tarball containing the assembly code, the hex file, and a perl program that is useful for putting the scrolling data in the right format, as well as a the ExpressSCH/ExpressPCB formatted schematics and an incomplete attempt at a PCB. You can run it as low as 3.7 V (contrary to the TPIC596 data sheet), so I was thinking that 3 AAA batteries (even NiMH ones), or even better yet, a Canon NB-1L LiIon battery (I have a spare for my digital camera), would work well as a power source. This would be a great adornment for Burningman, but since I'm not going this year, I haven't put much effort into it. However, if you design the PCB, I'll be happy to pay for it and send you one for your troubles. BTW, the datasheet for the LED module will be useful; I bought it from Digi-Key. I've limited the size to one of these LED modules because that makes an appropriate belt buckle, but the design can be scaled upto much larger arrays very easily, with the addition of a few extra TPIC596's. FYI, the cost for all of the parts (excluding the unmade PCB) are under $10, even in quantity one.

Not really a project, but while in Greece, I saw a copy of K & R in Greek, which to me is pretty amusing.

Everybody has heard about USB Christmas trees, but what about a USB menorah (or USB Imani Kinara for the Kwanzaa celebrators in the audience)? Inspired by the Delcom Engineering chipset which gives you a cheap ($12 for IC + discrete components + socket) way to interface with your computer, OS X drivers, GPL software to calculate the Hebrew calendar, a few LEDs, and there you have it. I've started a project page for the software and hardware efforts. Update 2004: I didn't do anything with this in the past year, but I've got a few ideas for updates.

Gavin Newsom Street Art (photos of stencil graffiti and stickers). I've been collecting digital photos of the stencil graffiti of San Francisco and Berkeley for almost two years now. A month ago, my friend Diana was bemoaning the fact that she had not made an anti-Gavin Newsom (a conservative San Francisco mayoral candidate) stencil. A few weeks before the election, I found one. The runoff campaign against Green Party candidate Matt Gonzalez heated things up. Too bad Matt lost. My Green party slogan: "Verde por Verdad".

The King/Glowing Hands art installation by Santiago Rodriguez for Burning Man 2003. I built the electronics that make the LEDs inside the hands pulse on and off--just a simple 555-based square wave signal with a bunch of Op-Amp integrator circuits; the schematic is now online.

Laser cage that I built as a Burning Man 2003 art installation. No photo-tricks--that's what you would actually see (the shadowy human figure inside the cage is me). Unfortunately digital cameras aren't as good as the human eye at discerning low photon numbers. In the end, I ended up not using the ultrasound circuit, since the probability of wandering into a small area of Playa is small.

16-foot Geodesic dome that I helped Tony Dutoi build. We used 3/4-inch steel-conduit, and did all the work with hand-tools (including electrical power drills). Tony has said he would put up instructions on how we did it (I even taught him HTML), but you can at least look at my photos of the process.

Periodic table of atoms endohedrally enclosed in fullerenes that I made to organize my thoughts after a discussion with Prof. Robert Harris.