I built a set of giant Jenga for the work christmas party. Lots of sanding involved! They were a great hit.

The shelves I built about two years ago received a coat of clear poly to make them look the part for their new home inside the house. They came up really nice and it also gave me the opportunity to redo some of the edge banding which was loose and allowing the shelf to sag (they are only mdf).

Today we built a kitchen counter for the new place. The bench space in the kitchen is a bit small so this will help a bunch.

Lost or misplaced the the power supply for your HTPC? No worries, just fire it up on a lab power supply =)

Blueberry Pancakes with Bacon! =)

I decided to unwrap these old BP Solar panels and see what they could do. I built a basic SLA charging circuit that would allow an SLA battery to be charged and to supply power to an ESP8266. This will be for use outdoors as a weather station "or something". I haven't decided yet. Mostly I just wanted to see if the solar panels that I've had for over a decade still worked.

Grilled Chicken Breast ready to go on burgers. Sometimes the most simple recipies are the most popular with the kids. Just lemon juice, olive oil, minced garlic and some parsley. Easy.

What's a Loxone and why does the stupid thing have such a low input impedance? The reason is this chip. HVS882. It's an industrial input serializer chip. The input impedance is only 10k. This chip operates in a "window" mode for detecting "on" vs "off". With the recommended 4.7k pullup on a 24V supply, this leaves things very close to the 16V threshold that the chip requires for an "on" state. So I've started using 3.9k pullups which gives a little more room for movement on longer cable runs where a few volts can potentially be lost bringing it under the required 16V.

I built an aircon mount today. It is a cantilevered design that holds the AC in and is secure, but does not screw into the house or into the window frames at all. The house is rented, so there are rules preventing us from fixing it permanently to the structure.

Gnocchi and Chorizo with grilled peppers. I've seen this before but never tried making it. It was delicious.

Toured the DC facilities today. We walked past one of the "smaller" load banks at 200kW.

Having some fun with some PIRs for lighting. I'm using CAT-5 flex. The sensors are daisy chained allowing for six sensors per run.

Internet Enabled Night Light. I made this out of an old wall wart and an ESP8266 SOC module. Basically took the guts out of the wall wart and replaced them with the contents of a much more modern wall wart (smaller) which left space for the ESP8266 module, the PIR sensor and other bits. The device uses MQTT to communicate trigger events and periodic measurements to a custom cloud service.

• Temperature - DHT11
• Humidity - DHT11
• Brightness - LDR (Light Dependent Resistor)
• Movement - PIR Module (DSN-FIR800)

Gallery

Here is a small ESP8266 prototype using a DHT11 and an LDR for light level sensing. This module is super convenient; it has USB to RS232 integrated and also has standard spacing so it can be put into a bread board.

Running a bunch of aqua noodles at the DC =)

The kids broke their iPad charge cable. They are not too hard to repair. I backed up the connector with a piece of cable tie as strain relief and heat shrunk it all together.

BBQ Salmon. Turned out great.

Scored a head unit that had AUX input, so I installed it in the car with a special IP-BUS cable.

LED Lighting control box mounted and installed.

Finn helped me out putting the rub on these ribs. Ready for bbq!

Drilling and tapping the insert board for the control box for mounting DIN rails and ducts.

Alternate power supply box design.

First LED power supply box installed and cabled.

Installed the last parts of the fiber duct today.

Making brackes for the DMX modules to bolt onto unistrut runners.

Lots and lots of pigtails soldered onto LED strips!

I am helping out with a project at work to install LED lighting in our DC. Should be awesome.

Had a mate around today for a BBQ and we built some sensors and wrote some code for the ESP8266.