The attic was hot. Mounting a large fan in the vent seemed to help, but it was drawing 5.5A continuously, which is too much for the thermostat/humidistat my roommate bought. He left it on all the time, which is quite a bit of wasted power. I’ve seen 1wire devices online for quite a while and I’ve always wanted to play with them. The easiest way I can afford to connect sensors to computer is with 1wire. I’ve found my excuse.
I got bored and started looking at adobe air. I made a clone of HakHouse air using the same chat as hakhouse.com. Since there’s already a HakHouse air app, I named mine HakHaus. Download HERE
How’d I do it? It turns out that getting started with Adobe Air is ridiculously simple. Just…
Install
http://get.adobe.com/air/
Install
http://www.adobe.com/products/air/tools/sdk/
Unzip and read devappshtml.pdf
http://help.adobe.com/en_US/AIR/1.5/AIR1_5_html_docs.zip
Also cool
http://www.adobe.com/devnet/air/ajax/articles/air_ajax_developers.html
I followed the “Hello World” example to get started. Pretty simple!
This is what I ended up with… if you wanna take a look
http://www.ragingcomputer.com/helloworld.zip
Project Requirements
At work we needed a time lapse camera of our new student center construction project. It needs to run continuously for entire length of construction project - approx 18 months. It should run mostly unattended.
Features
It captures 1 picture every 5 minutes. Storage capacity is cheap, so after using excel to make some projections, this worked out to be a reasonable rate for our resources. After some more research, I came to the conclusion that flash video has compatibility with most visitors while being relatively bandwidth efficient, but other codecs could be used. I originally got the idea from http://mydebian.blogdns.org/?p=261 but it wasn’t quite awesome enough, so I rewrote using Perl and expanded upon it. Continue reading ‘Time Lapse Webcam’
Apparently there only a few requirements for using Screen Shots of Microsoft® products. Also check out their trademark guidelines.
If you use Linux, there aren’t many projects that even require thinking about any of this. Just something to keep in mind.
If you have pictures, sounds, and movies in your presentation, there is a good chance they will not play on another computer. The reason for this is the media files are only linked to by the presentation file, not stored within it. If you move the presentation file to another computer, the linked files are not in the expected location and will not play.
Luckily, Microsoft® has already thought of this.
Continue reading ‘PowerPoint® Presentations and Flash Drives’
It’s almost done!
Hanging on the wall, doin its thing.
Inside view. Made hole in wall to run wires into other room for power/network/audio out.
Computer case fans, running off +5v from the only USB port on the craptop.
Using a hasp to keep it closed.
Now that it’s done, what music should I put on it? I’m looking for party music. Please IM/Email/Call Me/TXT Cell/Leave suggestions in comments!
I was finally able to put in the switches and hook up the controls tonight/this morning.
Here it is. The jukebox software started right up and everything worked perfectly on the first try.
Closeup of the buttons. The protective coating is still on the plexiglas.
Here’s the rat-nest of wires in the back. I don’t have cable ties on anything yet. The keyboard encoder is just taped to the side with double sided foam tape. The terminal strip is screwed to the bottom.
Shiny things are pretty, so the jukebox is going to be shiny on the front.
The test piece turned out really well. It’s almost like a black mirror or something.
I painted the back side of the plexiglas with Krylon Fusion. It coated well and isn’t a bad paint job, but the front looks really nice.
It’s not very shiny in this picture because the protective coating is still on the front of the plexiglas.
I set the front on the rest of the cabinet. It finally looks like something I would be proud to own.
It’s starting to look good!
The sides are wrapped with a random cloth we found at wal-mart.
The vent holes are wrapped around for a cleaner look. You can see there is padding behind the fabric to make everything look smoother.
The vent holes in the top will be covered with shiny metal fan grills and will have fans attached to the inside to keep everything cool.