San Mateo Maker Faire Recap for 2013

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This years San Mateo Maker Faire was even more awesome then usual. The amount of new and interesting makers and stuff to see was virtually overwhelming. Even after two long days I still was unable to see everything. I was able to upload all my images to my twitter account which you can check out on the right sidebar.

In other news I will be finishing up the Tommy Pinball system in the next week or so. Project first board should be ready for testing in a month. I will be looking for beta testers and programmers in a month so either send my an email or comment on this post if you are interested.

128×32 RGB DMD Started

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Just started my new DMD. This will be a 128×32 RGB DMD with a 4mm pitch. Total display size will be around 5″x20″ so it is almost twice as large as a normal DMD but it will be in color. I ordered a single 32×32 matrix (seen above) and took some sample code from adafruit’s website to get it working.

Since the proof of concept is working I will expand it to the 128×32 by adding 3 more modules and running the display off of a Ti Stellaris LaunchPad. The Stellaris LaunchPad runs at 80Mhz so it will be plenty fast enough to do the matrixing. It will have an onboard SD Card so it can pull the images off of it. The main controller of the pinball machine will use an I2C bus to tell the LaunchPad which image to display.

Demo Platform for the Low Voltage Motor Driver

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This is the robot I quickly built to demo the Low Voltage Motor Driver. If is based off the Mr. Basic platform and MSP-430 Launchpad. It has a 6.4V lithium battery as the main power source which feeds into the voltage regulators on the Launchpad.

For direction control a top mounted servo spins a Sharp gp2y0d810z0f IR sensor. The sensor has a single data line which is pulled low when a object comes within 10cm of the sensor.

Most of the code for the hardware is already written. Just need to finish the controls and it will be ready for a video.

Homebrew Fermentation Temperature Control

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This is my Temperature Controller for my fermentation freezer for homebrew beer. It uses a Digital STC-1000 Temperature Controller which controls two relays. One relay for the cooling and one for heating. The cooling relay is hooked up to the compressor of a chest freezer and the heating relay is hooked to a 60 Watt space heater.

I will be uploading the DIY guide tomorrow.