This past year, I found myself helping to organize a Survivor weekend, with some pretty tricky advanced robotic needs. I was pretty sure it could all be done, but had a fun technology journey to get there. This is a hard project to capture with a "do it yourself" style...
I have a Gaggia Classic Pro 2019 Espresso machine. It's a great espresso machine, with a capable boiler and steam wand. It's also super modifiable, with a healthy Arduino community. Recently however after several years, it developed quite a serious leak coming out of the group head. It was extremely...
If you are a Millennial, I bet you had front row seats to a really interesting turning point in the world's relationship to technology. Take yourself back to an innocent time in the mid 2000s. You probably went out to dinner with a friend who had just gotten text messaging...
I love coffee, and I love making things. So I'm surprised this project took me so long, but thankfully I've finally got around to building my own coffee roaster. All you need for a good DIY coffee roaster is a source of heat, and something to mix up the beans....
Disclosure: I work as a Software Development Engineer for Amazon (Alexa). I also exist as a living human person outside of my job. The views and opinions in this post are entirely my own. The First 12 Years I joined Facebook back in 2006, during my first few days as...
Alexa is fun and all, but combining her with animatronics such as the Big Mouth Billy Bass creates a much larger and weirder personality! In this post I'll walk you through how to make an Alexa device out of a Billy Bass toy. This isn't an original idea (kudos to...
Aol Ffily-Vtlsslaal Growing up I was always fascinated by hidden messages, secret codes, ancient languages, and all manner of disguised communication. As I started learning math and computer science, that interest strangely faded. This was likely because modern cryptography seemed so complicated I didn't think I'd be able to make...
After upgrading my Smart Mirror from a reflective film mirror to a glass two way mirror, I thought it would be interesting to attempt a (semi) scientific comparison between the two types of mirror. This test involves taking a bunch of pictures and rating the mirrors on a few categories....
I recently joined Toronto's SteamLabs, and got access to a laser cutter for the first time. Laser cutters are incredible machines which use a freakin' laser to carve or etch patterns into flat materials like wood or plastic. They are fast too! Over the past few years of 3D printing,...
This is a project I've had on the backburner for almost exactly 1 calendar year. The seed was planted when I toured the Harry Potter Studios last year and saw a fake fireplace effect being used quite extensively. I am also an avid watcher of the "Fireplace for your Home"...
Halloween is one of my favourite holidays of the year. One reason for this is that it's totally optional and low stress. People can get exactly as in to it as they want. I'm also really intrigued by the perseverance of belief that there are supernatural forces at work. No...
This post starts with two facts: 1\. I have a penchant for killing plants. 2\. People in Holland grow things really well indoors. After reading about how well things can grow indoors, I started thinking that maybe automation was my path to healthy plants. So I decided to build the...
The Lyrics Repetition Analyzer I have just returned from a two week vacation, which contained a sizeable amount of road tripping. And with every great road trip comes great tunes! One of the albums I was excited to be listening to was The Arcade Fire's newest release, called Everything Now....
I'll start this post with a disclaimer. This project has not produced conclusive results. But I'm optimistic! In fact, I've got a couple hurdles that maybe some of the people reading this can help with (which is what I'm hoping for). So let me describe what I have been working...
After working on the All-Seeing Pi, a series of events unfolded such that Dan and I were put in contact with a company called eSight. The founder of eSight had the same inspiration as the All-Seeing Pi many years ago, and has now developed the third generation of a vision...
This post is a about vision enhancement platform called The All-Seeing Pi that I have been working on with my friend Dan, who is blind. People who are blind rarely have no vision at all though, and in Dan's case, he still has a little bit of sight in one...
This is simply a video overview of my previous post on astrophotography barn door trackers. After lots of questions about how to use it, I thought a video might come in handy!
In a previous post I introduced a simple orbital simulation program written in python. In that post we simulated orbits by simply taking the location, and velocities of a set of masses, and computed the force on each body. Then we calculated where all the bodies would end up under...
In a previous post, I showed how you can build a smart mirror with an Alexa voice assistant on board. The MagicMirror software and Alexa voice assistant were both hosted on a Raspberry Pi, but unfortunately there was no obvious way to get Alexa to control the smart mirror, or...
This is a fun and very easy project I came up with while trying to build a wireless shutter for an iPhone. I knew selfie sticks could trigger your camera shutter, so I was trying to find out what information they were sending through the 3.5mm aux port (aka headphone...
In this post we're going to build a Markov Chain to generate some realistic sounding sentences impersonating a source text. This is one of my favourite computer science examples because the concept is so absurdly simple and and the payoff is large. This will be done using python, and your...
Materials 1. Computer Monitor. Buy used and look for cable inputs that point down or sideways instead of straight out. 22" recommended (I used Acer AL2216 ) 2. Video cable. Whatever fits your monitor (I used HDMI to DVI adapter) 3. Raspberry Pi 3, 16GB Micro SD Card, 5V Micro...
I want to document this project, as it is one of my favourite projects to date. This took place about 4 years ago while I was working at the Irish Centre for High End Computing (ICHEC). One of ICHEC's projects at the time was creating demonstration for the BT Young...
My trusty RPi3 twitter bot server "starkiller". So let's say you've got a twitter bot that you want running 24/7, but you don't want it running on your personal system. What you need here is a server, which is really just a dedicated system. Note, if you're looking for a...
Amazon did something really cool. They made their Alexa voice assistant code open source and cross platform. That means instead of buying their Amazon Echo to get a home assistant, you can simply install it on any system you want. It's actually a fairly straightforward project, especially if you've setup...
Many of the projects on this site use a programming language called python. Python is a great language for beginners, because it is designed to be very readable, but it's also very powerful. It is powerful because there are a lot of powerful libraries and APIs that are easy to...
This is the second post in a series. If you're just getting started, see Part 1. In the previous post, you got python installed, and ran a simple program. In this section we will use some language features to store data, and re-use code. These are important concepts for all...
Do you ever find yourself thinking "I wish I could do more recreational physics"? If so, today is your lucky day! We're going simulate our very own solar system. At the end of this tutorial, you should be able to define a hypothetical gravitational system, and graph the paths of...
Night Writer About four years ago, I invited some friends over to try to turn a remote control car into something programmable. We had some trouble finding supplies though, so they just brought beer instead. But we were determined to build something. I had recently seen this video, and thought...
Internationally, Canadians have a reputation for being a sorry lot. In fact, we've even passed a law called "The Apology Act" stating that saying "sorry" does not count as an admission of guilt. A very sensible law indeed. Is this stereotype true? We're going to test it in this tutorial,...
Most of the projects on this site are created with a cup of coffee immediately in reach, and my favourite way to make coffee is with an Aeropress. This device is sort of a hybrid between French Press, and Espresso. It was also created by Aerobie, inventor of the world...
Twitter Bots Twitter has some amazing bot personalities; from celebrity impersonators, to genuinely useful automated announcements. It is also probably the first place anyone was exposed to bots and interacted with them. Some of my favourites are BIGBEN and CaptainMarkov. It is also very easy to make a simple bot,...
Motivation After seeing some beautiful photos of the milky way, I wanted to step up my astrophotography game a little bit. In astrophotography, you are limited to shutter speed = 500 / (focal length) before your stars get blurry from the earth's rotation. To get better photos of the night...
Automated Sports Betting Everyone knows gambling is a great way to make money (/s). I myself formed this conclusion after hearing bookies will sometimes pay out before an event even happens, which planted a betting strategy in my mind that required a bot. This very successfully and slowly lost me...
One of the coolest mix of special effects and real images I've ever seen. Simply stunning. Wanderers - a short film by Erik Wernquist from Erik Wernquist on Vimeo.
I got a VPN service through "Private Internet Access" and wanted to setup a router to connect to this. I did a lot of googling for similar problems, so I thought I'd make a quick post with the relevant keywords to help anyone else in the world trying this. TomatoUSB...
This is an archived blog post from 2009, and was possibly my first attempt at astrophotography. On Nov. 17th there was a really cool meteor shower, so me and a bunch of friends woke up at 3 am to watch them. To get better viewing we drove out of Kingston,...