Electronics

/ Fun

Dusting off Haloween plans

The animatronic skeleton I built for last Halloween worked, but only after a last-minute compromise: there wasn't enough memory to hold the animation sequences for both the songs and the patter, so I loaded the patter and left it at that. This year the skeleton is going to sing, which means loading the animation files on demand instead of all at once.

I also want to spend less of the night running sequences by hand, so there will be a jukebox mode that lets it perform without intervention. Last year's code is up on GitHub, and the first job is reworking that repo to clean it up and strip out the options I never ended up using.

Animatronics · Electronics · Raspberry Pi
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/ Fun

For Posterity - Connecting a Sony KV25-XBR to an Amiga 1200

Someday there will be a proper writeup, and probably a video. For now, a placeholder: an archived message from an Amiga BBS in which Joe Smith explains how he got a Sony KV-25XBR talking to an Amiga, after discovering that nobody at any computer store, any Sony dealer, or Sony customer service knew where to find the cable.

He bought the service manual, decided the official PX-34 connector was overpriced and the SMK-0001 cable a gamble, and wired up his own breakout box instead: a 9-pin Amiga video connector, six RCA jacks, and two switches for sync-on-green and TV audio. The full 34-pin and 9-pin pinouts follow, along with the reference links he gathered.

Electronics · Vintage Computing
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This Raspberry Pi volumetric display is a new spin on LED 3D animations tomshardware.com

Really neat looking.  Some of these raspberry pi based personal projects are super cool!

The volumetric display is built using multiple panels—each sporting an array of LEDs. The panels are spun at high speed while the Pi tells each LED when to illuminate. The end result is a 3D effect that you can see no matter which direction you're looking at it from. The framerate and spin speed has to be just right for the effect to work successfully.

/ Raspberry Pi · Electronics

LumaCode - HDMI for retro computers with composite video signals.

Another project that makes me go, wow. LumaCode reads the luma signal coming off old computers and game consoles and carries it as digital video data, which an external upscaler can then turn into something a modern monitor or TV will actually accept.

The clever part is where the cost lives. The little board that generates the LumaCode signal for a given machine is simple enough to be made cheaply, so every system in the closet can have one. The expensive piece, the upscaler doing the real work, sits at the other end and gets shared by all of them.

Vintage Computing · Electronics
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Home Assistant local control of Garage doors via Ratgdo github.com

When we moved into our house, we had a MyQ-enabled garage door, which seemed cool at first. Over the past year I've been migrating all our smart home stuff to be able to be locally controlled where possible with some cloud integrations via Home Assistant. Unfortunately, MyQ was removed from Home Assistant a few months ago as the APIs are becoming hostile to 3rd party integrations. Now, I will integrate this garage door via this small piece of hardware. Another benefit is that it enables HomeKit to see it, so I can incorporate it with carplay.

ratgdo gives you local MQTT & dry contact control plus status feedback for your residential Chamberlain/LiftMaster/Merlin garage door opener including Security+ 2.0 openers. (Security+ 2.0 uses an obfuscated serial signal to control the door opener's open/close and light functions, which makes it impossible to use Shelly One, Go Control, Insteon I/O linc or any other dry contact relay device to control the door).When we moved into our house, we had a MyQ-enabled garage door, which seemed cool at first.

/ Electronics · Home Assistant

Amiga video via hdmi github.com

It's another really cool Raspberry Pi project.  There's a bunch of stuff I want to do with the Amiga and raspberry pi.

For all Amiga versions that produce a 12-bit color video signal, this signal can be convert to pixel-perfect HDMI using the RGBtoHDMI system. There are now quite some different ways available to wire this all together.

/ Electronics · Amiga · Vintage Computing
/ Fun

Amiga 500 is almost fully alive!

This one has been sitting since we moved into the house, and I've finally had time to get back to it. The plan was to run Kickstart 3.1 with an adapter board to make it play nicely with this revision of the motherboard, which got me a black screen at boot. Putting the 1.2 ROM back in got me a yellow screen instead, which is not much of an improvement.

Then, somehow, I zapped the machine and everything came up working. Strange, but I'll take it. The floppy drive tests fine, so what's left is sorting out the keyboard and building a cable for analog RGB.

Electronics · Vintage Computing
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Build your own smart lawn mower with Raspberry Pi raspberrypi.com

I've long wanted a mowing robot, but have been pretty disappointed with what is available.  This looks like a promising project.

Maker Clemens Elflein devised OpenMower after being let down by the current generation of robotic lawnmowers. The only models he could find simply drive themselves in a straight line until they hit a perimeter wire buried in the ground, at which point they turn around a bit and then set off in another straight line. OpenMower is able to localise itself using very precise real-time kinematic (RTK) positioning, meaning it can mow a patch of grass much more efficiently.

/ Electronics · Home

Raspberry Pi Digital Audio Workstation Built From Scratch tomshardware.com

I'm definitely planning to build one of these!

This Raspberry Pi digital audio workstation (DAW), created by maker and musician Stone Preston, takes the Raspberry Pi 4-powered synth idea to a whole new level. The project, known as LMN 3, is entirely open-source and packed with tons of cool features to make custom jams just the way you want them—with plenty of input options and tons of flexibility when it comes to sound wave manipulation.

/ Electronics · Music