Automated Gardening

So it turns out that I am too lazy to water my plants, but not too lazy to spend many hours automating the watering of my plants.

The AccelLehenga

This is my friend Shalue. Shalue is super cool. Shalue deserves a super cool wedding. For Shalue’s wedding, I constructed the AccelLehenga.

The plan was simple. Chris and Shalue would provide me with a lehenga that she planned to wear to her reception and I would modify it. I learned a bunch from my previous wearable project and was confident I could produce something more polished.

Killing Me Softly with Keyboard Input

I am, for the most part, not here to get into unwinnable debates. Some decisions are kind of arbitrary. Sometimes you go along with convention because that’s what is familiar. Sometimes you just have to forge your own path. So I am not going to spend time justfying why I put the tab bar on the bottom of an Android app instead of the top. Suffice to say, I wanted to do it and I did it and so can you.

The Rise of Plant-thulu

The Dramatic Entrance Machine

Some friends and I attended a certain gathering in the desert recently and one of the things we brought with us was a pair of saloon doors. Y’know, typical desert camping gear. A few weeks before we left, someone mentioned that the doors used to have a motion-activated speaker that was meant to play a random sound whenever someone entered, but it was removed because it gave too many false positives. I thought, “A reed switch might be better suited for that,” then I started looking at reed switches, then I started looking at how to play sound files from an Arduino, and now here we are.

A Dress That Wants to Dance

I found some conductive fabric in a drawer one day and started thinking about using it in a sewing project. The (eventual) result was a dress with hidden capacitive sensors and Arduino-controlled LEDs.

I made Speakers!

So I just finished making a small set of Fab Speakers. I’m excited about this not because it’s a particularly complicated project, nor because these are particularly high-quality speakers, but it represents the first time I’ve used soldering and/or 3D printing for something useful. The sound quality is decidedly OK. If you’re the sort of person who regularly puts your phone in a glass to make it louder, you may find that these speakers fill a gaping hole in your otherwise happy and fulfilling life; otherwise, they are nothing to write home about.