(n)ion

Orginally published back in 2004 I figured I better repost this because most of my traffic still comes from firestARTer

Some say this is the greatest invention man has ever made, some say it’s not, others still contest that it is. Regardless, I now would like all of you to realize this electronic device can be yours. All you need is a few hours and a couple of tools, oh and about $60 USD. Depending if you want to make it fancy or not, it could cost more. But my total costs where about $60 and there is no reason it should cost you any more. There are a few skills you might need before you get started. Not to worry though, Soldering is really easy! Trust me, if my girlfriend can do it, so can you! On top of that, this whole project can be accomplished without soldering on a proto-board, but for practical use one would most likely want to solder it to a board, and then put it in a case. Before we start, I want everyone putting this together to head on over to Firestarter`s home page and print out the parts list, and download the schematics, and the .hex file that you`re going to need later. OK, enough talk lets get down to bussiness! (more…)

At work, when I was first tasked to push some of our ads out on twitter, they used plain text authentication to get access to the accounts via the twitter API. A simple username and password was all it took to get up and running – I also used a twitter php class designed by Felix Oghina. It was REALLY easy and took about a day to design a script that ran every hour to push our ads to twittwer with help from Felix’s twitter class of course. Call me a spammer if you like, no one forced you to subscribe. Anyway… everything was going great, another set-it-and-forget-it Ron Popeil project completed. But then, on September 1st 2010 my script started throwing errors from the cron daemon. What I failed to realize ahead of time was that twitter was changing the way they authenticate users. They’re now using Oauth. Basically, a PGP style public and private key system to authenticate users. In this post I’ll walk you through the steps required to change your scrips/website over to oauth – because if you’re like me, at first glance this task seems overwhelming. I just feel bad for all of you who were using arduino and twitter… (more…)

Lately I’ve been doing work with the Google Maps API. This is part of an on going project DollarBeerNite. It’s a side project – like all my projects – so it will probably be sometime until I finish. But after everything is done, I’ll be adding more posts if anyone wants to make their own style site. I got my influence from Kayak’s explore site. Also most of what I leared about custom icons is from here Stiern.com it’s a great site with lots of tutorials – check it out. In this post I’m just going to talk about Custom Markers though, how you can make them and call them just like in Kayak’s explore site. (more…)

Sphere, or Ball Robots are all the rage. Here is a sneak peak of my v1.0. (more…)

About 3 months ago I ran into an article in ReadyMade mag, it had a simple sketch that basically showed water bottles turned upside down in a sort of drip system. This drip system fed plants, and pumped water via a cheap water pump from a reservoir. I updated the version a little – added lights, and a part to empty out the waste water. I’ve learned a little along the way,  so – if your an apartment dweller like I am and want a garden of your own, read along and you might learn something. (more…)