…a blog with awesome projects. A collection of overcomplicated devices nobody needs. A sanctum for all the things that did not get living room clearance, but oughta be seen by fellow nerds.
23 March 2021
Recently a squirrel noticed our nut box that was waiting to be raided for almost a year now. But as our squirrels here are a but skittish, I needed to come up with a way to get in close to take nice pictures of them.
Remembering my project where I used my old Sony Alpha NEX-5T for 3d printing timelapses, I decided to set up a photo trap based on the Wifi remote feature of this camera and it worked perfectly:
This should work on any Sony Alpha since the NEX-5R, including the a6000 series and any of the a7s and the controlling script should run on any computer with Wifi access to the camera. In my case, it was a spare Raspberry Pi.
08 March 2021
Since I received several questions about how I created the rendered PCB animations of my previous project, the macro keyboard, I decided to record my work on a new PCB animation for an upcoming project. So, here is more than four hours of mostly unedited footage of my by no means professional Blender skills:
There is not much more to say here. If you are interested in this, skip around in this very long video. If not, wait for the post about the project that will use this particular PCB.
17 February 2021
I built a dynamically assignable macro keyboard with an e-ink screen. What does that mean? Well, it is a device that pretends to be a regular keyboard, but the meaning of each button changes depending on which application you currently try to control. Let me show you in a video:
So, you now have an idea what I am talking about? Then let me explain the details in this article.
17 December 2020
Hacking a Sony Alpha for clean HDMI out: On my journey to find the perfect image for video conferences and lectures with a spare DSLM camera I found several solutions to use a Sony Alpha as a webcam - with varying results and obstacles.
The video should give a good overview and examples of what to expect. This articles describes how to do it…
03 December 2020
Probably one of my less impressive projects. Controlling my old garage door opener via MQTT. If you cannot imagine what a garage door looks like when it opens, here is a three minute video of the setup:
Self-deprecating commentary aside, I simply trigger the input of the garage door opener with a relay and determine the garage door position with a Zigbee orientation sensor. Two components that just happened to be available as spares from other projects, but it might help you if you want to do something similar.