Seattle Subway
This project was inspired by the fine folks over at https://www.traintrackr.io/ They’ve done some really nice layouts of subways around the world. My sister got a christmas gift of the Boston one which inspired this project.
This project was done on a lark, but really exciting for me. I got to try some new tools, some new approaches, and some new ideas. It was a great amount of fun to get up and running.
What I’m building: Ganglia
Yes, I know there is a network monitoring project called Ganglia. That’s not this. Move along now.
I’ve dreamed about building this for about 20 years now (see earlier post). It’s a musical/sound sculpture instrument that consists of 10-20 noise makers distributed around a room. Many of them will have the ability to play back audio samples, but other will have the ability to physically make noise.
By chrisprosser
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Fun with Driving Solenoids
I got frustrated trying to figure out the best way to drive some solenoids. I was looking for something foolproof that I didn’t need to design myself. I’m trying to build as much as I can with JLCPCB Assembly which limits parts. I settled on the Infineon BTS724G. It’s an automotive part that has all the protections you can think of. Good for an unmonitored art installation.
But I was torn on the circuit design. Do I need decoupling caps? Do I need my own snubber diodes or will the chip handle it?
By chrisprosser
read more20 years in the making
I tried to start this project back in 1999/2000 when I was living in San Francisco. It was inspired by a piece I saw in the gallery at Cellspace https://www.foundsf.org/index.php?title=CELLspace.
The piece was a fantastic little music box about 4 inches by 6 inches. It was filled with a microcontroller and all sorts of electromechanical fun. It played a song with no traditional instruments. I loved it but lost track of the artist years ago. I wanted to make something similar, but fill a room not a box.
By chrisprosser
read moreComparison of Firewalls for Home
I’m curious about firewalls. I have a Protectli FW4B along with a backup edge router ER-X and decided to do some testing. There are a handful of different ideas I wanted to explore.
The first had to do with the value of the next-generation firewall capabilities like threat protection. Practically, it doesn’t matter that much for me, it’s just my wife and I, but I was curious if it would be a valuable thing to deploy for my mom and how difficult they would be to be useful.
By chrisprosser
read moreIPFire and Centurylink Fiber
I recently switched from pfSense to https://www.ipfire.org and got to learn the hoops needed for PPPoE over a vlan like Centurylink needs.
In IPFire this is considered a VDSL connection and isn’t available during the guided setup. But overall it’s a pretty easy process. You’ll need your PPPoE username and password from centurylink to get started.
During initial setup select the Dialup option (even though you are on Fiber :) ).
By chrisprosser
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