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.

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.

https://www.infineon.com/dgdl/Infineon-BTS724G-DS-v01_00-EN.pdf?fileId=5546d4625a888733015aa3a2f1030ff1

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?

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.

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.

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 :) ).

I have an older Levo Book holder. If you enjoy reading books and value your neck, I highly recommend this product. I get no kickbacks from the company for this, just a very satisfied customer (https://levostore.com/collections/levo-for-books/products/levo-book-holder-floor-stand).

I have an older holder and can no longer purchase parts for it. Therefore I went ahead and designed a holder for my Kindle Oasis so that it doesn’t keep falling on the floor and getting damaged.

I take medications. I’m also very sensitive to medications therefore I take them in liquid form so I can get the dosing dialed and just right. But I have a dilemma. They all look very similar, several of them even begin with the same letter, but I take them at different times of day. After a recent incident where I accidentally took the wrong one in the evening, and took five times my normal dose I decided to build this contraption to help remind me if I try and take out the wrong one at the wrong time of day.

I’ve been struggling with running my radio cables through the wall. For many years I drilled some holes in the frame that held our cat door, but as you can see below, we stopped using the cat door. With the recent bout of horrible wildfire smoke here in Seattle I was forced to remove the cat door and hole up inside and was unable to use my radio. That prompted me to finally get up the courage to drill a hole in the wall of my house.

I have an MFJ-1788 Mag Loop antenna. I can tune it very easily by using my RSPdx to view the waveform. In the picture attached you’ll notice that the antenna is tuned a little bit high for my current frequency. This makes it super easy to tune without worrying about having to put signal out on the antenna. But I kept having a problem where I was neglecting to change the frequency in SDRuno to match the one on my radio, and then inadvertently tuned the antenna to the wrong frequency. Attempting to transmit into that did not make my radio happy.