Entries from the year 2016

RFID Candy Box + Twitter

Christmas is coming. The pre-christmas season has started. Sweets everywhere. It doesn't matter, if it's classic chocolate, marzipan potatoes, baked goods or gingerbread: Everything, everywhere! Everything is within easy reach, waiting to be eagerly devoured.
Every year i swear myself, to not eat this much. But every time i lose. Every time I lie on the couch, nearly sick, swearing to do better next year. Not this time. This year i will build some prevention:
A crate, which I have to open with a RFID Token, just three times a day. Haha! Take this! Future me!

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Let's do some art. Lightpainting

Writing and painting with light. This idea is not a new one:
You just take a camera, switch it to longtime exposure and paint with a flashlight, or LED, some characters in front of it. This works properly, if you are able to draw. I'm not.
So I just stood by admiring those people, but knew I will never be able to do this. Two years ago, while I visited the 30c3 (Chaos Computer Congress), there were some guys from Blinkinlabs. They sold some bags full LED stripes. I bought on e myself anf found out, that you are able to blink own images with it. But unfortunately mine broke after some days of testing. They are not (very) waterproof...

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Internet Kill Switch

This Kill Switch is the last action, to prevent things getting up- or downloaded into/from the net. This idea came into my mind about 1-2 years ago, but to be honest: I never had a good idea to use it for. So I put it onto my "One day you'll build this"-list and nearly forgot about it. But now a project called "Kliemannsland" started here in Germany. An awesome idea of building a place for creative people, in rurality on an old farm, between Hamburg and Bremen.

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Arduino: Atmel-Flash-Station

Finally not always using Arduinos:
Every time i nearly finished a project, I'm annoyed about using an arduino again, which uses a lot of space and isn't really necessary. A small stand-alone-controller would totally be enough. While prototyping the Arduino-PCB is a cool thing, but afterwards, when everything is finally assambled, the arduino needs a lot of space, which could be used for other things, like less case.

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Photobooth: GoPro + Raspberry Pi

There was a wedding in my circle of friends and I'm not quite sure, if the bridal pair wanted a photobooth for their party, or if one of my friends wanted to have one as a suprise for them. But that doesn't matter: There was an idea and I thought it won't be very hard to build one.
My head was like "Cam, Remote shutter, Raspberry Pi, a little bit of soldering and some coding - easy and fast".
This will not take a lot of time, one Sunday afternoon maybe. But: Jesus f*%&"?§ Christ!

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Mastadon Fuzz - Manly sound for guitars

Exchanging physical stuff is supercool. Why are people not stuck with it? (Maybe because it's not cool to pay your new car with 1.5 million carrots.) I would like to have a cool logodesign for my DIY stuff, but I suck at drawing and a good friend of mine, who is a professional designer, wants to have a very specific effectbox for his guitar, but has no soldering skills. So why not "execute" a classic exchange of these things? I would never pay his hourly wage. This is why I bought this DIY kit (You have to order the knobs extra!!!), waited for delivery and stored the kit in my desk. It's like wine: Store it and wait. To be honest: I had less time and enough other $things to do.

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EMF Detector: Let's hunt some ghosts!

The idea to build an EMF-Detector came while i fucked up my last project partially. While i was soldering the pcb i did a mistake while connecting a wire. This gave me a broken signal of a buttonstate (switching from 0 to 1) switching back and forth. I fixed that, but wanted to know exactly why this happens.

Result: When you don't connect the input of the controller to ground, you are not able to set a solid state and the µController starts to interpret everything what he gets. In this case it reads electromagnetic fields. So why not digging further into this and build a gauge to have a look on which devices are having a nice electromagnetic party?

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Transformers: Modding a LED-Lamp

Once upon a time there was a gift: A white glowing lamp shaped as an Autobotsign. My girlfriend gave me this lamp at the end of 2015. I really liked it, but it was a kind of boring. It just glowed white and I was not able, to mount the lamp directly onto a wall.

So i decided to mod this lamp:
It should glow in all colors and should be mountable onto walls, too.

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Freifunk (WiFi): Outdoor mount without drilling

Freifunk! Free WiFi for everybody!
Since two years, i'm more or less an "active" member of the "Freifunk"-community in Hamburg.
Unfortunately I'm the best in "don't be there on meetings", but at least I'm inventing some possibilities of mounting routers on windows.

My landlord started to renew the windows and put new insulation onto the walls. This was the end of my old Outdoorbox i've build some years ago, because it's prohibited to drill into the new walls or windowframes. I need a new idea.

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SSL for free: Let's encrypt! (NGINX)


New Blog -> New Technology. Why not delivering the blog via SSL and give it a little bit more security?

SSL is used to encrypt the data between a webserver an his clients, so no unauthorized person is able to read/grap them.

Since nowdays it seems to be good form trying (at least) to encrypt the data on it's way.
But since today I failed to see spending money for encryption on a private project. Since the last years, prices for valid certificates have plummeted a lot. And now there is Let's Encrypt, who give certs away for free!

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