Over the past year plus, I’ve gotten a handful of emails about donations to StuffAndyMakes.com. I’ve also been offered payments for customizing PCB designs or even just making the files available. Some have requested kits of the Iron Man Arc Reactor for payment. I hadn’t taken the time to get it set up. Well, no more! I set up a Donate page, thanks to the amazing people at Stripe! Stripe is a fantastic and ridiculously easy-to-use card processing system built specifically for developers. It’s easy to sign up, they take a little in fees per successful charge (2.9% + 30¢) and it even works in your mobile apps. Best of all: It ain’t PayPal! Woot!
From their website:
You don’t need a merchant account or gateway. Stripe handles everything, including storing cards, subscriptions, and direct payouts to your bank account. Stripe.js lets you build your own payment forms while still avoiding PCI requirements.
I put together a guide pamphlet for our group’s annual trip to the Kentucky Bourbon Festival and for the Kentucky Bourbon Trail. It included quite a bit of collected and learned information on my favorite adult beverage: Bourbon. Here’s the page that contains the “Bourbon To-Drink” checklist, if you’re interested! I thought I would reformat it a little and put it in a blog entry.
How many times has this happened to you? You have a little LED project with an AVR ATmega328 microcontroller (or Arduino) at its core and you need to light up a boatload…. A dingyload of LEDs. Maybe it doesn’t happen a lot to you. It’s happened on three recent projects for me. My latest two LED projects are a timekeeping piece that illuminates 21 characters from behind and a simple LED chaser thing.
As usual I wanted to keep the component count down on these projects. I also tend to prefer not to use a ton of ICs with busses between them and whatnot, if I can help it. So much darn soldering and stuff. Meh. Luckily, back in 1995, so the Wikipedia story goes, a super-smart dood named Charlie Allen at Maxim Integrated devised a super-ingenius way to control a large number of LEDs using a not-so-large number of microcontroller pins. The method is called, “Charlieplexing” and it seems a but daunting, at first, but it’s not that bad once you figger it out.
Today at the office, I walked by a coworker’s desk and something was different: She’d put an Ikea table and shelf together and set them on top of her desk. Nutty, at first glance. Purposeful, after 0.25 seconds of thought. Here’s the story of what I saw: Inexpensive IKEA furniture repurposed for other ingenius uses.
I guess I forgot to post an update to the update of my workbench. Not only did I clean up the gigantic mess that had accumulated on it, I improved the lighting and workspace availability: Prior to this upgrade, I had fluorescent lighting under the blue cabinets over the bench. They extended down about 3 to 4 inches […]
I’ve seen a few different add-on lenses for iPhones out there and decided to nab a set for myself to make my detail photos and product shots a little more neato. I went with the Photojojo three-lens kit for $49 US. These lenses are just little guys. They come with front covers and magnetic back […]
While wandering around at the 2012 Kentucky Bourbon Festival, I stumbled upon the Bluegrass Barrels tent. The guys there showed me how easily white dog (moonshine, or corn whiskey before it goes into the barrel to eventually become bourbon) can be aged at home in your own little charred oak barrel. Is that awesome or […]
Backstory: In a previous life, I was a freefall photographer. I took photos and shot video while skydiving. Before GoPro and others started popping up on the scene, I had devised a little rig for shooting freefall video without the need for the bulky miniDV camera on my helmet. The setup used a “bullet” or […]
Citrus trees in our back yard We HAD three citrus trees in our backyard. They were lined up at the west end of our pool (top right of the photo below). The middle tree was called, “Frankencitrus.” It had lemon-esque fruit on it, but the fruit had absolutely ZERO flavor. Ick. A tree nursery person […]
I’ve had a number of requests from readers to see my workbench in its entirety, as most photos of it are just backgrounds to projects. So, I thought I’d post some photos and explanations in an article. Maybe someone will get some helpful hints or perhaps someone will lend me some helpful advice. First off, […]