A quick and easy way to customize your doorstep…

Another attempt of creating something with a laser cutter. After the Paris Circuit Board, I made another type of PCB, this time, I’ll call it the Paris Chess Board. It still involves a fair amount of inkscape but with more plexiglass this time. And no chemicals except some glue.

After spending some time on Hack-A-Day an Makezine, my browser started to send me ads about laser cutting services (crazy what the mad men can do these days). I knew some hobbyist services existed in the US (ponoko or Pololu) but did not know any in France. So I was happy to find out about Damengo and decided to give it a shot. For the first tests, I needed something simple and decided to make my own Christmas tree decorations.

I have an iPhone. It works relatively well (well, except for the facebook app but that’s another story. EDIT: the new facebook app is much better now). Especially, I use the deezer application a lot. I use it to discover new artists or listen to playlists while I’m at home. I was looking for a cheap way to stream the music to my speakers wirelessly. Especially, I wanted to do this with no additional wifi access point nor ethernet cable of course. Something I thought would be easy now that we can compute pi to 2700 billion digits. I was wrong.

My last project was fun but a bit overkill. Embedding a beagle board to make a speaking alarm clock is sure very flexible and evolutive but does not make the cheapest clock ever… It’s been some time I wanted to learn about microcontrollers so I decided it was high time to start and make the next project a bit more optimized. TI having released a 4,30$ dev board last year (shipping and USB cable included !), my choice went to the MSP430 line of MCUs. I have never used an ATmega or a PIC before but I can say I am quite happy with the MSP430. Architecture is lean and clean, there’s a large range of devices available and power consumption is impressively low. Below are the major steps of the project. You’ll find source code and schematics here or a bit later with the explanations. Of course, this project had to involve a rabbit somewhere…

This is a Jack-o-Lantern I made last year and never had a the time to post since I was busy on something else. Now that it is that time of the year again and I have more time, I decided to finally post it here. I am on holidays right now so it is a small post, bigger posts with more transistors coming soon…

The MSP430G2452 is cheap and has more flash than the MSPs shipped with the launchpad (8k vs 2k). Only problem is that it is not always supported by standard tools (by standard I mean the ones that came with your distribution). And the introduction from hackaday is good but does not allow to use the 8k of the 2452.

Below the steps to get everything from the 2452:

After 6 months of playing with wordpress, I always end up testing modifications directly on the production website because all the urls are hardcoded to http://mbonnin.net/ inside the SQL database and testing on localhost breaks them. While editing directly the production website is fast, I would like to avoid breaking it by accident and also I would like to keep a subversion repository of my html/php files somewhere on my local hard drive to keep track of the changes I make. So I was looking for a way to make my browser believe mbonnin.net is local…