DIY LED Bubble Tube: Part 5–Motor Control I figured out how to control the speed of the air pump with the Photon. This will be just a short update on the programming part of this project. (Follow these links for: Part 1, Part 2, Part 3, and Part 4.) What DIDN’T Work… Okay, so I fully admit that I’m a total newbie […]
DIY LED Bubble Tube: Part 4–Tube Construction Okay, so now that I had acquired all of my materials for my bubbler, written the code to control it, and designed the base, it was time to construct the actual tube. This turned out to be the part that has been the most frustrating and required the most experimentation so far. Laser Cutting the End Cap […]
DIY LED Bubble Tube: Part 3–Designing the Base So as you can imagine, a tube full of water that is four inches wide and six feet tall is not very stable. I needed a way to: Provide more stability to the bubble tube when it is standing upright House the NeoPixels and the air pump and all their tubing and wiring Make it […]
DIY LED Bubble Tube: Part 2–Programming In this post, I’m going to describe the coding involved in creating my DIY bubble tube. In case you missed it, Part 1 of this tutorial describes this project in more detail and gives a provisional shopping list of parts you’d need to buy to do it yourself. I may amend the shopping list later, […]
DIY LED Bubble Tube: Part 1 Imagine the most annoying alarm you’ve ever heard clanging in your head all the time. Last week I had the good fortune to attend the 2016 Autism Conference hosted by the Matthew Reardon Center in Savannah, Georgia. It was there that I learned that many people with autism spectrum characteristics (ASC) experience continuous sensory overload. […]
Your Very Own Shiny Server Shiny Server is a cool tool for deploying data visualizations based on statistical analysis with the R programming language to the web. I just wrote a guest post on Quality and Innovation (Nicole’s blog) on how to install your very own Shiny Server. Check it out!
How I come up with domain names A student emailed me today to ask about how to come up with a good domain name. I don’t make any claim that any of my domain names are “good,” per se, but I can certainly talk about what they mean to me and the process that I used to come up with them. It’s […]
Finally! Free SSL Certs!!! Let’s Encrypt! OMFG! From the why-the-hell-did-this-take-so-long department, I bring you an exciting announcement: you may never, ever have to pay for a trusted SSL certificate for your website again! E-ver! I’d like to introduce you to Let’s Encrypt. From their website: Let’s Encrypt is a free, automated, and open certificate authority (CA), run for the public’s benefit. Let’s Encrypt […]
Installing Laravel 5.1 at Digital Ocean with PHP 7 PHP 7 is here!!! …well, almost. As of the writing of this post, we’ve reached the 7th Release Candidate (!) phase, so it shouldn’t be too much longer until a stable release is made official. With reports of between 25% and 70% speed improvements, all of us PHP devs should be very excited about this. […]
Should You Use EAV? The Entity-Attribute-Value (EAV) pattern can be used to flexibly add or remove properties to an object and its corresponding data model. There is some debate about if and when it is appropriate to use EAV. I’ll provide my opinions here, and also a tutorial on how to implement EAV into a Laravel 5.1 application using Cartalyst’s […]
