When I started this blog two years ago, my first article described a hot potato game I wrote using the original Circuit Playground (before there was a Circuit Playground Express version). Now two years later I have created another game, the “Magic Hallowing”. Inspired by the children’s toy “Magic 8-Ball”, this Arduino sketch turns an Adafruit Hallowing […]
When the interactive fiction game of Zork first appeared on home computers in the 80’s, it was truly magical. Users playing the game were able to type sentences like “open mailbox and read leaflet” and the computer would understand it. The parsing engine was truly a technological feat for 8 bit computers at the time, […]
I was successfully able to get the classic game “Zork” and the Z Machine engine that drives it running on an Adafruit ItsyBitsy M4 Express. Despite its small size, the ItsyBitsy M4 Express contains one of the most powerful processors available on an Arduino today, the ATSAMD51 32-bit Cortex M4. With this powerful tiny device […]
I found the personal compass project at Instructables.com quite interesting. Basically, a personal compass works like a regular compass, but instead of pointing to magnetic north, it points to a particular location of personal interest. Maybe it is pointing to the place where you were married, perhaps where your childhood home is. All this compass […]
On or around May 15, with no announcement or advanced notification, the Weather Underground quietly removed their free API key option for use in their weather products. This left developers with no advanced warning to update their products or inform their customers in advance of the change. This also means that developers have one less […]
It’s been a month since my last post about my Arduino music player and remote. This is a music system geared towards performers, like magicians, ventriloquists, jugglers and the like who perform a one man/woman show and need an easy way to queue up and play music and sounds. It uses two packet radio Arduino devices, […]
Yes, there are plenty of bluetooth enabled speakers that can be used with a smartphone to play music remotely, however, I was looking for a music system geared towards performers, like magicians, ventriloquists, jugglers and the like who perform a one man/woman show and need an easy way to queue up and play music and […]
This past holiday season my wife asked me if I could make her a homemade gift for Christmas. So, I gave a her a gift that required some soldering, programming and configuring a web based service. I’m not sure if that was what she was expecting for a homemade present but I like the […]
Introduction The party light project is a simplified version of another project I have been working on that uses Adafruit’s Circuit Playground and its capacitive touch feature. This project has a number of features that make it well suited for new as well as seasoned hackers: No soldering Easy assembly Open source (available on GitHub) […]
Jack the Duck is helping test the first prototype of my magic pinwheel.