http://camelspit.org Things Ned finds interesting... Wed, 14 May 2008 03:05:54 +0000 http://backend.userland.com/rss092 en The EnvStick is cheap, homemade temperature sensor that plugs into a USB port. It provides a simple way to collect a room's ambient temperature. I made it for fun. EnvStick Features: - Temp sensor (+/- .5 deg C) - USB 2.0 - Windows/Linux software - Poll up to 100 times/minute- In-circuit programming- Only ... http://camelspit.org/2008/02/29/envstick-usb-temperature-sensor/ I dug out my 9-year-old Garmin GPS the other day and brought it on a snowmobile ride near Grand Lake, Colorado. It gave me a chance to use the great, free visualization tool GPSVisualizer.com. You can use this tool with any GPS or GPS-enabled phone. Here are the results - click ... http://camelspit.org/2008/02/28/40/ Here's an initial take on an idea for running Maxim's One-wire protocol over standard Cat3 phone cable for cheap, modular networking of a bunch of small temperature sensors... The One-Wire protocol (which really requires TWO wires - one for ground, and one for data+power), is reasonable for a cheap local sensor ... http://camelspit.org/2006/05/25/one-wire-over-phone-wire/ These are my first HDR photos - made with Photomatix. Here you can see the final result, followed by the three exposures that were used to generate it. I hugely adjusted the saturation/contrast in these. Click on the big pictures for a bigger version. -1 Exposure Default Exposure +1 Exposure -1 ... http://camelspit.org/2006/05/18/hdr-pictures-from-elkhorn/ The HandySwipe provides a portable magnetic card reader interface and display. It collects card data from a “Type 2″ card reader (shown here), and displays the data on a small character LCD screen. Type 2 stripes are by far the most common in use, such as on credit cards and ... http://camelspit.org/2006/04/30/handyswipe-portable-magnetic-card-reader/ I was looking for a cheap way to interface my PIC microcontroller projects with my X10 home automation system. Plug-in serial X10 interfaces have to be … plugged into the wall, so I thought a good alternative would be to hack a wireless X10 remote. It worked… click to read ... http://camelspit.org/2006/04/30/modified-x10-rf-transmitter/