Ever since I visited d3js.org and saw the examples of what people build with it, I was inspired and wanted to have a go – I’m pretty sure most developers are the same. But I never found the time or reason to use it until this week, (the week before my uni exams 👌), when […]
Read More The Productivity Puzzle, and D3.jsI have been keeping my podcast, Distinguished Devs, ticking over for a little while now, and though I don’t have loads of episodes, I’ve learned a ton and was keen to share some of that knowledge. So I was delighted when Stack Overflow commissioned me to write an article for the Stack Overflow blog on […]
Read More The most successful developers share more than they takeIf you stay up to date with niche software news, your ears may recently have twitched at the release of a new programming language: V. New hobby-project programming languages are released all the time, you would correctly argue; what makes this one special? The answer is a number of design choices which promote speed and safety: V is tiny and very fast
Read More The V Programming Language: Vain Or Virtuous?I recently bought a new phone, because my old one’s battery capacity had degraded to the point where it couldn’t last me through the day – an experience that’s fairly common. The pain of financial expenditure fresh in my head, I decided to investigate what I could do to look after the battery of my […]
Read More A smart charger that preserves your phone batteryMy electronics workbench was missing one crucial component: a power supply. For years I’d got by as a broke student testing my projects with an assortment of DC adaptors, LiPos, AAs, small buck/boost converters and linear regulators. But enough was enough. I had been bitten by no current limit enough times: it was time to […]
Read More Making a DIY power supply from an old stereo ampOne of my favourite posts that I wrote for Hackaday recently was the coverage of what’s new in the latest Python release. You can read the full article here. Also of interest might be: Stop Using Python 2: What You Need To Know About Python 3 Make Your Python Prettier With Decorators Python’s Iterators and […]
Read More Hands on with Python 3.7: what’s new in the latest releaseI recently bought this fairly chunky buck converter from China, manufactured by a company called Yeeco. Despite its price, it works well and the quality of manufacture is high. You can set voltage and a current limit on the “control panel”, and you get some CV/CC lights too – it tries to behave like a […]
Read More Secret UART On Cheap DCDC convertersThis is a project that I’ve had on the back-burner for a while, but recently got around to finishing. It still needs some tuning but it’s getting there. Since I wanted to be able to control it from my phone, it uses a Raspberry Pi Zero W to handle WiFi communications. For a cheap, easily […]
Read More Balancing robotI decided to build a tube headphone amp because I’ve been aware of them for a while, but I wanted to see how much of a difference they actually make to a listening experience. I decided to go with an amp that uses a twin triode 12AU7 tube, which has two advantages: Runs on 12V, […]
Read More Tube headphone amplifierDue to a friend moving away (Finnian Anderson, check out his blog) I came into ownership of a Skywriter. I decided to hook it up to an Arduino Leonardo to create a gesture/shortcut pad for my computer. The skywriter can detect a number of gestures including flicks, circles and taps. I assigned each gesture to […]
Read More Computer gesture control with Arduino and skywriter