Blog

Light bulbs everywhere

Last year the company I was working with were having their offices refurbished and it got me thinking about corporate art but something that's potentially useful as well as interesting to look at. I g...

Interfacing with a Vending Machine

Before Christmas Build Brighton procured a vending machine. This is something we had been talking about for a while but vending machines are typically large and heavy as they have refrigeration units...

Website Design with Material Design

Back in June at the IO event Google announced the Material Design guidelines. This was a full set of design and style guidelines or at least recommended guidelines for mobile and android apps, they ca...

My Name In Lights

I really enjoy making things out of wood but I don't often get a chance or have a reason but after watching some videos from the amazing Jimmy Diresta I decided to spend an afternoon making a light ba...

Modern PHP Development with Laravel

I have been using Laravel for a few years now, I moved onto it from Codeigniter and its now my framework of choice and something I use whenever I get the chance. I have found laravel to be very diffe...

Xively, Phant & DataStore

I have been working on a home sensor network for several months now and had been passing this data to Xively but I started to think about the next steps, namely using this data to control devices. To...

Making Things

I have just started work on a 'Drawer Slide CNC', this is basically a poor mans CNC as rather than using accurate high quality bearings and rails you use a pair of drawer slides. I have started this p...

Google Glass - so much potential but still so very far away

A few weeks ago Google officially launched Glass in the UK and to coincide with this they held a 2 day event for people to come and try out Glass. The event was held in Camden in London in a lovely ar...

Mini LCD Adapter Backpack

Over the past month I have been working on a simple I2C adapter for the common Hitachi LCD displays. These adapters are already widely available but only for displays with a single row of pins and I h...

Internet of Things - Serial to Ethernet Adapter

I have been working on a number of projects recently which would all require an internet connection either for fetching data or uploading data, in other words the Internet of Things! One of the easie...