Actively Cooling a Monitor

My grandfather got a brand spanking new iMac relatively recently and he had given me his old LCD Monitor. The only thing wrong with it was that it would just turn off after a period of time. It wasn’t always the same amount of time and after you power cycled it, it would come back but the picture would flicker.

I expected to be able to just crack it open, spot the problem and move on - that wasn’t the case. Nothing appeared to be wrong. I finally figured that I would follow what my first hunch was, which was thermal issues. As a temporary fix, I duct taped a computer fan to the top of the display and used the tape to force it to intake from the monitor only.

It hasn’t even flickered all day. So I guess it was thermal issues. I might make a more permanent fix in the next few days. I just have to open the display again and locate a source of 5-12 volts that will be able to provide the current I need (a measly 0.12 amps).

I’ve finally found a use for my old iPhone; it isn’t the most amazing or elegant use but at least it isn’t just sitting doing nothing.

Pandora.

That’s right. Pandora.

There is a Pandora client for the iPhone, so what I’ve done is taken the audio output from the dock and routed it to my A/V switch. Now, in a sense, I have a dedicated Pandora “machine”. I’ll find other uses for it in the near future, but like I said, at least it isn’t doing nothing.

I wonder what other uses I’ll find.

Oh and by the way, I did get a new iPhone last week on the first day it went on sale. Waited in line seven hours and left with a Black 16GB iPhone 3G.

More ATTiny13 and LEDs

Ever since I discovered charlieplexing some time ago, I’ve wanted to implement it and I finally have - at least on a small scale. There are six LEDs controlled by three pins on the micro-controller. Since I didn’t really have the board space, I only used those six LEDs, but once I etch the board (or have it fabbed) there will probably be something like 20 LEDs.

Once I get to that many LEDs, I’ll really have to refine my code since as of now it is fairly rudimentary.

At one point I was putting together a rather nifty animation, but due to my rather inefficient code I ran out of memory to finish it. I only have 1K after all. And while yes, I could drop down to assembly to program it - I don’t know assembly; I know C/C++.

The next step for this little gizmo is to design it a board to use, etch it, and get some proper SMD components.

ATTiny13 Light Wheel

The Aftermath

It is the morning after Robot House Party 3, people are sleeping on the floor and things are a total mess - but it was a blast. I exaggerate slightly, only three people that don’t live at the Robot House slept over and they slept on couches and such not the floor.

Turnout was fairly nice. We had a good average of 20 people here until about 12:30AM-1:00AM. After that time, it dropped down to about six or so and we moved outside. We have the entire party (well, most of it) recorded on ustream and it just needs to be finalized and displayed somewhere. I have no idea if we will ever watch any of it, but it was a rather fun concept and we had a good half dozen people watching us have fun online. I’d stream out future parties without a doubt. This is the Robot House after all and it must maintain a certain level of technology about it.

I was inspired by one of our guests whose name I don’t remember. He wasn’t really “into” electrical engineering or anything like that, but he wanted to build a replica Iron Man arc reactor. So he did it. He even etched his own boards and learned what he needed to learn to be able to make his device; it looks fantastic. He is on his second or third version of it and I have to say that I was impressed. He basically started with a standard arduino, got the software working, and then built himself a board for it and dropped the micro-controller from the arduino into his board.

That made me wonder why I don’t get off my butt and etch my own boards. It should be fairly straight forward to do. The only thing I really have to work on is getting a little more proficient with EagleCAD but that really is a nonissue since there are so many tutorials and guides on how to use it. The question now is, what to build? I suppose I could start with making an arc reactor. Although, instead of using through-hole LEDs I would go SMD just to challenge my soldering skills. I’ll have to check the price of RGB ones because that would be just awesome.

I am definitely enjoying Chyrp and I think that I will transfer my primary domains (ryanfaerman.com, faerman.net) over to it.