I made a bike light indicator system out of a BlinkyTape, a PowerMonkey rechargeable battery and some Loom Bands. It starts off with the central front LEDs lit up bright white, and pressing the button on the BlinkyTape switches between steads/left/right indicator modes. The PowerMonkey is a simple little 5v rechargeable battery, with a variety […]
Category Archives: hacks
Custom KSP controller and display
Here’s my custom controller and display for Kerbal Space Program. Last year, after seeing this custom controller, I was suitably inspired. I wanted to build a simple physical device to control launch/stage, throttle, landing gear, lights, and maybe some custom stages. I knocked up a quick hack just to get a feel for how well […]
Things meter
I’ve been using the Things app for a while for tracking projects and next actions with the goal of Getting Things Done. I wanted something to help me pay attention to the things I need to get done, and decided that a physical representation of daily progress would be an interesting thing to try. The […]
Jargone
I made a thing. Jargone is a bookmarklet for highlighting jargon words on any web page. The list comes from the Government Digital Service GOV.UK style guide, specifically the plain English and words to avoid sections of the guide, which has this to say about avoiding jargon We lose trust from our users if we write government ‘buzzwords’ […]
Inky-Linky
Inky-Linky makes web pages 100% more useful and irritating when printed. It’s a bookmarklet that adds a QR code to the margins for each external link in the page. It came about because I wanted to make it easy to visit a link from a printed page, and also wanted to see if I could […]
P5 Glove – Rock Paper Scissors and other fun
The P5 Glove is a consumer wired glove (tactile but not haptic). I bought one boxed as-new on eBay a while ago for not very much, and I’m glad I did as they now seem to be increasingly hard (and expensive) to get hold of. It contains five analog bend sensors, 3 buttons plus […]
Yo-yo tuning; tangible audio
I’ve been thinking about augmented reality and tangible stuff in relation to music recently. A while ago I hacked together a RFID reader and rotary encoder (using cheap-ish off the shelf USB kit from Phidgets) into a virtual knob. Ian captured me giving a quick (“it’s me knob demo!“) demonstration in the office a couple […]
It’s me knob demo! – RFID reader + rotary encoder = virtual physical control
Thanks to Ian for recording this: I used a Phidgets RFID kit, a rotary encoder and Reaper.