Pyroblogg

With the recent release of the Foobar200 v1.0 beta I am finishing up a new release of FooSnarl to be released later this week. Watch this blog for more details.

Update [12/16] - So I feel like I’m shooting myself in the foot here, but there will be no release at the moment.  It turns out i’m becoming notoriously bad at estimating time needed for projects, especially where padding for unforeseen events comes into play.  After making my post last week I had some personal issues come up that have been taking up a significant amount of time.  It also seems I have undertaken a few too many homemade Christmas presents this year, and with THAT’s a deadline I can’t miss.

That being said, progress is being made.  Two-way communication between Foobar and Snarl is coming along nicely.  There will soon be configurable actions when left (or right) clicking the snarl notifications.  It’s the handling of the configuration that’s been slowing me up.  As far as deadlines, lets say I’m confident FooSnarl will hit 1.0 no later than Foobar2k releases a stable 1.0.

For more day-to-day, short form updates on FooSnarl progress, follow my new twitter account @FooSnarl

For heckling about the delay, use the comments below or tweet me @pyrodogg

I need a workbench.  My computer desk just isn’t suited for working on projects, especially ones involving electronics and soldering.  I don’t have much for woodworking tools at my apartment yet so I’ve been looking for some nice plans that won’t take much to build.

A few days ago I came across a bench designed by Bre Pettis for the Make: Weekend Projects program back in 2006.  It’s a nice simple design consisting of plywood, 2x4s, and wood screws, something I can accomplish in a day.  The design calls for making it 8′ long but I think that’ll be a bit big for my needs so I’m going to cut it in half to 4′.  The new workspace will be good because  I anticipate working on a few projects concurrently.

The Build

On Saturday I went across town to the local Menards to pick up my supplies.  It was nice to find a 4′ x 4′ piece of plywood for the top instead of getting a 4×8 piece and only using half.  I got a handsaw to do all the cutting and a $30 cordless drill for fastening things together (you could use a hammer if you’re so inclined).

I got all of the 2×4′s cut down in no time, using towel covered table benches as my saw horses.  One benefit of making decisions ahead of time  is that I was able to eliminate an entire 2×4 from the design, saving me time and money.

I got a little help holding down the plywood and got the table top, shelf and back brace cut next.

Screwing things went together went pretty well too.  It turns out that cheap and small power tools don’t have much power.  I had to turn my drill up to it’s maximum torque setting just to drive 2 1/2″ screws through 2x4s.  I guess I could have drilled pilot holes.  Or I could have just bought a hammer and some nails.

The Results

For the first (if simple) woods project I’ve tackled in a while I managed to get everything put together fairly square.  The table is even near dead on level!

More photos on flickr

Go ahead and make your own! Let me know how it goes.

More info on workbench design

Make Podcast: Weekend Projects – Make a Workbench

3/30

Dorm room automation kit.  There are many ways you could add automation to your house, many including hard wiring things in to the building to make them hidden.  In a dorm room that isn’t an option, everything must be left as it was found.  I want to make some sort of system to control lights and other small appliances that leaves no permanent marks, but is also fairly compact and not just a bunch of cables running all over the floor.

4/30

Building a system to monitor an NTPA pulling truck engine.  I want to make some small system to record things like the header temperature, and some other variables.  It must also survive the physical rigors of barreling down the track (no moving parts).  A simple microcontroller (arduino?), some sensors and an SD card might work.

5/30

A random flavor button for the pop machine in the IEEE room.  Everyone is always wondering loudly which pop they should get.  I have an urge to hack the machine and add led lights to the buttons.  If you press the random button, they light up and pulse in sequence until the light stops on a random one.

6/30

A scale, which I can calibrate to the weight of a book, the Wizards First Rule for instance.  A timer can be set and the book removed.  If the book is removed without setting the timer, or the timer expires an alarm goes off.  NO snooze option.  The book must be replaced for a certain amount of time before the timer can be set again.  This would keep me from reading 800 pages in one weekend again, very bad.

John Baichtal, of Twin Cities Maker and GeekDad challeneged members of TC Maker to “Describe a project in the works, or a project you’d like to work on in the future, ONE PER DAY for the entire month of April. Document/share as much as you can.”

I will be posting my current and potential projects here.

Day 1

I want to make a book out of my photos from my spring break vacation to national parks out west.  I have so far processed a few of them, but there are many more yet to be worked on.  When I’m completed I hope to make my first book using the blurb.com bookmaking service.  Some of the photos can already be found on my flickr photostream

I’ve been raher busy past week trying to keep up with life and classes at the same time.  Today I finally got in to the IEEE lounge at school to use the soldering equipment there.  I finally got my Protoshield for my Arduino soldered together.

I’ll be going back tomorrow to solder together the Danger Shield I also purchased recently.  Man, I almost forgot how easy it is to solder things together when you have nice equipment.  It’s great that the IEEE group has a nice lab bench because I’m unfortunately unable to afford to put together a decent one of my own right now.  That tends to hinder a number of my hardware oriented ideas.

I also went out today to take some nice fall photos along the river, but as soon as I got down there the weather decided to not play as nicely as i’d hoped.  I had to hide from the rain for a little while, and then It was cloudy so I missed the nice vibrant shots I had set out for.  I still made the best of it and I should have those done and up on Flickr by the end of the weekend.

Thanks to some help from Yirkha on the Hydrogen Audio Forum I’m pretty sure I fixed the dependency problem some people were having with FooSnarl.  v0.1.6 is now up on SourceForge.

http://sourceforge.net/projects/foosnarl/

Like I mentioned earlier, this is definitely a learning experience for me.  Two days ago I finally got a “blank” component to compile and ‘run’ in Foobar2000 without crashing anything.  Yesterday I had FooSnarl catching events (play, pause, stop) in Foobar2000 and sending Snarl static messages “Track Paused”, etc.  As of today I now have the component to the point where it will send snarl a Titleformatted string to Snarl.  The string can be defined in the preferences.  Now I need to refine things more and work on an actual configuration scheme so that people would be able to specify what events they want to catch, what they want the title to read, icon, etc.  I also need to see if I can get Foobar2000 to respond to clicks on the Snarl messages; bringing up the foobar window if right-clicked for example.

I’ve been borrowing heavily from the one component tutorial and alot of digging in the SDK.  Other than that I’ve had little source code to go off of.  And I haven’t even been able to get on the developement forum on Hydrogen audio (still one day left of their 5 day “you can’t do anything” registration scheme).  I now think I can essentially  finish what I initially planned, but may end up seeking furthur advice when it gets too GUI intensive.