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Project Updates: January 2024

I feel really badly about not posting anything since last October. I have so much I want to share with you, but I’ve been really busy and there aren’t enough hours in the day to write it all down! Although I know (well, hope really) that you enjoy my super-detailed posts on each of my…

Project Updates: October 2023

If you’re familiar with Reno, Nevada, you know that over the past couple of years there has been a lot of development in downtown, especially in the Neon Line district along West 4th Street. The district is envisioned as a regional destination for gaming, music, and large-scale art, especially art that taps into Reno’s history…

Project Updates: September 2023

Sorry, it’s been 4 months since I posted anything. So, so busy, mostly in preparing for my annual trip to Burning Man in the Nevada desert. Normally I would have been designing and building the lighting for a large sculpture created by my artist friend Peter Hazel, but this year he decided not to bring…

Project Updates: May 2023

The last couple of months have been super busy. I’ve got seven projects to update you on! Octopus I last wrote about this project in the January update. The customer isn’t quite ready for delivery, so I put off completing the work on the “zap” lighting effect I described in January. However, my blog posts…

FidoLight RGBW Spotlight: Update #8

Well, there’s been lots of progress on upgrading my woodworking shop, but I won’t bore you with that. Somewhat less progress on the various “big” lighting projects, but there are a few updates on my FidoLight project that I think you might enjoy hearing about. As you may recall, I’ve been working for a couple…

Project Updates: February 2023

As I predicted in last month’s project update, there have been lots of distractions that have prevented me from fully completing the Octopus project. First, the massive amount of snow we’ve had this year in the western United States has motivated several ski trips. Lots of fun both here at Lake Tahoe and in Utah.…

Debugging with Capture Logs

This article describes a technique for debugging microcontroller firmware when a full-featured debugger or equivalent functionality is not available, and when print-statement debugging (also known as printf() debugging) is cumbersome due to the high rate at which debugging data is generated. The capture log technique involves storing the debugging data in memory buffers during normal…

Project Updates: January 2023

Happy New Year! Last month I described the early progress in building a 22-foot ceramic tile octopus sculpture that is destined for a commercial building complex in Morro Bay, California. The sculpture itself is now 95% complete, and all 405 of the WS2811 pixels have been mounted underneath the translucent glass “suckers”. The pixels and…

Project Updates: December 2022

As the new year approaches, I thought it would be a good time to provide an update on the projects I have underway, and some new ones that are just getting started. FidoLight I’m continuing to test the latest version of the 4-channel buck driver board for the RGBW FidoLight spot/flood light. I’ve started experimenting…

FidoLight RGBW Spotlight: Update #7

One of my recent posts described the design details of the latest iteration of my 4-channel buck constant-current driver board that’s intended to be used with a high-power Cree XML RGBW module. As mentioned at the end of the post, I just received the bare PCB v5 boards from PCBWay, and the components from Digi-Key,…

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