The personal blog of Brian Carrigan, software and electronics engineer.
There is a wonderful Magic: The Gathering scene here in Durham, NC. Unfortunately, Magic often deserves the trope that it gets of being an expensive hobby. In order to enjoy the game on a budget, myself and a group of locals created a new format: Paper Dreadful. The format is simple: create a 60 card deck with a maximum of 4 of any card (other than basic lands) and the total cost must be $20 or…
I didn’t actually plan this project, but rather it found me. I was at the Scrap Exchange, a local reuse center, when I found a very nice looking scanner that you might find at a grocery store kiosk. It had been ripped from its connectors and had unlabeled wires hanging from it; a bit of hardware gore if such a thing exists. It was labelled on sale for $6.25, and a quick search revealed that it…
For Moogfest this year, Smashing Boxes put on an event for festival-goers that showcased our recent labs projects. We wanted to give attendees something to bring home and hack on, so I set out to design a programmable synthesizer for $20 or less. Check out the project writeup, complete with schematics, code, and build instructions, at the Moogfest 2017 Synth repository on Github.
Video of Coffeebot In Action Imagine this tragedy: you get into work in the morning and go to get a cup of coffee, only to finally sip it and find that it is yesterday’s luke-warm spoils. A simple paper solution for this would be to add a post-it to the coffee with the time that it was brewed, but this requires buy-in from the team. A digital solution for this would be an internet connected button…
With my talk coming up at All Things Open , I recently wrote an article about why and how I got started in doing digital art. In retrospect, it is amazing how learning the tools discussed in this article changed the way that I approach software. Huge thanks to Processing, Arduino, and the entire open source community for what they do; I am honored to be a small part of such a wonderful community.…
I have recently been working on Smashing Boxes’ first Elixir project, and it has been fantastic. As a primarily Ruby shop, I wanted to create a presentation about what the experience has been like so far. Just like my blog, I’ve wanted my presentations to be focused on content over style and tedium, so I’ve switched over to remark.js for my slide decks. A nice side effect of this is that I can…
At SB, we’ve been working hard on shipping Fraqture, our open source art platform. We are happy to announce that it will be on display in the 21C storefront window on Main St. in downtown Durham for the next few months. Check out my recent post about why and how we built Fraqture, and see our splash page for more info on what will be on display and how you can get involved.
My 2015 brought a ton of change, and I am very happy with all of it. Using a format similar to Michael Fogus’s , I thought it would be cool to do a roundup of this year using my favorite things produced and consumed. While I don’t track blog reading 2015 In Pictures The single biggest event this year was getting married to my wonderful partner of over 5 years, Jennifer. My work situation churned a…
New Message, New Medium I’ve wanted to start a new blog for a while now, and decided to use part of my holiday break to do so. There were a lot of really cool projects on my old site that still get quite a bit of traffic, but I wanted to move from a site where there are 2-3 project posts per year to a site with more frequent smaller posts. I envision it being small tips or resolutions to problems…
Link to the source code, schematic, layout, and BOM can be found at this project’s Github page: https://github.com/Carrigan/USBBusinessCard . Introduction Since there is already a write-up on why and how I made the business card project, this post will only detail the changes made since the first version. If you would like more information on how this project was made and how it works, please…