Recent content on Semicolons & Side Projects
I had an old Raspberry Pi 3b not doing much of anything so I went looking for a project to give it a purpose. Turns out there are a couple of free APIs that provide the current location of the International Space Station as well as who is currently in space. The software for this project is written in Python but you don’t need to know how to program in any language to get this running.…
The Seattle city government provides a public API for fire department emergency dispatch data. There’s a very cool project, SFD Live , that visualizes this information (and a lot more) with a ton of features. What I wanted, though, was something much simpler: a stripped-down view of the data that would be interesting, if not especially useful, on a dashboard I could glance at from across the room.…
Let’s get this out of the way — what is “gravy blood”, and who is “Damp”? This whole project started as an inside joke. My buddy and I would say we had gravy blood whenever we overindulged in a meal. That sluggish, heavy feeling afterward? In our lore, that’s the gravy blood kicking in. Then one night we were watching Iron Man 2 and saw the Stark Medical Scanner. Perfect, we joked that we needed…
I have a love-hate relationship with BART. I’m grateful for it, but let’s just say it’s not always the most reliable so it’s nice to see before hand when the train you need is due to arrive. There are plenty of projects out there that show real-time BART arrival information. This one does that too, it’s nothing groundbreaking, but I wanted to build my own version that captures the vintage…
My doorbell camera provides an RTSP stream, which made me think it would be perfect to display on a small dedicated screen. I built this using Jay Doscher’s excellent ARM Terminal 2 - The Cube . I highly recommend taking a look at his blog, because if you’re reading this, you’re gonna love his stuff, doscher.com . The Hardware Raspberry Pi 4 running Raspberry Pi OS Lite (Bookworm)…
I have an ADS-B node feeding data into the vast network of flight trackers, but it mostly just sits on my roof humming along without any interaction from me. I can, and have, looked at the webpage that shows my local flight data and the planes on a map, but it didn’t quite have the whimsy I was after. I decided a wall-mounted device that displayed the aircraft type closest to my location at any…
If you’re brand new to Adobe Experience Manager (AEM), one of the first things you’ll hear about is something called the JCR —short for Java Content Repository . That might sound intimidating, especially if you don’t have a Java background (I didn’t either), but don’t worry. This post is here to give you a simple, high-level mental model. And the model we’re going to use? Lego.
Just a little something I wish I had when I first started working with AEM. Adobe Experience Manager can feel like a real chicken-and-egg situation—Adobe doesn’t provide an easy way to set up AEM instances for experimentation, so you’re kind of forced to learn on the job. That’s a tough spot to be in when a company is paying you to already know how to do AEM work.
Hey, I’m a frontend developer. My day job is building in Adobe Experience Manager (AEM). After hours, I’m tinkering with CAD, 3D scanning and printing, and microcontroller projects, usually with more whimsy than usefulness. This blog covers personal builds, dev notes, and whatever falls between software, hardware, and design.
After setting up my PiAware receiver to track live flight data, I wanted a simple way to glance at some key stats without SSH-ing into the Pi or opening a browser. Enter the humble 20x4 I2C LCD screen. This post walks through how I wired up a character LCD to my Raspberry Pi, wrote some Python to pull flight data from PiAware, and got a tiny dashboard updating every second—all without needing to…
What you need: Apple Thunderbolt to FireWire Adapter MicroMV playback device with FireWire port FireWire cable MicroMV tapes with footage Apple computer running OS X 10.6 or higher AVCVideoCap software ( download ) Once you have all the hardware needed to connect everything up to a computer, turn it all on, insert the tape you want to ingest, and fire up the free AVCVideoCap application…