Featured on Make: Building a Rocket Ship in the Basement
My rocketship playhouse was featured on Make's Substack!
JohnJonesFour
I'm a software engineer and innovator with a creative approach.
Latest posts
F-Stop Printing in the Darkroom — Full Workflow + Custom ΔStop 100 Timer
In this video I walk through my full f-stop printing workflow—from the very first ½-stop test strip, to refining exposure in ⅛-stop steps, and finally shaping the image with dodging and burning in stops instead of seconds. I also demonstrate a project I’ve been building: a modern enlarger timer designed specifically for f-stop printing, created to make darkroom exposure more predictable,…
My Son Asked for a Rocket Ship… So I Built One
What happens when your son watches Apollo 13 on repeat and asks for a rocket ship? You start sketching… then open Fusion… and suddenly you’re building a two-story rocket ship playhouse. This project was inspired by an old Make magazine video, but I leveled it up into a two-level structure with a hatch, windows, ladder, and a control panel inside. I focused more on structure, durability, and…
Pegboard Everywhere: Start to Finish Workbench Build
I completely rebuilt the back wall of my workbench — and the result is a fully custom pegboard system packed with storage for electronics, tools, and all my photography + videography gear. In this video, I walk through the entire build on John Builds Things: from framing a massive 8' x 2' pegboard panel to routing the edges, adding LED lighting, designing 3D-printed organizers, and wiring…
DIY Toy Rocket Ship Panel (Apollo-Inspired) – My Son’s Favorite!
Take imaginative play to the next level 🚀! In this project, I built my 4-year-old a homemade Apollo-inspired rocket control panel using laser-cut acrylic, UV printing, and an Arduino. Complete with flashing lights, toggle switches, and authentic Apollo sound effects, this prototype turned a simple play tent into a full space mission. Along the way, I learned a lot about laser cutting, UV…
I Built the Ultimate Darkroom Timer (and Finally Finished My Dream Film Space)
Welcome to my film photography sanctuary — a custom-built darkroom with a DIY ESP32-powered development timer at its heart. In this video, I’ll give you a full tour of the space I spent years dreaming about and months building. You’ll learn how I designed my flush-mounted darkroom timer, built a custom epoxy-coated sink, and organized a fully functional 5x10 darkroom with ventilation, water, and…
I Turned My Basement Into a Home Theater | DIY Star Ceiling + Room Makeover
Transforming a dusty spare room into a full-blown home movie theater? Challenge accepted. In this DIY home theater build, I take you behind the scenes of turning our unused basement room into a cozy, cinematic escape — complete with a custom starfield ceiling, hunter green walls, and a surround sound system (all using FREE equipment left by the previous owners!). Whether you're a home improvement…
Building a CNC + LED Smart Clock
My office has plenty of great toys, but it was missing something important: a stylish clock. Since I had just finished assembling a lightweight, 3D-printed CNC machine based on a Dremel, I started brainstorming ways to put it to use. That’s when I came across these circular programmable LEDs from Adafruit. The contrast between modern LED lighting and natural wood struck me as a perfect concept for…
Ultimate Ford Maverick Mod: A Flux Capacitor!
If you’re going to build a Time Machine into a car (or truck), why not do it with some style? That was exactly the question I had as a Back to the Future fan myself. This question even vexed my toddler. He’d ask me: Why can’t my truck go 88 mph in a residential area? Where is the Flux Capacitor? What is a Flux Capacitor? Why can't we climb up to the top of our town courthouse clock? These little…
ESP32 Powered Darkroom F Stop Printing Timer
Abridged Transcript: # I absolutely love film photography. From the moment I was first given a hand-me-down Nikon SLR in the early 2000s until today, the process of loading a fresh role of film into a camera excites me. Much like most working professionals I spend much of my day staring at a computer screen, and so digital photography lost its luster to me long ago because it ended up just being…
Live Train Announcements with a Raspberry Pi
Abridged Transcript: # From a pretty young age my son loved trains, and I’ll admit that I do too. In our first house we lived within earshot of some train tracks, and so out of my own curiosity about which trains were passing by and to make something interesting for our precocious toddler, I turned an old Lionel train signal from Ebay into something that announces arriving and departing trains…
Nighttime Time Lapse Photography with AllSky
A few weeks ago, I came across an intriguing article on IEEE Spectrum featuring a Raspberry Pi sky time-lapse project. The project utilized the standard Raspberry Pi HQ camera with a wide-angle lens, running an open-source program called AllSky to control and export time-lapse videos. Being fascinated by the intersection of cameras and astronomy, I couldn't resist taking on this project. After…
Tracking Smoking Temperatures with Grillbot
What’s the best way to overcomplicate grilling? Make a meat thermometer that logs temperatures to your computer. This helps me track and understand how different cuts and types of meat behave throughout the smoke. Smoking and grilling meat is one of my many hobbies and I'm constantly searching for ways to improve. With my longer cooks like brisket, I want to be able to go back and review…
I Built a Bluetooth Low Energy, ESP32-Based Darkroom and Film Development Timer
Developing is just subjecting exposed film or paper to a series of chemical reactions. It involves "developing" which brings out the exposed image, "stopping" which halts the chemical reaction of developing to freeze the image, and "fixing" which removes light sensitivity from the medium so it can be viewed in normal light. All chemical reactions are sensitive to quantity, temperature, and time,…
How To Write a Go/Lambda Based Twitter Meme Bot
It's been a while since I wrote a fun bot, so on Sunday evening I cracked my knuckles, set up a new repo and wrote a bot I've been thinking about for a little while: a "pep talk" generator themed after Apple's hit show Ted Lasso and a cool pep talk generator graphic posted on Reddit . You can see the bot in-action on Twitter: @LassoPepTalkBot . Here's how my bot works: Generate the Pep Talk #…
Raspberry Pi Model Rocket Telemetry Flight 3: 1200 Feet! (With Project Updates)
I recently joined NOVAAR, Northern Virginia Association of Rocketry so that I could have consistent access to a launch site and so I could learn from the club's members to grow my own skill. (And potentially pursue high-powered certification.) At the club's launch on October 9 on the Great Meadow in the Plains, VA, I was able to fly my custom telemetry rocket with much success. I detail that below…
How I Backup (2021 Edition)
Experiencing any sort of data loss makes you paranoid about backing up. Between hard drives dying, rm -rf 'ing directories, and closing accounts without exporting, I've had my share of data loss events. Because of that, I am always examining my file backup solution and attempting to be as comprehensive and redundant as possible. (Within reason!) In the past I've leaned more on homegrown solutions…
Another Update On My Raspberry Pi Powered Model Rocket Telemetry System
Since first blogging about this project last year , I've gone through several iterative improvements of the platform, and so I'd like to share the latest and greatest on this project. This is one of those "never really done" side projects right now, and so long as I have time to devote to model rocketry and this work, I will continue to make improvements where I see fit, offer help where/when I…
An Update On My Raspberry Pi Powered Model Rocket
When I asked the woman behind the counter in the hobby shop for a pack of Estes E12-6 motors, she responded with: "Oh you must be one of those serious model rocket guys?!" Yeah, lady. I am serious. This past weekend, on a long-overdue trip home to PA to visit my family, we planned a short excursion to some wide-open space we have free access to for an afternoon of rocketry. Back in September, she…
Capturing Model Rocket Telemetry Using a Raspberry Pi Zero (Part 2)
Q&A on Hacker News about this project As we're driving out to our launch site in Leesburg, VA, my wife turns to me and asks, "did you intentionally wear a yellow and blue striped rugby shirt to match your yellow and blue striped rocket?" I look down, and realize that, yes I had indeed accidentally dressed exactly like my rocket. I wonder if that ever happens to Elon? Launches # Very special thank…
Capturing Model Rocket Telemetry Using a Raspberry Pi Zero (Part 1)
Q&A on Hacker News about this project It seems like everyone's getting back into old hobbies in the time of COVID-19. For me, that's come as model rocketry, something I spent quite a bit of time doing growing up in the Appalachian Mountains of Pennsylvania. On a whim, I bought a model rocket a few weeks back, built it, and launched it while visiting home in PA. Armed with excitement from this…
AWS Honey Code is Visual Basic for a New Generation, and that's a Good Thing
My first job as a software developer, as it is for many, was as an intern. It was a B2B data transformation software shop that still supported old IBM mainframes and also offered a newer Java Enterprise Edition version of the platform with software teams supporting both. As an intern, I reported the "Director of Special Projects," a guy who did exactly what that sounds like: whatever needed to be…
Using Webpack to Build Browser Extensions
The broader Javascript packaging ecosystem has evolved greatly in the past several years. Tools like Grunt, Gulp, and others have fallen by the wayside in favor of newer, more robust tools like Webpack and Babel. Because of that, there exist many a create-X toolchains like create-react-app and Vue CLI that deliver to user/developers easy starting points for using these packaging tools. Yet, there…
Lean Into Your Side Projects
There's a common refrain in software among engineers when they see a product that interests them: "I could build that." The phrase captures a lot about what's going on in that their heads the instant they utter it. At first, it seems to be a statement of boasting – that they feel they are just as good (or better) than whoever made the original product. Thinking deeper, it's a personal challenge…
Go Analog
Me in the highlands of Scotland doing some landscape photography. Photography is my passion. The art of composing a picture, shooting manually to understand how to get the right ratio of aperture to shutter speed, the cropping and editing process, and yes even the pursuit of the new and interesting gear are all elements of this hobby that I enjoy. Amazingly I’m using the same hand-me-down 35mm…
Accessing Dropbox From A Vintage Macintosh
There's a small, but growing, niché of nerds out there who enjoy an activity aptly-named vintage computing or sometimes retrocomputing . Think of it along the lines of buying and fixing up classic cars. There's a love the design and an astonishment for how primitive yet still amazing this old technology is. The design of the first Apple II motherboard makes one think about all the decisions…
My 2018 Open Source Contributions
I love the open source community not just for it's ability to unite developers and other technologists around common interests and problems but also because it is a showcase of what everyone - from beginners up to the masters - are exploring. In the interest of that, I want to share a few projects I've built this year to serve some of my own needs. The three projects I present here are the result…
SSIR: Open Source Software Is Philanthropy
From Stanford Social Innovation Review: It is increasingly important that any serious enterprise—whether startup, media brand, government agency, foundation, or nonprofit organization—have access to cutting edge, reliable, and useful digital tools that extend their reach and accelerate their success. While commercial software continues to play a role for many organizations, more and more…
Case Foundation Blog: The Technology Powering the Impact Investing Network Map
From the Case Foundation blog: The Case Foundation has worked over the last two years with data partners ImpactSpace and Crunchbase to develop the Impact Investing Network Map, an interactive tool showcasing the publicly available transactions between companies and investors within Impact Investing. We believe that by bringing the connections between actors to life—looking specifically at the…
Doomsday Machine Followup: Docker Project
Doomsday Machine is a tool for backing up cloud services to a local machine. This project is a followup to a Node.js project I started in April. While that project worked well, I wasn't happy with the code's performance and lack of support, being that the project was just my code. Instead, I've constructed this project which is really just an amalgamation of others' great projects. With a rising…
Why AR Will Supersede VR
Apple’s unveiling of their augmented reality development tool, AR Kit, at the World Wide Developer Conference is an indicator that they see the future of augmented reality being much stronger than the future of virtual reality. Augmented reality, or AR, is a user interface paradigm whereby a mobile device overlays information such as 3D graphics on live video captured by the device and positions…
Backing Up Cloud Services With Doomsday Machine
I've constructed a new version of Doomsday Machine based on other backup tools and coordinated all in a Docker image. Read More . With a rising threat of ransomware and other data-crippling threats, backups are indispensable. While cloud services, by their nature, are extremely stable and backed-up often, there is still the threat that a malicious entity could compromise or corrupt those services.…
An Opportunity For Responsible Innovation With Amazon’s Alexa
There has been a need in the ever-expanding universe of Internet of Things (IoT) devices for some unifying factor. I’ve written about this before, calling for an open standard to make IoT devices interoperable. This is important because without a common standard or other unifying factor, these devices, designed to facilitate ease in our lives, only create frustration out of poor interoperability…
Featured On IOT Weekly
Open standards and a common communication protocol is needed if we expect devices to truly bring value in the world of the Internet of Things in the future. This article focuses on this need, specifically when it comes to devices that live in the ecosystems being built by Amazon, Samsung, Google and Apple.
BASIC Inspired A Generation Of Technologists. What Will Inspire The Next?
I received a Christmas gift in fourth grade that profoundly impacted my career path and thus the rest of my life. That gift was a VTech PowerPad Plus “pre-computer.” While just a toy, the PowerPad line of products from the late 1980s and early 1990s were functioning computers that featured, among a handful of educational games, a functioning BASIC interpreter. For the uninitiated, BASIC is an…
New Project: GrammarLint
With having _theInitialCommit rolling and making a personal goal to write more, I was unhappy with the grammar checking tools available in the open source community. There're some great online offerings such as Grammarly and Hemmingway. However there is nothing that works from the command line or one that can run in a build tool such as Grunt. While this wasn't a problem foremost on my mind, I…
Where The Internet of Things Runs Aground
The big holiday gift of the season seems to have been the Amazon Echo Dot. The small voice-controlled gadget was the perfect combination of low-cost and high-tech for gadget lovers and techies everywhere. Amazon's line of "Echo" products represents the first big hit seller in voice-controlled digital assistants following on the mediocre performance and reviews of such similar offerings by Apple…
_theInitialCommit Featured on TechNative
_theInitialCommit was featured on the site TechNative this week. It's been an exciting time for that project as the interest in it seems to grow week over week. I'm also excited to share that Maddison Long, also featured in the article, will be joining the project to help recruit new interview candidates and further promote it. But who are these people dedicating so much of their time to…
Algorithmic Journalism
In hindsight of this election, there have been countless articles on how social media, so much more than ever before, affected the outcome of the race. And while the deeper causes of this election have much more to do with the evolution of this country over the past several decades, there is room for a conversation over how the ever growing study of artificial intelligence (AI) in computer science…
New Project: _theInitialCommit
Virtually all developers rely on open source software as part of their daily lives. It powers everything from development environments to servers and everything in between. Even non-developers, while rarely realizing it, use open software because it powers much of the web and app ecosystems. With the challenges both developers of the most prominent projects have in maintaining their projects and…
New Node.js Package: Mongoosey
This is a simple Mongoose frontend that can be built into a pre-existing Express application. Installation and Usage # To add Mongoosey to a project, first install the npm package: # npm install --save mongoosey Then, pass your express app and monogoose instance to Mongoosey: var mongoosey = require('mongoosey'); mongoosey.set('app',app); mongoosey.set('monogoose',monogoose); For a full example,…
Presidential Candidates Tweets N-Grams (Twitter API + D3.js)
This is a small data collector and visualization that scans the Twitter API for tweets from presidential candidates, analyzes the N-grams of the tweets, and renders the most popular n-grams based on frequency. The N-gram algorithm is based off of the one found on Text Mining, Analytics & More and the visualization is built with D3.js .
Contributing to Backup Tool
My latest project, BackupTool, has really taken off. I've added a new section to the project outlining how contributors can help out with the project. This is my first open source project to get this sort of traction, so it is quite exciting. Having these sort of guidelines is absolutely crucial for an open-source project. Behind the veil that discussion boards provide to contributors, it is easy…
Sweaters & Sustenance
My best friend, John Allen, worked with a videographer to produce this amazing documentary about his non-profit, Sweaters & Sustenance. Getting to volunteer with it this holiday season was such a joy, and it's great to see John's work recognized in a such a fine way through this video.
New Project: Backup Tool
Update (1/3/15): I've also built a Mac status bar app that displays the backup progress of the tool. It is not a separate implementation of BackupTool. Rather, it is a tool to monitor the status of BackupTool's progress in the Mac OSX status bar. I wasn't impressed with the open-source Glacier backup tools out there, so I'm implementing my own in Node.js. There are more than a few open-source…
Content is Changing: Is Your Team Ready?
Content Science Review recently featured an article co-authored by my colleague Jessica Mancari and myself. In it, we discuss a new approach to content and digital production that we've been expirmenting with in our teams at Adfero. When we produced our first multimedia campaign together, we quickly realized that our old way of building content would no longer fly. Trying to fit yesterday’s…
Chef's Hat Featured on LifeHacker
Chef's Hat was featured on the lifestyle blog Lifehacker last weekend. This is a very exciting moment for the app as that post has brought it much attention and validation to the effort. I'm excited for the project to begin catering to a wider audience thanks to the positive review from Alan Henry at Lifehacker. ... it’s one of the fastest, and it’s nice and simple—if all you need is a tool to…
TruckToMe Now On React Native
All mobile developers, entrenched in either the Android or iOS camps, have always been skeptical of new cross-platform development tools that offer performance and quality just like natively-developed code. It has been the Holy Grail of the mobile development world. That’s why when word of React Native started popping up in the usual dev news circles, I didn’t pay it much attention. It was just…
Chef's Hat Featured on ArlNow
Chef's Hat was featured on the local blog ArlNow as part of the site's regular feature on local startups: A Courthouse resident has created an app to help people save recipes they find online. John Jones developed Chef’s Hat, a mobile and web app that works like an online recipe box. Users sign in through Facebook or Twitter and then start electronically clipping recipes.
New Drupal Modules: Mobile Preview and Social Media Links
I've been a Drupal site developer for a number of years, and I've always enjoyed the quality and robustness of the Drupal contributed module community. For those of you not familiar with this, Drupal as an open source platform relies on the contributions of third-party modules, called contrib modules, to bring it the agility and feature-richness it is know for. Given the experiences I've acquired…