Holiday season 2016 general update and MAGFest panel announcement

Happy Hackerdays readers! Since the last update I've been absolutely slammed between life and projects which had a drastic balance change that took more time and energy away from the blog than I'd have liked but thanks to a few alterations it is looking like I'll be back on track to get updates out more frequently and have an increase in project progress.

Hackertree 2016, with even better gear and Wi-Fi LEDs!

Hackaday DC event recap

Giving a talk to the packed room

As some of you might have seen, I recently attended the Hackaday DC event and gave a talk on the rocket stabilization system while there in addition to explanations and demonstrations to quite a few people that came by my table. Surprisingly, the Amazon AWS crew that was there took quite an interest in my project and gave advice on code upgrades for the stabilization system, namely dynamic control movement ranges dependent on velocity.

Random Neopixel projects to pass time before Christmas break

Neopixel microscope detail

Sorry about the delays between posts, school has been picking up again and some other stuff keeps coming up. I am putting my stabilization system on the back burner at the moment because for it to progress I'm going to need access to 3D printers and Autodesk Inventor. I will be going to TechShop DC during Christmas break to continue work, if you're in the area stop by and say hello! (Contact me @ascii211 prior to stopping by). Currently I'm working on upgrading my little sister's cheap microscope to ditch the horrible dim and yellow incandescent bulb it shipped with.

Neopixel power line feedback phenomena

While working on a christmas gift for a friend I encountered an interesting phenomena involving signal leakage over the USB power line.  The USB to UART adaptor I was using caused the signal leakage to go into the USB hub of the keyboard and into the amplifier for my headphones which amplified the signal up to an audible level. It sounds rather ethereal in my opinion with the echo fading similarly to a Meteor echo radio reflection. The program that was running at the time was a generic randomization "twinkle"program which pulsed on a random pixel, color and fade time on the strip.