I decided this year to make a 8x8 RGB LED device to give to my girlfriend for Valentine’s Day. I had made her a heart of red LEDs two years ago and I decided to step it up a little. No, this was not a cheap solution (it cost around $100 in materials, including all the stuff I bought that I ended up not using). I spent more time on this thing than anything I have made before.

So, my girlfriend bought me a STM32F103 board to play around with that has a RS-232 serial port on it to program it. Since I haven’t owned any computer in the last few years that has a serial port, I needed to get a converter.

I’ve obtained two Airwick Freshmatics from a yard sale for $2. These were used in my house for a while, but it quickly became annoying to be sprayed in the face every time.  So I decided to hook it up to my arduino for no reason whatsoever.

There are a few projects that I worked on that I haven’t yet made open source. Most of them I don’t actively develop anymore. Below is a list of these projects and what they are. You can find all of my source code at http://github.com/kdar/.

My computer setup at home involves two computers. The first computer is my quad core workhorse. I do all my programming and gaming on this machine. My second computer is my chat/fileserver machine. I use this primiarly as a backup computer and so I can talk to people while gaming or programming.

At church, we have a projector device that is hooked up to the computer that allows us to show words to a song or a video. The problem is the VGA to composite converter we have does not have a button to black out the projector. So, when I go to get a video ready to be shown, the whole congregation sees what I’m doing.

A long time ago (a few years), I used to play a lot of counter-strike with a few friends. We used to do a lot of scrimmages and matches (cal-m). One thing we were tired of was having to find a scrim via IRC. My brilliant friend, James, decided to make a tool that would automatically find scrims for us.

Lately, I’ve been inhaling a little too much flux fumes so I decided that I needed a fume extractor. I saw a lot of DIY fume extractors on the web but I wasn’t satisfied with the performance of those extractors. A lot of the demonstrations showed that you had to be within 2 inches of the fan in order for it to work properly.