Adam sent me a stumble of a DIY vinyl wall art project on Instructables by Britsteiner. Immediately I was inspired by her project and went to work. Her Instructables project used contact paper and after a quick trip to Lowe’s and the local dollar store I decided contact paper would not work for my project. I wanted specific colors – brown and green – that I could not find as contact paper. I wanted to make a tree.
I recently had an MRI and wanted to make an animated GIF out of the images. I found a couple of great little programs that made this task a breeze.
I’ve had a FTDI cable for a while for testing serial communications between my microprocessors and my computer and for that job, it works great. However, I recently grabbed a couple Ardweenies from Solarbotics and decided to use my FTDI cable to program them. The FTDI cable doesn’t have an automatic reset, so you have to push the reset button on the board at exactly the right time when trying to program it from your computer. This causes tons of frustration.
Oddly, a few days of experimenting with the arduinos, my cable got a short in it. While fixing the short, I was surprised to find out that the FTDI cable uses the same chip as the Sparkfun Programmer (which has automatic reset) so I went about modifying my cable to include this feature.
Modifying the cable is much easier said than done, but since I got it working, I figured I’d do a write-up on it in case anyone else wants to give it a shot.
Adam and I had been in search for a drawer system for use in our office, and then there it was, the Ikea Alex. Everything was right. It was the perfect height. It had plenty of long thin drawers, perfect for tool organization. It even had wheels. We excitedly perused our color options; white, white, or white. Hmm….Our office is mostly wood tones and black, so white was just not working for our color palette. At first we tried to find another option, but we just kept coming back to the Alex. It had the barebones of exactly what we needed. That’s when we decided to buy the Alex and give it a facelift. Our plan was to paint it black and customize the drawer fronts. This is how we did it.