The Life of Caleb

Kitty Pizza the Game

2012-01-01T17:41:00.001-08:00

Kitty Pizza is an exciting game where you must face your greatest enemy and take back what is rightfully yours. You'll laugh and cry as you venture through the world of great pizza and geometrically simple animals. Play it now!

geoverse

2011-11-15T19:14:00.000-08:00

Geoverse is a geolocation app that allows you to "drop" bible verses wherever your mobile device can access the internet. Imagine covering your street, city, or any place you visit with God's word. Now imagine joining together with thousands of others to cover the entire globe with the truth of the Bible! Let's "verse the earth"!

Music from the older brother you never had in the 80s...

2011-07-01T08:31:00.000-07:00

Tesla Boy - Spirit Of The Night by Tesla Boy / DJ Futures

College feat. Minitel Rose - The Energy Story by College

Mille - Afterski by Mille Music

Running for love or money by outrunners

Sugarbaby by Robots With Rayguns

XINOBI • Day Off [Anoraak Remix] by Anoraak

Lazerhawk - Arrival by Lazerhawk

Redial - Anxiety by Redial

Blake Lewis - Heartbreak On Vinyl (Dispatch 27 Vintage Remix) by Dispatch 27

Camera collision detection with Three.js and JigLibJS

2011-06-17T08:29:00.000-07:00

With the release of Firefox 4, I was really excited to play with the support of WebGL. I never thought that a day would come that OpenGL would accessible in a web browser via JavaScript! :) Crazy!

So before I began rolling up my sleeves and getting dirty with coding my own OpenGL rendering code, I took a look around the web to see if someone already did the work for me. And I found Three.js. This is an awesome rendering library that makes it incredibly easy to get something on the screen. It's a pretty powerful rendering engine that can even load JSON model objects.

Once I got up to speed on Three.js and got a simple world built that I could roam around in, I decided next that it would be cool to make my camera a little smarter and let it know about the world around it. So I set off trying to modify the Three.js QuakeCamera.js class to support collision with objects but I soon realized it was going to be a lot harder than I thought!

I was about to reach for one of my old math books when I thought that there must be some sort of physics library out there that I could apply to take care of all the intersection checking stuff for me..... and maybe even get some awesome physic interaction between objects for free. :)

So again, I went searching and found JigLibJS. The library is actually a port of the popular Flash physics library named JigLibFlash. Perfect! Now physics should be easy... well sort of. Using JigLibJS with Three.js was trickier than I thought. Since there's really not a lot of documentation on the library, I had to do a lot of source code investigation and searching on google but I eventually pulled enough info together and found what I needed. :)

After a few days of mental, elite gymnastics, I got camera collision detection to work! So I went out and celebrated by getting chocolate pretzels. (lame!)

I then thought it would be fun to make a little library that would allow someone to build simple worlds composed of blocks using the JSON format to construct them. I made a little bit of progress on the project but kind of lost direction for it. :) So I decided just to leave it on GitHub as a source for adding collision detection to your camera using JigLibJS.

https://github.com/calebhc/platypus

The file of most interest is the CollisionCamera.js class. You can see how I used it in the platypus.js file. If you're wondering why it's called platypus, it's because I couldn't think of a name and just thought of those animals.

Well, that's basically it! I know it's kind of lazy for me to just point you to the source but it will explain it better, I think. Clone the project if you like and play around with it. :)

Later

How to stub request.remote_ip in Rails using Mocha

2011-02-16T23:26:00.001-08:00

Done.

Generate random numbers easily in Rails

2011-02-15T17:32:00.000-08:00

No more need to write your own random number generator. Just use this:

It's awesome!

Bluetooth MakerBot

2011-02-07T20:18:00.000-08:00

Want to make your MakerBot Cupcake bluetooth enabled? Then head over to http://wiki.makerbot.com/bluetooth and learn how. This is my first article on the MakerBot wiki and I hope to contribute other hacks in the near future.

Have fun! :)

Perfect Park

2011-02-07T20:05:00.001-08:00

The Perfect Park project was something I thought of one day when I saw my dad trying to park their brand new SUV into the garage. The car barley fit and someone needed to watch the front so my dad wouldn't crash into the front of the house.

Seeing all of this realized there has to be a way to use technology to make this easier. And there is! So I pulled out some paper and one of my Arduinos and went to work. I figured I'd build this for my parents as a Christmas present since the season was near.

After writing the Perfect Park code and building the hardware for the system it turned out to be a great success and the mechanics are simple.

I'll be posting pictures soon and talking more about the electronics.

I got a Cupcake! Mmm...

2011-01-30T20:27:00.000-08:00

I've been following 3d printers for a while now and they have always been crazy expensive. Usually just the big corporate companies and universities could afford them but not any longer! In the recent years there has been a lot of exploring and development in the world of cheap, DIY 3d printers and we have finally arrived there. Now you can build your own 3d printer and be a part of the next revolution!

There are many designs out there for cheap 3d printers but one of my favorites is MakerBot's Cupcake CNC printer. It's not only cheap and totally awesome looking but it prints great too! I was lucky enough to get my Cupcake from the last batch before they discontinued them. Now they're just producing the new Thing-o-Matic printers which looks wicked cool.

When you buy a printer from MakerBot you have to assemble it yourself. That could scare some people but I think that is the funnest part. Besides, if you build it you'll know how everything works so you can repair it.

It took me about a week to build mine and another week to get used to printing with it. MakerBot provides great online instructions for building so you won't get lost. If you can build Ikea furniture you can definitely build a Cupcake or Thing-o-Matic printer.

You maybe wondering... what in the heck do you do with a 3d printer and how does it work? Well with a 3d printer you can make real tangible items like bottle openers, whistles, toy figures and even cups! It builds or "prints" these object one tiny layer at a time by extruding out hot melted plastic from a nozzle. So it's basically a really advanced hot glue gun! :) Here's a video of it in action.

To start printing something you need to find a 3d design from the internet or build your own and then prepare the 3d file for the printer. Thingiverse.com is a great way to find awesome things to print. MakerBot printers use ReplicatorG to get the 3d designs ready for print. The designs need to be in .stl format. Once the file is prepared you just click the Print button inside the ReplicatorG software and your bot will begin to print!

So if you want to live in the future and be able to have your designs in your head come to life, get a MakerBot printer and live in the future!

Check out the pictures I took while building my Cupcake. View photos

And to learn even more, visit makerbot.com.

How to Setup DJGPP and DOSBox on Mac OS X

2010-08-22T23:37:00.000-07:00

Have you ever wanted to go back in time when computers cost over $5,000 and they could barely draw a pie chart? Well, I know I have! I miss the ol' days of DOS and being able to easily impress your nerd friends by typing "cd mystuf~1\games" and then entering "dir" to list all of the contents! Pretty exciting stuff. But seriously, it is fun going back and messing with DOS and maybe even writing some old school C/C++ programs that directly access your VGA card. Gasp! :)

The great thing is that you can still do all of this and the best part is... you can do it on a Mac!

The tools we'll be using to get the job done are the great DJGPP development tool and the awesome DOSBox emulator.

The first thing to do is download DOSBox by visiting this site and downloading the Mac OS X version. http://www.dosbox.com/download.php?main=1. Once you've downloaded and installed DOSBox leave it alone for now and we'll revisit it again later.

Now we need to download DJGPP by going to http://www.delorie.com/djgpp/zip-picker.html. Since DJGPP is a pretty advanced tool that comes with lots of features, we're only going to download the specific files we need using their handy Zip Picker tool. This will help us only get the files we actually need. You can see all of the things I chose in the picture on the right. I'm only going to write programs that run in DOS and I'm going to be writing C/C++ programs and maybe even some assembly! :)

Here's a picture on the left of the other settings I chose. After all of that, click on the "Tell me which files I need" button. Go ahead and download all of the files you see and move them to some directory. I moved mine to /Users/(username)/Tools/DJGPP/. Once you have all the files, open up a terminal window and navigate to your folder. Once inside your folder, type "unzip \*.zip" to unzip all the files. If your prompted to overwrite some files just say yes. After that, you can delete all of the zip files in that directory because we won't need them anymore. You should now have a nice directory structure that looks like the picture on the right.

We're almost done! Now we just have to configure DOSBox to recognize DJGPP so we can get to programming! To accomplish this, we need to edit DOSBox's preference file which is created the first time you run DOSBox so make sure you at least run it once. The file we need to edit it located in /Users/(username)/Library/Preferences and the file is called "DOSBox 0.74 Preferences". Your version number may vary. So go ahead and open up that file in your favorite text editor and scroll all the way down to the bottom. Add these lines:

mount c /Users/(username)
set PATH=z:\;c:\Tools\DJGPP\bin
set DJGPP=c:\Tools\DJGPP\djgpp.env

After that, save the file and we're done! Now let's try to compile something cool. Create a folder somewhere on your computer for this little C demo and navigate to it IN DOSBox. For example I created a folder in my /Users/(username)/documents/myprojects/ called "Lines" and I navigated to it by entering into DOSBox:

Z:\>c:\
C:\>cd docume~1\myproj~1\Lines

Since DOS doesn't support long file names, you have to use that ~1 after six characters of the folder/file name. Weird.

Now that we're in our new directory inside DOSBox, head on over to http://www.brackeen.com/vga/shapes.html and download the file called "lines.c" into your new directory. Then in DOSBox type "gcc lines.c -o lines.exe" and press enter. Your program should compile successfully and now you can run it! Just type "lines" and press enter and you should see a bunch of multi-color lines being drawn like crazy! Check out the screen shot below.

Congratulations! You can now compile C/C++ code inside DOSBox using DJGPP for free! One quick note, if you want to compile C++ code you need to use "gxx" instead of "gcc". To learn more about this, just check on the docs on DJGPP's website. And also, if you want to learn more about VGA programming, visit the site where we downloaded the "lines.c" file and read the tutorial at http://www.brackeen.com/vga/.

Have fun and if you have any questions just leave a comment and I'll try to help even though I'm not really an expert! :P

Multipath Movies! Part 2

2010-08-20T10:35:00.000-07:00

Now let's check out Popeye: The Quest for The Woolly Mammoth. This is a really cute story for kids but... I still thinks it's fun to watch anyway! The premise of this movie is Olive Oyl finds an interesting article in the paper saying that anyone who finds the bones of a woolly mammoth gets a million dollar reward. Pretty sweet! Of course there will be trouble because Brutus over hears Popeye and Olive's plan to find the mammoth bones and also because he hates Popeye so much.

Eventually, they find the bones and even a few living mammoths as well and Popeye, Olive Oyl, Bernice and Swee'Pea all get the reward. They then make Brutus their janitor.

That's basically the whole story. Check out the pix below!

Multipath Movies! Part 1

2010-08-15T12:37:00.000-07:00

It seems like all the cool companies that had awesome 3d web plugins are dead now. That's sad but probably good because browser plugins totally suck but HTML 5 and WebGL will fix all of that soon.

Anyway, I thought it would be fun to revisit some of my old Multipath Movies from Brilliant Digital. If you have never heard of these, well you missed out! They were cool interactive, real-time 3d movies that let you choose the direction of the movie. You were given choices during the movie and had to select what the characters would do next. It was a lot of fun because there were always multiple outcomes and of course it was always fun picking the worst outcome! :)

These movies weren't around very long and there's like no information on the web anywhere about these sweet movie/games so I guess I'll provide the info!

Just a side note... the graphics in Multipath Movies are SUPER outdated but I think it's fun watching crappy low-resolution textures on LOW polygon count models. Not sure why...

Here are some pix from the Choose Your Own Nightmare series. I only have the Halloween Party in this series. This movie is about two main characters Beth and Peter. They're invited to a Halloween party in their apartment building by some new girl named Meg. They soon find out that Meg is a witch and so is her mom. Meg's mom plays a game with Beth and Peter that they have to survive all the scares during the night or they will be turned into what they wear! So since Beth doesn't want to be a cat the rest of her life and Peter doesn't want to be a zombie, you have to help them survive! Pretty fun movie. :)

KidAppReviews.com is going bye bye...

2010-08-10T11:37:00.001-07:00

Well KidAppReviews.com is about to close its doors. It was fun for a while and people seemed to really enjoy the site and the reviews, but it had to end. I no longer had anytime to run this site because of my commitments to other projects and MissionMakr.com. I tried passing the site along to someone else but that didn't work out. So thanks to everyone who submitted in apps to review and I hope more sites like this will pop up to help parents and kids find sweet apps for the iPhone/iPad/whatevers next. Later

Unreal

2010-08-09T14:32:00.001-07:00

I remember the days of Unreal. It was the most innovative game of its time and I couldn't get enough! Epic Mega Games created a first-person masterpiece!

Anyway, there was a contest held by some gaming website that used to exist years ago and the contest was to see who could build the best death match level. When I learned of the contest I thought it would be really exciting but I also was really intimated by it. Trying to learn level editing tools isn't the easiest thing to do. Especially, when you're 11 years old!

So I spent months trying to build a great DM map but it was really hard. I finally settled on a design and called it Deja-Vu because of the repetitive nature of the map.

After I spent time getting it all finished and cleaned up, I submitted it off to the contest. I had no idea what to expect. Being only 11 years old, I thought there was no chance of winning but I was wrong! A few months later, the gaming site hosting the contest posted the results on their front page and I was the grand prize winner! I couldn't believe that I actually won a contest and especially a contest for designing a level for a major game. Pretty awesome!

I won $500 and I really don't remember what I wasted it on. Oh well.

Here's some pix!

Dispatch 27

2010-08-09T00:02:00.001-07:00

Here's some retro 80's music I've produced to bring back those awesome feelings you had when you first saw Axel Foley in Beverly Hills cop. Epic.

80s Cinematic by Dispatch 27

Metal drumming!!!

2010-08-08T23:26:00.000-07:00

Here's some vids of me playing to some of my favorite melt your face metal songs. Enjoy!

MissionMakr 2.0 is live!

2010-08-08T23:20:00.001-07:00

After two years of extremely hard work and many visits to Starbucks ... it is complete! It's a beautiful web 2.0 app written in the beautiful Ruby on Rails framework. This new tool is really going to help churches make more out of their short term missions. We have lots of video showing how MissionMakr works so head on over to http://www.missionmakr.com and check it out! :)

The Wishing Well Video Review

2009-08-12T16:39:00.000-07:00

My app just got reviewed by The App Podcast. Check out the review!

The Wishing Well App

2009-07-21T21:43:00.000-07:00

Have you ever needed to make a wish but were no where near a conveniently placed wishing well? Fret no longer! With the Wishing Well App you can make a wish at anytime, anywhere with the single click of a finger and the best part is, you don't need any pocket change! So download now and start wishing today!

MissionMakr 2.0

2009-05-27T16:43:00.000-07:00

We'll since our first release of MissionMakr we have had a lot of positive feedback on the software. People love all the features and all of the great benefits it can bring to a mission trip. Since our initial version 1.0 we have learned a tremendous amount of new things and ways to make our app even better. We have learned so much that we decided to write a new version! I guess we'll call it MissionMakr 2.0. Fits in with the web2.0 era pretty well. :P

Our team has a lot of work ahead of us but we know what we are creating has an enternal value. I believe when this version done it will blow people away! I'm excited to see it when it's complete. Later

Retro Bits Part 1

2009-02-12T20:44:00.000-08:00

I just thought I would let you all know that I will be posting up some of my old school video game consoles sometime this month. I love having these old systems because it reminds of how games used to be and how far they have come in a very short time! Okay, that's it for now.

My life is .NET

2008-12-18T22:53:00.000-08:00

Hello all!

It's been a while since I have posted anything new. I've been really busy with some new projects I have been developing. Maybe someday again I will post up a new gadget I have been working on when I have some more free time and...money. :) A big and exciting project I have been working on is called MissionMakr. It's an all new web application that helps churches and organizations promote there mission trips like never before. If that sounds cool you can check it out at http://missionmakr.com.

Ok, that's it for now.

I had 3 biscuits, then I ate 1...

2008-08-24T09:07:00.000-07:00

Hey everyone. I thought I would just give an update about life. I haven't been working on any new electronic projects recently, well except for my web enabled sprinkler system (pretty cool). I have been getting busy with work and my other hobbys. It's hard when you like to do too many things. :) Also school is starting soon...oh well, I'm almost done. Ok, that's it. When I finally finish my sprinkler system I'll have to post some pictures. later

Control my LED from the web!

2008-07-13T18:05:00.000-07:00

Well, I have been at it again playing around with a new device and this time it is a XPort Direct+. It's a serial-to-ethernet device that allows your projects to communicate using TCP/IP. No longer do you have to worry about programming your own protocol stack. I bought the device from gridconnect for about 50 bucks and a shield for a Arudino from adafruit for around 15 bucks. The shield is a breakout board that allows for easy connection to an Arduino. When you purchase the shield you have to solder it yourself but it was pretty easy. I followed this great tutorial at http://www.ladyada.net/make/eshield/ on how to assemble it.

Once I had everything assembled and built, I decided to do a simple test. I hooked an LED to the Arduino and had my XPort serve a simple web page that could turn the LED on or off. Not very exciting but still fun to build and try out. After some coding, I got everything finished and it actually worked! The XPort serves a web page and then on the web page I can select to turn the LED on or off. Cool. Sometime soon I'll put the XPort live so you can turn on or off my LED. Here's some more pictures of the web-enabled-led project http://www.flickr.com/photos/28505447@N04/sets/72157606153318203/.

Homemade Ambient Orb

2008-07-11T19:45:00.000-07:00

The latest project I just finished up was my homemade ambient orb device. I've seen these devices for a while and think there ultra cool. So instead of buying one I was like, "hey...why not spend more money and just build one myself." So that's what I did and it actually turned out pretty nice. For the globe I used a cheapo light fixture from Lowes that cost about 8 bucks but it works perfect. The device that generates the light is a BlinkM from sparkfun. It's a great little device that contains a programmable RGB LED. It uses the i2c protocol which if your using an Arduino, which I did, its a snap because there already a i2c library written for the Arduino delopment software. Like I said before, the orb is using a Arduino with a XBee shield for the wireless communication. Using XBee is awesome because it's so freakin easy to send serial commands wirelessly! The device that is sending data to the Arduino is a XBee explorer board, from sparkfun, connected to my computer. Custom software I wrote sends out simple serial commands as to what color the orb should display. I wrote the software just using very simple VB.NET. I have the orb setup right now to track the current price of a stock. It's pretty fun to just take a glance at the orb and based on what color it is I can know how it's doing. :) Right now my stock isn't doing so well...so its red. I would like to see it green someday!

It was really fun building this project because I finally got to use together a Arduino board with XBee and also a cool BlinkM led. If you have any questions about the project you can email me at, calebcohoon at gmail dot com. Well, I just got in the mail today my XPort Direct + serial-to-ethernet device from gridconnect.com and now I'm trying to think of what new project I could put that in.....hmmmm. BTW, more pix of this project are at: http://www.flickr.com/photos/28505447@N04/sets/72157606113264590/. Ok, later

Edit:

Here's the source code I used for the entire project.

Also here's a link on controlling the BlinkM http://thingm.com/products/blinkm. The site contains some really good example code to get you started quickly.

Arduino Code:

#include "Wire.h"

#include "BlinkM_funcs.h"



#define BLINKM_ARDUINO_POWERED 1



int index;

int val;

byte blinkm_addr = 0x09; // the address we're going to set the BlinkM to

byte colorByte[3];



void setup()

{

 Serial.begin(9600);



 BlinkM_beginWithPower();

 

 BlinkM_setAddress( blinkm_addr );  // comment out to not set address

 

 BlinkM_stopScript(blinkm_addr); // stop script



 // clear globe

 BlinkM_fadeToRGB(blinkm_addr, 0x00, 0x00, 0x00);

}



void loop()

{

 if(Serial.available() > 0) {          // if data available from reader

   if((val = Serial.read()) == '#') {   // check for header

     index = 0;

     delay(100);

     while(index < 3) {             

       if(Serial.available() > 0) {

         val = Serial.read();

         colorByte[index] = val;

         Serial.println(colorByte[index]);

       }

       index++;

     }

     BlinkM_fadeToRGB(blinkm_addr, colorByte[0], colorByte[1], colorByte[2]);

   }

 }

}

VB.NET Code for controlling the Arduino:

Imports System.Net

Imports System.IO

Imports System.Text



Public Class Form1

   Dim webControl As New WebClient()

   Dim stockURL As String = "http://download.finance.yahoo.com/d/quotes.csv?s=SPZI.PK&f=p"

   Dim currPrice As String

   Dim htmlData() As Byte

   Dim objUTF8 As New UTF8Encoding()

   Dim keepWorking As Boolean

   Dim priceTemp As Double



   Dim red As Byte() = New Byte(3) {&H23, &HFF, &H0, &H0}

   Dim purple As Byte() = New Byte(3) {&H23, &HFF, &H0, &HFF}

   Dim yellow As Byte() = New Byte(3) {&H23, &HFF, &HFF, &H0}

   Dim blue As Byte() = New Byte(3) {&H23, &H0, &H0, &HFF}

   Dim green As Byte() = New Byte(3) {&H23, &H0, &HFF, &H0}



   Private Sub btnStart_Click(ByVal sender As System.Object, ByVal e As System.EventArgs) Handles btnStart.Click

       btnStart.Enabled = False

       btnStop.Enabled = True

       stockURL = "http://download.finance.yahoo.com/d/quotes.csv?s=" & TextBox1.Text & "&f=l1"

       keepWorking = True

       BackgroundWorker1.RunWorkerAsync()

   End Sub



   Private Sub BackgroundWorker1_DoWork(ByVal sender As System.Object, ByVal e As System.ComponentModel.DoWorkEventArgs) Handles BackgroundWorker1.DoWork

       While keepWorking = True

           htmlData = webControl.DownloadData(stockURL)

           currPrice = objUTF8.GetString(htmlData)

           stock.Text = currPrice

           priceTemp = Convert.ToDouble(currPrice)



           If (priceTemp <= 0.0003) Then

               SerialPort1.Write(red, 0, 4)

           End If



           If (priceTemp >= 0.0004) And (priceTemp < 0.0009) Then

               SerialPort1.Write(purple, 0, 4)

           End If



           If (priceTemp >= 0.001) And (priceTemp < 0.005) Then

               SerialPort1.Write(yellow, 0, 4)

           End If



           If (priceTemp >= 0.005) And (priceTemp < 0.009) Then

               SerialPort1.Write(blue, 0, 4)

           End If



           If (priceTemp >= 0.01) Then

               SerialPort1.Write(green, 0, 4)

           End If



           System.Threading.Thread.Sleep(60000)

       End While

   End Sub



   Private Sub btnStop_Click(ByVal sender As System.Object, ByVal e As System.EventArgs) Handles btnStop.Click

       keepWorking = False

       btnStart.Enabled = True

       btnStop.Enabled = False

   End Sub



   Private Sub Form1_Load(ByVal sender As System.Object, ByVal e As System.EventArgs) Handles MyBase.Load

       keepWorking = False

       TextBox1.Text = "SPZI.PK"

       btnStop.Enabled = False

       Try

           SerialPort1.Open()

       Catch ex As Exception

           MessageBox.Show("COM port could not be opened!")

       End Try



   End Sub



   Private Sub Form1_Resize(ByVal sender As System.Object, ByVal e As System.EventArgs) Handles MyBase.Resize

       If Me.WindowState = FormWindowState.Minimized Then

           ' NotifyIcon1.Visible = True

           Me.Visible = False

       End If



   End Sub



   Private Sub NotifyIcon1_MouseDoubleClick(ByVal sender As System.Object, ByVal e As System.Windows.Forms.MouseEventArgs) Handles NotifyIcon1.MouseDoubleClick

       If e.Button = Windows.Forms.MouseButtons.Left Then

           Me.Visible = True

           If Me.WindowState = FormWindowState.Minimized Then

               Me.WindowState = FormWindowState.Normal

           End If

           'NotifyIcon1.Visible = False

       End If

   End Sub

End Class

New Book!!!

2008-07-09T22:07:00.000-07:00

Today my book finally came from Amazon called "Making Things Talk: Practical Methods for Connecting Physical Objects" by Tom Igoe. I can't wait to start reading it and learning some new stuff. This book goes over how to make different devices communicate with each other and how to do so in a practical way. It has a lot of fun projects in it and the cool thing is that the author uses an Arduino in the book. If you ever want to get into the world of ZigBee, Bluetooth, RFID, Wifi, ... etc. pick up this book.

RFID Fun

2008-07-09T15:34:00.000-07:00

Well today I went down to radio shack and picked up a Parallax RFID reader kit. I've been interested with the technology for a while and what cool things I could possibly do with it. So far, no cool idea except making a couple of LEDs blink(the 'hello world' of electronics). As you can see in the pic to the left, I used an Arduino to interface to the RFID reader. BTW, if you have never used an Arduino they're amazing! They save you a lot of time on development and have really cool features. You can find out more about them at http://www.arduino.cc/.
I used some code from the Arduino playground to receive data from the RFID reader from http://www.arduino.cc/playground/Learning/PRFID. It's pretty simple code. The Parallax
reader outputs basic serial data when a card is read. I modified the code a little bit to have a green LED light up when one of the cards is read and had a red one light when a different card is read. The reader only has four pin outs: serial out, VCC 5V, ground, and enable. Very simple. This kit cost about 50 bucks. Kinda pricy but still cool to play with. Ok, later

Dragon's Lair Restoration

2008-07-08T06:57:00.000-07:00

I'm not sure which time period you were born but I'm sure at some point in your life you have heard of the arcade game called Dragon's Lair. It's pretty much a freakin awesome, classic game that was born in the 80's. I'm not sure why I decided to restore this game but I think it was because long ago I bought this game on cd-rom and loved playing it because it was like controlling a cartoon. So years later when I some how stumbled upon a website called the dragon's lair project, http://www.d-l-p.com/, it gave me inspiration to construct my own. It took me a few years to complete because I was pretty hard finding the right parts.

I first had to find an original arcade cabinet which would seem pretty hard because the game is so old, but that's why ebay was created. I got lucky one day while browsing through arcade cabinets people were selling and I noticed that one of them very closely ressembled the Dragon's Lair cab. It turned out that the cab was an old DL one but the cool, three sided marquee had been sawed off...but I still bought it anyway. Here's what the cab first looked like when I bought it (on left). It was pretty banged up from a lot of use and it was converted to a game called dynamite duke. The game was kinda fun but no sound. It didn't matter because I then ripped everything out (on right).

This project took my a few years to complete but it was worth it. There are many things that went into this project(money) and it could have not been completed if it wasn't for the great community from d-l-p.com. The people on those forums helped out a lot. Thanks! I could probably write and write about this project but instead I uploaded a bunch of pictures. Pictures say a thousands words or something like that so enjoy the gallery: http://www.flickr.com/photos/28505447@N04/sets/72157606117829675/. If you do have some questions about the project please e-mail and ask. My e-mail is, calebcohoon at gmail dot com.

(side note) The emulation software I used to control the game is the DAPHNE Arcade Laserdisc Emulator. Very cool. Check it out!

The S.A.D. Device....sounds evil kinda...oh well...

2008-07-07T22:05:00.000-07:00

A while back I got really interested in GPS technology and some how came up with a semi cool way to use it. The idea to create this project spawned(gamer's term) from the idea of always allowing a driver to see what the current speed limit of the road they were driving on. Sometimes while driving I have been totally at loss to what the speed limit of the road I was on and wished my car could just tell me....so thats when I created the S.A.D. device. Stands for Speedlimit Awareness Device. I know, it probably should be S.L.A.D but its not, so sorry. Now this device doesn't know ALL the speed limits of all the roads out there. I have to manually program in the coords of roads and their speed limit. The device is kinda ugly, but I'm not an expert case designer. It looks likes a bomb but thats usually how all my cases look! So there you can see the main body housing all the electronics which connects to external LCD screen via a phone line cable(RJL 11, i think). Inside I'm using three Atmel microcontrollers and a 20 Channel EM-406A SiRF III Receiver with Antenna ordered from sparkfun.com.

There's also a I2C EEPROM in there that stores all the coordinates for the roads and their speed limit. I wrote custom software that uploads to the device through a serial port, and inside the main device is a MAX232 that takes care of the TTL signal conversions.
Here are some more professionally taken pix...sorry if this page looks like a mess. I'm not too good with the putting images on a bloggy thing yet. :) (actually the pix are below all of this)

If you want more info on my project and really want the "niiitty griiitty", I wrote a paper about it and it goes over how everything works and what hardware was used. I actually used this for one of my computer science class projects. It was a lot of fun showing the class and "making" them think I'm really smart or something like that. :p Anywho, here's the link: http://calebcohoon.7host.com/files/semesterproject-endofyear-final.doc

Herro

2008-07-07T22:03:00.000-07:00

Welcome to a blog amidst a million or two out there on the web. Here I will post projects I'm working on or stuff I have already made. Ok, that's it later