Midnight Projects
Working on projects is one of my favourite things. Luckily people pay me to do it most of the time, but I still enjoy working on stuff for fun. Some of my more relevant, cool, interesting projects are mentioned here. When possible I’ve tried to help others by providing schematics, source code and so on. If you need help or more information, please email me and I’ll see what I can do. You can also check out my page of Ancient or Irrelevant Hacks
CR-68 MIDI Input
In late 2009 I bought a CR-68 analog drum machine. (circa 1979) The sounds are great but built-in patterns are rather limiting. I made a MIDI input circuit. – More Info
Information Superkitty
Listening to so much music at work it’s nice to know what you’re hearing, especially with online streams. The Information Superkitty interfaces with iTunes to provide a real-time data display conveniently mounted above my workbench. – More Info
Line Amplifier
It’s nice to be able to easily boost or cut the level of audio signals without introducing much noise, or having to run them through complex equipment like mixers and things. My dual line amp provides a simple method of changing audio levels and impedances of unbalanced signals for use on the bench. – More Info
Laser Engraver
In 2009 my local geek club acquired a broken laser engraving machine. This page explains how we got it working again. – More Info
Moving Sign 2
In 2003 I worked on bringing a small LED sign back to life. Now, with the help of several friends we have done it again, this time with a much bigger display. – More Info
Blinkenlights Stereoscope
During 2008 I had the opportunity to work on the Stereoscope project at Nuit Blanche in Toronto. This page is my personal account of my experience and a bit about the project. – More Info
Shoutmatica
Shoutmatica is a Shoutcast source that uses music directly from iTunes playlists to generate a Shoutcast stream on the fly. Music is programmed by making playlists and then different playlists are scheduled to play at different times of day. – More Info
ChickenPhoto
ChickenPhoto is my answer to wanting a simple photo gallery that exports automatically from iPhoto. ChickenPhoto can read the iPhoto XML file and generate lightweight index files, scale all the images and prepare a web directory ready to be uploaded or synced with a webserver. A simple Perl script displays the images to the user. – More Info
MIDI Conductor
A few years ago I was working on recording a song that I really enjoyed learning in university. It was a modern choir piece with many time signature changes, rits., accels. and so on. I wanted to sing all the parts myself but it just wasn’t possible to stay with the computer by only hearing a beat. So I built an LED conductor to follow the MIDI clock signal and show more information than a click track alone. – More Info
IR Mixer
When I first moved to Toronto I lived in a Geekhaus. It was a place filled with computers and network cable, and we did our best to make sure that we always had more cool technology than the average household. Before iTunes and other cool stuff was popular, we made our own music distribution system. Part of this system was my IR-controller audio mixer. You might still find a use for this device, or parts of it. – More Info
Aerial Photography
I’ve always dreamed of flying. I have studied flying and hope to get a pilot license one of these days. But before all that, I decided to make a kite with a camera on it. Here is my project to put a small camera on a kite. – More Info
RTTY Modulator
When working on my aerial photography project I got the idea that I wanted to send GPS data from my GPS receiver to a computer over a radio voice link. To aid in the use of GPS over FRS radio, I built a fairly crude (but effective) RTTY modulator using a PIC. A PC could decode the signal in software. – More Info
Stereo Amplifier
My friend needed a good cheap audio power amplifier, so we set out to build one for him. Here is the circuit and notes on the design. – More Info
Time Lapse Camera
Once my first digital camera became obsolete for normal picture-taking tasks, I thought it would be neat to make it into a time-lapse camera. This is a simple project but should give you some ideas of how to do it yourself. – More Info
Moving Sign
When I used to live in a house with a bunch of geeks, one of them came home with a small moving sign that had been tossed away. With a bit of new circuitry and code, we had it connected to a computer and displaying all kinds of useful information. – More Info
Door Chimes
Dismayed with the poor sound quality of most artificial sounding door bells, I made my own from scratch. They randomly choose one of two songs and sound loud and clear. All parts were made from surplus or easily obtained hardware. – More Info
Theremin
As an electronic music fan and someone that likes playing around with synthesizers, I needed to pay homage to one of the first electronic music pioneers: Leon Theremin. I built a Theremin from a design by Robert Moog. (also a legend) – More Info
Laser Harp
My very first microcontroller project from way back in 1998, my laser harp project became the first ever laser harp to be featured on the internet. Since then many others have made similar and also much improved harps based on these designs. – More Info