04 Feb 10 Arduino + Scalextric = lap counter

I bought an Arduino board last year and have been playing around with it on and off since. I’ve had a few ideas for projects but not really got around to completing anything except monitoring my gas meter.

For a few months I’ve been hankering after a scalextric (even before James May’s excellent Toy Stories programme about it) so when a friend invited me round to have a go on his, I jumped at the chance!

I took along my arduino, he dug out a pair of cycle computer sensors and we had a go at hacking together a lap counter. (more…)

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11 Nov 08 Caching

Refreshing the main blog page to see a new post appear, I notice that it’s blocked connecting to twitter.com. I think I need to investigate caching the twitter posts in this plugin or it might become quite a pain.

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11 Nov 08 Software plumbing.

After randomly surfing from twitter to blogs, I enjoyed reading one of Matt B’s posts about designing a system to deal with lots of text messages at the BBC. Linking different software components and sources together like he described is something that really interests me. I don’t think I’m hugely good at it, but there’s something about that kind of relatively large-scale software plumbing that draws me in.

I think the kind of work I do tends to involve more small-scale nitty gritty like UIs – that doesn’t interest me nearly as much. There are some quite prominent elements of generic plumbing in the product I’m working on at the moment which I find quite stimulating, but they’re rather ruined by the need to write horrible code to produce a GUI