Having some new Raspberry Pi 3’s laying around in the house the idea sparked to invest some time in seeing how the state of affairs are in the retro gaming world. I vividly remember growing up in the age of Nintendo & Sega (I had a Game Gear once and it was glorious!) and the …
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Reconnecting IFTTT
Last week we delivered a couple of LightSagas to some of our earliest customers. Everyone was very happy with a product we feel proud of. Work however continues and one thing that was bugging us from the start of the prototype run was the problem we have in that we would like to keep the …
First steps: 3D printing
Exciting times are upon us as the last couple of years 3D printing has really taken off. Driven by a large enthusiasts community of makers a lot of innovation and broadly available DIY sets for building your own 3D printer have become available and while they utilize an inferior technology (FDM – Fused Deposition Modeling instead of …
Living with Atom
Sublime Text used to be my goto editor on Mac for years now, however there were some things I didn’t like about it. It is fast and works well. There are some downsides however; it’s paid software (to be fair, you can evaluate it forever if you’d want), the price however for a real license …
Testing Neo4j with Bolt
For a project I’m working on with my colleague Joost den Boer we are investigating the use of graph databases in the form of Neo4j. The current version of Neo4j is 2.3, however last christmas 3.0.0.M02 was released with one of the key features the introduction of the Bolt driver. Neo4j evolved from being available only as …
Many small steps, one giant leap
Finally, just before the years’ end, we made the giant leap of constructing our first LightSaga clock (Technically it is the second if you count the original iteration made of wood). A lot of small steps were required to finally get to this point and we still need to assemble the other 19 out of our …
Glass Bead Blasting!
After manually sanding our first acrylic ring from opaque to diffuse it became painfully apparent that this method doesn’t give the envisioned result nor did it scale well to our full prototype run. A single ring costs around 20 minutes to properly sand manually and even then the result wasn’t the silky milk glass finish …
ESP32 Incoming!
I’ve been a fan of the ESP8266 low cost, high powered IoT platform and their makers, Espressif just announced that they’ll be introducing a new chip named the ESP32 soon. It is not just a new module with the ESP8266 on it, but a whole new chip featuring many improvements. The improvements are among others: …
Elbow grease & Love
Our first assembly underway, we spend a day sanding our acrylic rims to give it that sweet milk glass look that will help to make the light of the LEDs diffuse. Starting with a high grain and working down towards a fine grained sanding paper, it took more time then anticipated but the results are beautiful. …
Color choices
Because a lot of the people that ordered their LightSaga prototype weren’t sure which color to pick, as it is hard to picture how it will look, we asked Aldor to help us out by making one of the small rings in each of the four colors we were going to offer. Wouter and myself …