Create your own “mad-eyed” Cybernetic Santa Claus eye patch! The eye code with robot/terminator style eye animation runs on the Adafruit TFT Gizmo and Circuit Playground Bluefruit or Express.
Some simple crafting with EVA foam sheets make for a stylish, comfortable eye holder.
“Ho-ho-ho. Get to da reindeer!”
Check out the full guide from John Park!
Projects like this are why we champion open-source. A fully analog tachometer relay built by supunmsw and shared instructables shows how you can be efficient without going digital.
As an Engineering Executive in a graphite mining and processing company, I’m constantly surrounded by rotating equipment—fans, pumps, and conveyors. I’ve seen multiple incidents and inefficiencies caused by these machines running below their required Rotations Per Minute (RPM).
I needed some extra holiday spirit in the workshop, so here’s a quick Sparkle Motion NeoPixel strand Christmas Tree! Here’s the Learn Guide to make your own (in case you’ve got some spare NeoPixels and a Sparkle Motion on hand).
The Sparkle Motion board running WLED makes it easy to set up great looking lighting and animation, plus, there’s no soldering involved, just plug and play your way into the holidays.
Read more at Sparkle Motion Christmas Tree Lights
Shawn Hymel takes a look at real time operating systems for hardware focusing on Zephyr and FreeRTOS.
Every time I mention Zephyr, I inevitably get a few responses along the lines of “just use FreeRTOS.” I admit, FreeRTOS is amazing, but it might not be the right tool for the job. In the rest of the post, I’ll analyze each to hopefully help give you a better idea of what kinds of jobs each is better suited for.
The first question you should be asking is if you even need a real-time operating system (RTOS). I covered this in a previous post, but the basic answer is that if your embedded project is complex enough, it might be worth looking at using an RTOS.
At a basic level, an RTOS gives you deterministic scheduling, task isolation, synchronization primitives, and timing guarantees. Many modern embedded systems demand more than just a scheduler, especially once connectivity, security, portability, and long-term maintenance enter the picture. Connectivity, security, portability, and long-term maintenance often end up mattering just as much as real-time performance.
See the analysis in the post here.
A fun Christmas coding project using the Sense HAT from Raspberry Pi:
Count down to Christmas with your Sense HAT! Your digital advent calendar will display a new image each day between 1 and 24 December.
Christmas sounds different across the globe. While some may be singing carols, somewhere else may be crooning to jazz, and elsewhere may be enjoying a parranda. NPR shares what musicians from NoLa listen to this time of year.
When you think about music in New Orleans — you probably think of jazz or blues, or maybe funk and bounce.
Christmas carols? Not so much.But many musicians in New Orleans have deep roots in the church.
Since it’s that time of year, Rosemary Westwood from member station WWNO asked a few of the city’s favorite musicians about the songs they like to listen to around Christmas.
Michael Klements has built a low-power SSD NAS around a Raspberry Pi 5. The Pi 5 NAS offers flexible storage options, a stats display, and custom carbon fiber panels. It uses both 2.5-inch SATA SSDs and NVMe storage drives.
I’ve used OpenMediaVault (OMV) as the NAS operating system, and I’ll run some real-world tests on the NAS to evaluate real-world performance across different drive options.
Two carbon fibre side panels support the 2.5-inch drives and the acrylic base for the Pi stack. A clear acrylic top panel holds a fan above the Pi’s heatsink, with a carbon fibre accent piece tying it into the side panels. A black acrylic front panel houses the OLED display. The layout is designed around easy of assembly and providing airflow to the drives and Pi.
See the video below and more in the post here.
