A while back my kids got this SOS station toy, it came with a few emergency cars and the boys quite liked it. My girl friend and myself however; hated it, it had a speaker and made a high siren sound and an annoying voice would shout things like “all cars respond”. So I modified it; ripped out the speaker and mounted a few LEDs instead, so now it flashes but no sound.

I’ve gotten myself one of those ultrawide curved monitors. I’ve wanted one for a long time, and I finally bought one; a Samsung 34". Since my desk is pretty shallow, and not that big really, I also wanted to free up some work surface by getting things on shelves. So I’ve been doing a bit of work on my computer setup.

Bias lighting is, simply put, to light up the wall behind a monitor or TV. It creates a glow around the screen and, supposedly, creates a more comfortable and high contrast viewing experience. I made my bias lighting by merely sticking a LED-strip behind the TV.

My two twin boys are pretty into Fireman Sam these days, so the red walking car they got when they were babies got an upgrade. Four blue self-flashing LEDs, a toggle switch and a 2xAA battery holder; everything bought cheap on eBay. And voila! A fire truck with blue emergency lights.

My nephew, and my twin boys, both have a Ikea play kitchen. It’s a pretty cool toy, with a microwave, oven, sink, cabinets and hot plates. The plates have LEDs so they turn red when turned on, just to make it a bit more real. But the play kitchen is even greater with some lights!

My brother-in-law is into RC car drifting, and a big part of that is of course to have a cool-looking car! He used a LED light kit, but the front lights were not that great. Very blueish and the intensity of the LEDs varied quite a bit.

So I replaced the LEDs and installed some fog lights, it ended up quite decent looking I think 🙂

As I wrote in a previous post about my home office; our house isn’t huge, so I had to make the most of the office/man cave that I got. The electronics corner is pretty small, and a couple of things about it was annoying — like not having my instruments, e.g., oscilloscope and power supply, readily available. So I decided I needed to fix that!

When I am at work, I use headphones; a lot. About half the time I am listening to music, the other half I am talking with someone on Lync (Skype for Business). That made it difficult for my colleagues to know whether I am available or not, so I get interrupted when I’m on the phone. I needed a way to communicate my availability!

About a year ago the girlfriend and I finally found a house and got settled in. It’s not huge; neither is the garden or the garage. But there was enough space for me to get my own room; a man cave, office, and workshop, all in one! I’m very happy with it, small spaces spike the creativity, and I’ve managed to fit pretty much everything I needed. It has taken me this long to get everything together and document it.

AVR is a series of microcontrollers from Atmel. Fitted with A/D converters, comparators, timers, interrupts, internal oscillator, and more. Flash memory is used for the main program, SDRAM for variables and EEPROM for values that need to be saved through a power loss. Cheap, fast and easy make them perfect for home automation projects.