Recently a friend of mine who works as a machinist supervisor reached out to me asking if I could help write a simple app to assist him with one of his machines.

The machine in question is a gear shaper that dates back to the 1940s, and requires the configuration of ~60 gears into four slots & 10 gear combinations into two. Each combination requires equal ratios between other parts of the machine. Below is a page from the original manual explaining it in better detail.

Normally, a machinist would manually calculate several gear combinations, then try each until he finds one that works. As you can imagine, this is a very time consuming process.

I recently began playing around in Golang and thought this could be a great application for it. I really enjoy the simplicity to compile down to run on any OS.

The end result was an simple to use application that prints out every possible combination. It is now saving his company a handful of hours every single week. It's simple solutions like this that I really love building. Every day, I see something around me that can and should be automated freeing up more time in our lives.

But, after realizing I only had about five nights to get this done, I almost started regretting my decision.

The task was to create an RC-Controlled rose prop that allows the stage hand to control each petal with a complimentary cascading light effect.

I decided to use an Arduino Nano due to its low profile and high I/O. The Arduino alone cannot provide enough current & voltage to drive multiple servos. So, I chose a PWM driver from Adafruit to drive both Servos and Ultra-bright LEDS.

The RC controls were not 1:1 like you normally see. The Arduino monitored the stick positions and fired functions based on specific positions for each stick.

All mounted up!

This was the first iteration, the second will have the fiber optics installed.

Regardless, it came out great and was a blast to build!

In the early 2000s I was introduced to BrightSign, which at the time was named Roku. They were, and still are, the industry standard for playing video. You will see these everywhere, from a BOSE audio demo at Best Buy, to the Jurassic Park exhibit at Universal. They truly are amazing pieces of hardware.

What is a BrightSign? In short, they are solid state media players with many models, offering a plethora of features from network capabilities to I/O support. From personal experience, I have never seen a single one fail. I have dropped them (not recommended), seen them doused in fire retardant (also not recommended) and they still continue to run for hours and hours to this day.

From the first time I made a light blink on my BASIC stamp 1, I have been in love with microcontrollers. Three years ago, the first Raspberry Pi (Microcomputer!) was released. "The Raspberry Pi is a series of credit card-sized single-board computers..."[1]. It was a huge advance in the hacker community & it was only $40.

Immediately after release, devs began making everything--one of those things being kiosk software. It was great for photo slideshows, but was not great for video. It was slow and missing the the feature I needed most--seamless looping video. Since then, the Raspberry Pi has been seriously upgraded. Devs have written much more efficient code. Seamless looping video is now a thing!

A Raspberry Pi is 20-45 USD , while BrightSign is 200-600 USD! But, if they both do the same thing, why would I bother with BrightSign?

Reliability

As stated before, I have beat the hell out of BrightSigns and they have never failed me once. In some installations they ran for weeks/months at a time without being shut off and there was zero effect on frame rate or quality. I cannot say the same for a Raspberry PI. I have had many issues with cards going corrupt, rebooting for no reason, and some issues with memory causing the frame rate to chug.

Ease of use

Bright Author vs terminal?

The Raspberry Pi has a great deal of documentation behind it. Even so, if you have zero development background, there will be a very large learning curve. On the other side, BrightSign's Bright Author software was written for the average consumer. From creating just a simple video loop to button interactions, you will only need to spend minutes building your configuration file.

Who to choose

Today, BrightSign will still be my go to for client video installations. If I'm being paid to create an experience, I want that experience to work flawlessly for as long as it's needed, many times after many years. I would not feel comfortable using a Raspberry Pi in a client installation. In the near future, however, I see the Raspberry Pi taking BrightSign's place. More and more artists are making the switch and using them for production. For my personal projects I will experiment with the Pi. If the problems I faced become less of an issue, I will then make the switch permanent.

The Blog

My wonderful girlfriend mentioned wanting to curate a fashion blog. I suggested Tumblr & immediately the dev side of me wanted to automate this.

It just so happened to be one week before Mercedes-Benz Fashion Week in New York, so we decided to focus only on Fashion Week for now.

Automation

We quickly built up a list of top designers, magazines & currators. For the sake of speed, I took to my favorite automation tools, IFTTT & Yahoo Pipes and loaded in all aforementioned sources.

The Non-Automated Part: Curation

Every post is queued up for curation. Occasionaly, irrelevant content needs to be purged. Additionaly, we tend to rewrite the original description and modify tags.

Domination

After the first day of MBFW we became one of the top Tumblrs to follow for "fashion week", "MBFW" and many other keywords.

Notable posts

25k notes and climbing...

Despite being a heavily followed & reblogged Tumblr, it really remains just that. The click through rate is horrible, with under 100 visits daily to the actual site.

Organic search traffic is little to none. I have read that Google does not index Tumblr well due to duplicate content, and this test seems to support that.

In the end, Tumblr gives you the platform to showcase content. If your content is mainly images, and they are original and appealing, you can easily reach a massive audience with little effort.

If you're shooting for click through, I would try another approach.

Install here:
https://chrome.google.com/webstore/detail/etsy-sold-price/ffogkkcomfnaliekljojnomlbljclmpo

Github:
https://github.com/knabe/etsy-sold-out-chromeextension

As a person who manages two buisnesses that get high traffic, I fell in love with the concept of Facebook Wi-Fi. Giving the users free WiFi in exchange for a check-in seems rather fair and non-obtrusive.

As soon as this feature was released I sought out a router that supported it (all NetGear 802.11ac Smart Routers.) The NETGEAR Nighthawk AC1900(R7000)
had great reviews and was affordable. After purchasing it, I was furious when I noticed the Facebook Wi-Fi link missing. I found this on their site: "firmware with Facebook Wi-Fi available in Q2." [2]

After digging into the html source I noticed it is indeed there, and easy to turn on!

Here is how:

• Note: At this moment in time, updating your firmware may fix this.

Easy Way

• Follow these steps up untill #4 in the link below: http://support.netgear.com/facebookwifi/
• Visit http://192.168.1.1/fbwifi.htm
• Done

Hard Way / or if above doesnt work

• Follow these steps up untill #4 in the link below: http://support.netgear.com/facebookwifi/
• Using Chrome or Firefox, inspect the last element where the Facebook Wi-Fi should exist

• Look for commented out Facebook Wi-Fi list item

                <!--  <li class="SubMenu"><a href="fbwifi.htm" onClick="return false"><span class="subMenu_text">Facebook Wi-Fi</span></a></li>-->

• Right Click & Edit as HTML

• Remove the comments. It should look like below:

              <li class="SubMenu"><a href="fbwifi.htm" onClick="return false"><span class="subMenu_text">Facebook Wi-Fi</span></a></li>
  

• Success!

Click the link and follow the remaining instructions: http://support.netgear.com/facebookwifi/

Recently, I ran across an old project. Back in 2010, many of my haunt friends were getting into video projections. They specifically wanted bugs to interact with objects around their haunt- some scenes with bugs eating food on a table, others coming to and from holes in sets.

In a weekend's time, I was able to build a prototype Flash program that gave me the flexability to manipulate spawns of bugs in real time. This allowed me to bring my computer directly to the haunted house, run the program, and position the spawns to work flawlessly within pre-built sets. I exported the final outcome and dumped that onto a video repeater.

Fast-forward to the end of the year, and the program was forgoten. Last month I rediscovered it and figured I would make it available to the public. If people show interest, maybe I'll dive back in and make some updates.

All of that said- I present you with Project Bug!

For Downloads & Documention please visit:

http://tomknabe.com/project-bug/

Sadly, I won't be attending Transworld 2014, breaking my solid 5-year streak. However, today I was going through old footage and was reminded of a time lapse video I shot of Blackout's 2012 booth.

Blackout is a very 'extreme' haunted house with locations in NYC & LA. Their booth stirred a lot of commotion from both vendors and buyers. A huge mix of emotions were had. Passersby were angry, disgusted, confused, and possibly aroused. People couldn't grasp exactly what this booth was trying to achieve.

The booth itself was simple, yet perfect. A female actor was made to look very disheveled and emaciated. A TV was carefully placed in the rear corner where she watched the birth of a calf on a grainy '90s VHS. Needless to say, it was the talk of the convention.

Having a background in advertising and a previous knowledge of Blackout, it clicked immediately. Blackout was trying to define a presence in the haunt community. When I would mention visiting Blackout to other haunt owners they would all shake their heads stating it was merely a fad, or that the city was going to shut them down. "They won't last more than a couple years." This is when Blackout had only one location.

I originally met Josh Randall, the co-owner of Blackout, at his attraction in NYC. When approaching his booth I spotted him hiding in the crowd, watching people's various reactions. Wanting to take observations one step further, I mentioned my curiosity in seeing how his actress would look time-lapsed while simultaneously filming reactions(in 1080p). He seemed equally interested and gave me the OK to film his booth for the next 6 hours on my GoPro. After watching the footage it was incredible to see how well the actress could slowly transition positions.

To this day I still keep coming back to this video- partly out of admiration & awe, and partly because I won't be attending Transworld this year. Regardless, the art of the haunt is changing, and I can't wait to see what's in store.

I needed to simulate a phone ringing that was capable of being triggered by an actor. Instead of using a speaker I figured my best (and most realistic) option was using the ringer from an old phone. As modern phones no longer use bells.

A phone line receives about 90 volts to trigger the phone to ring. However, applying just 12v directly to the bells coil is enough to trigger the arm.

To simulate the ring oscillation I applied a 555 timer
to a momentary push button.