The last time I decided to make a printed circuit board I just drew all the lines by hand and wound up with an effective yet rather ugly board. I wish I had seen this link about making circuit boards using a laser printer back then. Basically when you etch a board you cover the spots on the copper that you want to become your wires, and an etching solution dissolves the rest. Normally this is done with a sharpie pen or pressure transfer sheets but you can also transfer toner from a laser printer printout using an iron, soak away the paper and get a nice professional looking board. Next time I have the time, will convert the LED circuit to a board as well as maybe rework a new revision of my IR remote receiver to make it more compact and slick looking. So far nothing I've done is as complex as the picture below but I should be able to get similar professional looking results when I do it.



Current Project: Things I'd rather be doing than homework.

I finally got the chips I needed to build this project I've been meaning to for awhile now, basically it comes down to being a mood light but its still a fun project. The circuit uses two IC's and various other components to cycle through various colors using a red, green and blue LED. I bought a couple units that do all three colors in one but all they had was surface mount ones and its not nearly as bright...a little soldering though and it might still work.



Current Project: Study break: Rainbow machine
Current Soundtrack: I love bees

I installed these a few weeks ago but I haven't had the chance to take decent photos. I'll have a few more up of the interior once it gets dark. I replaced the parking lights (little bulbs under the high beams which illuminate the headlight housings) as well as the side marker bulbs (the painted bulbs that came with my smoked side markers gave a rather pale milky yellow light rather than the nice deep amber they should be)




The rest of the images can be found on my gallery page under "projects". More to come possibly tonight if I remember to get the camera out.

Current Project: Blogging is mathematically reducable to paying attention in class.

I had my first coke in weeks today and it tasted...bad. Corn sweeteners don't seem so bad when you dont have anything to compare it to but if you get the real thing enough, you can tell just how poor of a substitute for sugar corn syrup is.

As a part of my soda making project I've started making my own soda syrups, using flavor concentrates and real sugar. So far my favorite is vanilla cola (3/4 oz cola, 1/4 oz vanilla per liter of syrup) The flavor for plain cola is different from the name brands obviously but the flavor that real sugar adds more than makes up for the difference, and the vanilla variant I could only tell the difference in a taste test, and would pick the homemade any day.

Now I've always known that the reason HFCS is used instead of sugar is cost. Corn sweeteners are dirt cheap and using them adds pennies on every can of coke sold to the profits. I thought maybe the reasons could be two-fold, that somehow HFCS could be healthier but that is not the case, to the contrary HFCS is actually much worse for you, fructose being linked to adverse reactions in lab rats. Not to mention that the industrial process for developing the stuff was developed in the 70's. Think of what wonderful 70's technologies that you would trust your life with today...no seriously, come up with one.

Current Music: The Bots - This Thing Called Happiness
Current Project: Conspiracy Theories...and homework.

I nearly broke my webserver getting it up but I now have a copy of "Gallery" running to show off my wonderful photos. (Wonderful photos to be added later when I have time and have had more sleep. My previous solution which tied directly into iPhoto was kind of cool but required too much work to show off the photos that I wanted (and required my mac to act as the webserver) and usually only about 2% of the photos I take are actually worth showing off so it should be easier to simply add the photos I care about through gallery.

Check it out here.

Current Music: tag's trance trip
Current Project: PHP Photo Gallery