My ATMEGA328P videos

Posted in Digital Logic, Processors on May 17, 2013 by jackBuffington

About a year ago I was working for Hackaday.com and shot some videos about how to work with the ATMEGA328P.

Rattlesnakes!

Posted in Uncategorized on May 16, 2013 by jackBuffington

About seven to ten times a year I find a rattlesnake hanging out in my yard. I, of course don’t like to have rattlesnakes in my yard so I catch them and take them away.

First of all, I would recommend that you leave all rattlesnakes alone unless you have a really good reason to be messing with them. In my case, I have two dogs who spend the majority of their time outside and although I have trained them to leave snakes alone, I still worry that they might disturb one without meaning to. Because of that, and because my wife is terrified of them, I catch them and take then a few miles away.

In this video, I show how I go about catching and releasing a rattlesnake.

New Videos about Digital Logic

Posted in Digital Logic on April 14, 2013 by jackBuffington

Logic Simplification:

How to make any gate from NAND or NOR:

Karnaugh Maps:

New digital logic videos.

Posted in Digital Logic with tags , on April 11, 2013 by jackBuffington

Here are the two newest digital logic videos.

This first one is about the basic logic gates and their truth tables:

The other new video shows how to convert between Boolean algebra and logic gates:

Digital Logic – Multiply, Divide, and Square root

Posted in Digital Logic with tags , , , , on April 10, 2013 by jackBuffington

Here is the next video in my series of videos dealing with digital logic. In this video, I talk about how to multiply, divide, and calculate square roots in binary.

Digital Logic – Binary codes

Posted in Digital Logic with tags , on April 8, 2013 by jackBuffington

Here is the second video in my digital logic series. In this video, I talk about different ways that you can encode data. Specifically, I talk about straight binary, Binary Coded Decimal, Grey code, and ASCII.

New Digital Logic video series

Posted in Digital Logic on April 7, 2013 by jackBuffington

Here is the first in a series of videos that I will be making about digital logic. This video deals with number systems that are used when working with digital logic and how to convert between them.

Hacking a shop vac for greater capacity and easier cleanup.

Posted in hardware things on March 31, 2013 by jackBuffington


Here is a video about a modification to my shop vac that I did a while ago. What I am doing is essentially making the canister over an order of magnitude bigger by using a steel garbage can as the canister. As a bonus, when it is time to take out the sawdust to the curb, I no-longer have to dump the canister into a garbage can since it is already in a garbage can and is ready to go out to the road for pickup.

Wrapup of my entry for the Buildlounge.com laser cutter contest

Posted in Uncategorized on December 19, 2011 by jackBuffington

Here is the final word on my Buildlounge.com laser cutter contest entry where I have built a sun-powered clock. For those of you who haven’t seen my previous posts, here is what I have been up to:

When thinking about what I would do for this contest, I decided that I wouldn’t go high tech and do something involving lots of LEDs doing color mixing, video, or just displaying patterns. I have done that before. Instead, I decided to go ‘no tech’ and build something that had no moving parts and no electronics and yet still managed to ‘blink’ some lights on and off. What I ended up building was a clock that used the sun to display the current time. Above, you can see the face of the clock. The body is made out of aluminum. Instead of hands, I have a large number of acrylic rods running behind the clock face to illuminate the frosted glass in the location where the hour hand would be.

On the outside of the building, facing southward is a camera obscura (pictured above). This camera has a rather large hole as compared with a regular camera obscura that doesn’t have a lens in the front of it. This hole allows a beam of sunlight to pass through and hit an array of acrylic rods that are carefully arranged on the back. These rods channel the sunlight from the camera to the clock face. Below you can see a picture of the inside of the camera.

Below is my entry video for the contest. At the end of it you can find three links that take you through how I built it from start to finish.

Clock Project Part 3

Posted in Contest Entries with tags , on December 4, 2011 by jackBuffington

I have been continuing on with my clock project. At this point I have the clock itself finished with the exception of the daylight savings time lever. This video shows how I:

  • Polished the face plate
  • Frosted the glass
  • Attached the glass
  • Made the wheel that holds the optical fibers
  • Attached the wheel that holds the optical fibers
  • Made the detent mechanism that lets you adjust for daylight savings time
  • Made the outer ring to hide the mechanism