ZoomBox: Completed

ZoomBox is ready! I designed and printed the top part and fitted the arcade buttons in. I wanted the button icons to be extruded out, which presented a problem. If I extruded them, I couldn’t print the top part upside down. Eventually I decided to print without them and then printed them separately in black filament. Then used a white acrylic pencil to contour the icons. I am pretty happy with the result....

March 10, 2021 · 1 min · Taylan Pince

ZoomBox: Designing with Fusion 360

Despite my initial aversion to it, Autodesk Fusion 360 is truly an amazing tool. The combination of sketching on faces and timeline editing makes it incredibly powerful. Following the great Layer by Layer tutorials form Adafruit I designed a simple case for the ZoomBox. I was able to import the official DXF files from Arduino right into Fusion 360 and map the screw holes exactly. Surprisingly, there was no good information available on component heights....

March 5, 2021 · 1 min · Taylan Pince

ZoomBox: Zoom Mute Controller with Arduino

I had a very informative hacking session tonight and quite a few trips down rabbit holes. I decided to do a little side project: A couple of big hardware buttons that can control Zoom mute/unmute and screen share on/off states on my laptop. I spend most of my days on Zoom and it would be very handy. Easy, right? Well, it turns out that it’s not that easy. First thing I did was confirming that Zoom already had global hot keys for the controls I needed....

February 24, 2021 · 4 min · Taylan Pince

Project LED Rainbow: Bluetooth Support

Added some logic to the LED rainbow so it dims slowly over the course of the hour before turning off for the night, and same in the morning. With that, I call this project complete! Decided to add Bluetooth control to the LED Rainbow. Every once in a while we need to change the go to sleep and wake up times and M wants to be able to control the colours from her iPad....

February 12, 2021 · 2 min · Taylan Pince

Project LED Rainbow: Prototype

I have been working on an LED rainbow project for M. It’s really coming along and I also managed to get an RTC module soldered on to the board tonight. Everything was going well until the sketch upload to the Trinket failed. Apparently Adafruit Trinket has this issue where it’s easy to override the bootloader by mistake. I think it happened because I was using 99% of progmem. Solution is easy, you just hook up the Trinket to another Arduino and use a little sketch to burn a fresh bootloader....

February 3, 2021 · 1 min · Taylan Pince