Shinium - Brilliance by Design

My background is in software, specifically web development. I used to do both front and back end stuff, as well as sysadmin things. I worked with graphic designers a lot, some amazingly skilled people from whom I learned the importance of getting things exactly right, visually. Exactly right. Every pixel has to be perfect, every aspect of a design thought through carefully and then polished to perfection. I'm eternally grateful for the things I learned from those people. Programming and systems admin adds a different dimension to the art of "Doing Stuff Right", that of every case being accounted for and every exception or problem caught before it happens. Beauty takes many forms, both in terms of visual design and in software too. This focus on detail, on perfection, has carried over into my current work in the physical realm. Making stuff that is machine-perfect isn't so hard. Especially when using machines (although I don't have as many machines as I'd li...

A little while ago I made a media centre for some friends, which had hardware audio playback controls. Much as I love giving people things, I was a bit jealous because it was pretty cool thing (even if I do say so myself). When the opportunity came up to make one for our upcoming wedding, I jumped at the chance, and added a few features extra to the original design. A little time scouring the internet for parts and then, time to assemble: First up, out with the ironing board (soldering iron is an iron, right?). The dotstar LEDs run at 5v and the Pi's GPIO outputs at 3.3v, so we need a level shifter/bus buffer to bump the volts up a bit. Terrible messy circuit "diagram", but it worked. You can see the LED layout down at the bottom, there are six pins on each one - power, ground, clock in, data in, clock out, data out. This means they can be chained and addressed individually by software. They're pretty smart little things. Dotstars are new and a little more f...

In this post , I showed how I made my Raspberry Pi jukebox. Here's how it is controlled. At it's core, it's just a python script which waits for interrupts from the Pi's GPIO pins. That's the easy bit (although it would be a lot easier if there wasn't two different ways to number GPIO pins - I mean really...) I do know that just making a bunch of functions isn't particularly pythonic and I should probably do something with classes and objects and stuff, but I had a really immovable deadline on this project so I just stuck with what I knew (which mostly comes from php, years ago). Adafruit provide a library to let you access the Dotstar leds, but it's pretty basic. That's cool, it was fun learning how to figure stuff out. I ended up using a couple of modules to generate colour gradients and to shift between various colourspaces. A nifty thing happened when I wanted to flash random, but bright colours as part of rave mode. Taking random RGB va...