With 2019 looming, I have been thinking about the shit that I want to tackle in the coming year. I’ve got some nerdy shit I want to accomplish — a couple of which have been lingering for far too long.
First up, the 3D printer, which has been lingering for far too long. I need to get it dialed-in, making prints, and doing so with accuracy enough to print molds for carbon fiber projects. Been thinking that 2019 will be when I do some experimenting with building carbon fiber forms and then some destructive testing of the same. For the latter part, I’ll probably have to build some sort of a testing rig, and I have some ideas for that stuck in my head.
Secondly, I want to finish the under-cabinet RGB lighting in the kitchen. I think I’ve detailed that here, but it’ll be Arduino run, and have the ability to control brightness, color, and on/off via both Alexa voice commands and via HTTP (only over the home network). Thus, I’ll be able to do some cool shit like turning the lights purple when the Vikings are leading. Depending on how this goes, I may make a second set to go behind the entertainment center. We’ll see.
Lastly, I want to build an Arduino-based remote to control the TV (power, volume, input, channel), AppleTV (power-on only), and eventually, anything else that occurs to me. Basically, this one will entail building a temporary Arduino setup that has an IR receiver diode so that I can sample the emitted codes from my remotes and dumps them to the console while plugged into my laptop. Building the WiFi-enabled webserver to run an IR LED might better be tackled with a Raspberry Pi, too, so the plans for this might change a bit.
Those are the hardware tasks. There’s a few other things that have been in my head that I may want to tackle, too — wiring the house for gigabit Ethernet, for example — but right now, the ones listed above are the top three. Other ideas:
- get fontosaurus.com back up and running
- wire the house for gigabit Ethernet
- build some environmental sensors for the house
- finally finish the #%*&ing cyclocross frame