Bernie's Blog

Real time visualizations of data with D3.js

The workspace for our haptic interface arm was really small, so it was hard to tell what the arm was drawing when moving autonomously, or for the user to tell what was going on when he/she was moving around the effector. I had D3 plot the position of the effector as it was moving around

Haptic Interface - Part 2

This is just a quick summary of what we ended up doing for our Haptic Interface project for ELEC 391. I won’t get into the details of how all the hardware was done.

Haptic Interface - part 1

This is the first school project I’ve blogged about. For our project course at school we are making a haptic interface. A haptic interface is a system that responds to physical human body movement, and produces computer simulated tactile feedback.

Jekyll Gotchas

I made this blog with Jekyll, and have been pretty content with the Jekyll experience, despite making the website while on a Windows PC (Jekyll doesn’t officially support Windows). Jekyll is a parsing engine that handles blogging logic for you, and makes it possible to host a blog on a static site. Removes the hassle of storing posts in a database, etc. Anyhow I just wanted to list a few gotchas to Jekyll

IoT with the Spark Photon

I got a Spark Photon for Christmas. I had thought IoT sounded pretty cool ever since I saw a presentation at work about it, so I was pretty happy with this gift. Photon promises an Arduino-like experience, and I guess it is pretty good at this. Spark Photon was an option at a Hackathon I later on went to, which I’ll talk some more about in this post.

Trying out the 3D printer

After finishing the calibration cube, for the first time ever I had access to a 3D printer. All I had ever seen prior was the glamorous, perfectly calibrated and gorgeous models the online 3D printing hype tries to advertise, so printing failures this time 'round taught me a few things.

Made a 3D Printer

The parts came in a plain brown box with writing in Chinese on the sides and was taped shut with duct tape. It also didn't come with the right size of screws for the metal heatbed. Apparently it was bought for about $400 or $450 in cash from someone running a shop in a storage unit.

Review - Wooden MeArm

I ordered a wooden Mearm a long time ago off of Ebay for fun. I forget which shop exactly I ordered it from on Ebay, but I after shipping and handling I think it came to about $50 CAD. The parts were laser cut wood, but unfortunately didn’t come with any motors.

Hi There

I hope your browser supports Google fonts, so the headings aren't appearing as comic sans.

My GitHub contains some of the code I talk about here if you want to have a look.