Hello, my name is Rick Miles (a.k.a. justwantin on some forums). I live in Langwarrin on the Mornington Peninsula in Victoria, Australia. If you're wondering if this is the same Rick Miles you knew somewhere in the United States, the answer is maybe.
I enjoy wood working, playing with microchips and low voltage electronics, messing around with Linux systems and crafts in general.
Here are some of the things I've had a play with. I'm a strong believer in the concept of open source and while I may not provide complete instructions for anything you find below you are still most welcome to take it, have a go. If you have a question, comment or constructive criticism feel free to send me an email.
My current project is a weather logger for recording weather measurments in my garden. It comprises a Banana Pro running Slackwarearm, an arduino compatible LeoStick and several sensors on breakout boards with a little bit of C and BASH to pull it all together.
I enjoy the soft gentle flickering of andon lighting around my home in the evening and have made various types of andon using both candles and my LED circuit. This activity has expanded somewhat since I started out. You can learn a bit more about andon here.
MPLabX is over kill for my modest Microchip programming activities. I usually use geany for editing and pk2cmd for assembling and programming. However, I can never remember the pk2cmd commands so I wrote a script, pk2cmd-gui, that uses yad to provide a GUI wrapper for pk2cmd.
Here is the C program and circuit I use for my flickering LED's
After my jack-o'-lantern project I tried my hand at making a couple andon using the same flickering LED circuit but modified to use transistors for switching and in one of them I also used 1 watt LEDs.
I had wanted to make a Japanese andon lantern with flickering LEDs inside to simulate an oil and wick flame for quite some time. My first step was to come up with the circuit and with Halloween fast approaching I figured I'd do a proof of concept project inside a paper mache jack-o'-lantern.