Understanding a Mouse Scroll Wheel

Having been rather addicted to understanding electronics lately, I’m always looking for something to play with. Last week I was about to throw out a broken wireless Microsoft mouse, but I caught myself and ended up taking it apart. Rotary Encoder from a Mouse I dug down to the scroll wheel and found out it was a nice little rotary encoder - there’s an LED pointed at two phototransistors (light detectors) in it, as well as a circle of tiny black posts that pass between the LED and the detectors, as you can see to the left. »

stevekamerman

Home Temperature Monitor

Yes, I’m still on the electronics kick. This is something I’ve been wanting to do as part of a complete home automation project down the road: monitor the temperature of the different rooms / zones in my house. Now that I’ve got a few Arduinos laying around and some thermal probes (thermistors) from some broken Radio Shack temperature displays, I’ve got the hardware necessary to make it happen! I first installed the thermal probes in the ceilings of the master bedroom, my daughter’s bedroom and our living room in locations that I thought were least affected by vents, fans, lights and other sources of heat. »

stevekamerman

Arduino Parking Assistant

Arduino Duemilanove I recently bought a 2010 Honda Accord Crosstour and was shocked to see how large it really is in my garage! When it’s parked correctly, I have about 18 inches behind it and 26 in front of it, when it’s not, I can’t shut the garage door, or I can’t walk in front of it. As a fun project, I decided to make a device that would let me know when I’m exactly in position! »

stevekamerman

Just Released: Tera-WURFL 2.1.3 Stable

I’ve been delaying the Tera-WURFL 2.1.3 release since mid-July because of the large number of feature requests and improvements coming in, but the time has come to release it. I’m still waiting for the unit test code to stabilize a bit before I put it into the tree, but if you are interested in it, follow me on GitHub and you should see it soon. Here’s a short list of features and improvements in Tera-WURFL 2. »

stevekamerman

Tera-WURFL 2.1.3 Database Roundup

I’ve been working hard on Tera-WURFL 2.1.3 lately. I’ve been meaning to release it for over a month now, the problem is that I just keep finding improvements to make. Since Tera-WURFL’s development is now hosted on GitHub, you can always see what I’m doing and grab a copy for yourself. New in version 2.1.3 is a MongoDB Database Connector. I keep getting pounded by people about NoSQL and I haven’t given it a fair chance until now. »

stevekamerman