During his life, my grandfather was an avid photographer. He photographed family trips and events, plants and animals, buildings and sculpture. In his living room, hung from the ceiling, was a projector screen. In the living room closet, thousands of slides, organized into boxes and projector trays by category. While he died before I was born, his handwritten notes regarding people, locations, dates, and even focal length and aperture were meticulously hand written on the cardboard slides themselves.

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When we purchased our house, it came with a gate at the end of the driveway controlled by a Sentex Crown Jewel keypad. The keypad is programmed over 300 baud modem via the Win98 software CJWin32. While it is possible to run this software under a VM on my Mac, I wanted to try building a replacement as an excuse to learn PCB design. It would absolutely be trivial to replace the gate computer with a Raspberry Pi or similar, but that would defeat the point of the project as an educational exercise.

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Rummikub is a family favorite around here, being suitable for all ages and allowing up to four people to play at a time. As the holiday break comes to a close, I wanted to write a post about this game and its intersection with 3d printing, a hobby of mine.

The Game

The Wikipedia link above does a great job describing the game. For the purposes of this article, there is one main aspect of the game which is relevant to 3d printing: the tray design. Games start by drawing 14 tiles, and cannot start playing tiles until they have drawn sufficient tiles that they can make “melds” (runs or sets of 3 or more tiles) worth at least 30 points in total. This leads to a few requirements on the tile holder:

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Have you heard of the critically acclaimed MMORPG Final Fantasy 14? With an expanded free trial which you can play through the entirety of A Realm Reborn and the award winning Heavensward, and thrilling Stormblood expansions up to level 70 for free with no restrictions on play time?

Regardless of the answer, there are many tools available to help one keep track of their progress on their quest through the world of Final Fantasy XIV. ARR Triple Triad keeps track of Triple Triad cards specifically, while XIV Collect and XIV ToDo can help keep track of which items, ability, quests and objectives you may have missed.

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One project I’ve been wanting to work on for quite some time is self-hosting an IoT sensor and event logging platform. As a first step down this path, this project documents the process of logging the data from my personal weather station, rather than relying on forwarding the data to Weather Underground or Ambient Weather for viewing historical data.

Background

My weather station hardware consists of a WS-1401 weather station (wind speed, direction, temperature, humidity, solar intensity, and precipitation) and an OBSERVER-IP bridge which takes the readings from the weather station and forwards them to Weather Underground and/or Ambient Weather Network.

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Overview

Over the past 8 weeks, I built a HomeKit accessory to open and close the gate at the end of my driveway. The project was really fun, and this document outlines the process of creating it, from concept to working prototype.

Additional Background

Programming examples for microcontrollers will be in C++. For the most part, we’ll be sticking essentially to “C with Classes”, which is typical of most Arduino and other microcontroller projects.

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