Greetings, Internet, and happy holidays!

For the past month or more I've been working on a new video to demonstrate the latest features added to the Nitrogen Logic Depth Controller and Automation Controller, as well as step-by-step tutorials for setting them up.  After dozens of hours of coding, screen recording, voice overs, and editing, the video is finally edited and ready to upload.

If you've seen my previous videos or my company website, you know I'm always looking for creative ways to measure and reduce electricity use.  A couple of months ago one of the 100W-equivalent compact fluorescent light bulbs in my kitchen burned out (right after I threw away the warranty info).  Not wanting to waste the opportunity, I decided to find out how much electricity the dead bulb was using relative to a working bulb.

With halloween here it seemed like an ideal time to post code and pics from a simple PIC project I did last year for a costume (intended to be worn under clothing).  It's very loosely based on Tony Stark's reactor in the Iron Man movies, and uses PWM to dim and flash some LEDs.  I've been too busy with Nitrogen Logic to do a full writeup, so here are the pics, and you can find the code on Github.  I'll note that, due to a lack of proper fabrication tools, the housing is rather ugly.

Greetings, Internet!  I am pleased to announce that the Nitrogen Logic Products page is now live.  The first product with a completed information page is the depth camera controller.  I will be adding more details and more product pages as they are ready.

I regret to announce that my web contact form was malfunctioning for an extended period of time. If you used the web form to try to contact me and didn't get a response, please try again. For the curious, some details follow.

There are times when it's useful or necessary to use an external command as part of a program, and full control of the command's stdin, stdout, and stderr are required, rendering popen() insufficient.  This level of control is useful for, among other things, writing a GUI frontend for a console application.

I've put together a new video showing how a zone-based control system can do "gesture-like" things, such as raising and lowering one's hand to control the brightness of a light.

It's taken me longer than I expected, but I finally have a new video ready, complete with music this time.  This video covers my latest work with the Kinect: an HTML5(ish) web interface and low-level protocol for configuring and using the Kinect with a home automation system.  I also demonstrate my own home automation software.  I'm sure you'll all enjoy this video.

I've been hard at work writing code, so I haven't been as responsive to inquiries as I would like.  To try to make up for that, here's a very work-in-progress preview of what's coming next:

This is a followup post to my previous post and video demonstrating how I used a Kinect sensor in my home automation system.  That video has generated a pleasantly surprising amount of interest and a lot of questions.  I invited a friend over to help demonstrate some of the answers.  Though this isn't the big revelation people may be hoping for, I hope this new post and video answer many of the questions that have been asked.