Silent Meditation Timer for a Singing Bowl
In 2014 I had another idea about a meditation timer for singing bowl (Klangschale). A clapper which automatically hammers after a specified amount of time.
I had some features in mind:
- It needs to fit on a wide range of bowls.
- The mechanics needs to be silent.
- The timer needs to be adjustable
- Maybe it can also bell in adjustable time intervals, like Tich Nhat Hanh’s mindfullness bell
Motors, servos and solenoids are all too noisy. So I made some research and found electric muscles. I ordered two from sparkfun. And I made some scribbles how it can look like.
I think it would be nice that the time can set by a rotary encoder, combined with a little display, maybe 7-segment led or a small oled, like in the MicroView
The latest thing I made is a paper prototype with a simple button. I was amazed, the mechanics works perfect. And it’s really silent.
The click in the video is just the button press. The NanoMuscle itself is very silent.
Alles Gute im neuen Jahr
Alles neu macht 2015.
Vielleicht klappt es dieses Jahr ja, dass ich mich wieder mehr hier im Blog sehen lasse.
Allen Lesern alles Gute im neuen Jahr.
Kleines Zeitlupenvideo, welches letzte Nacht entstanden ist.
New Enclosure for my Knob
In 2013 I started designing a nice enclosure for my knob. But unfortunately I never finished it. I designed it by layering laser cutted acrylic glas.
It has the followong features:
- Li-Po battery power
- Wireless charger
- Stand for iPad and iPad mini
- Bluetooth Audio connection
Here are the vector files which i have used for cutting.
mysqldump windows command line only databases with prefix
Here’s a little snippet which mysqldumps only the databases with a specific prefix or another wildcard expression under windows command line or windows batch.
@echo off
setlocal enabledelayedexpansion
set myvar=
for /f %%i in ('c:xamppmysqlbinmysql -uroot -pmysql -e "SHOW DATABASES LIKE 'prefix_%%'"') do set myvar=!myvar! %%i
echo %myvar:~10%
@echo on
c:xamppmysqlbinmysqldump.exe -u root --password=mysql --databases %myvar:~10% | "c:Program Files (x86)gzipgzip.exe" > "C:WHEREEVERYOUWANTmysqlbackup-%date:~6,4%-%date:~3,2%-%date:~0,2%-%time:~0,2%-%time:~3,2%-%time:~6,2%.gz"
THE KNOB III – BlueTooth 4.0 aka BLE
Here is a new Version of my rotating Knob. It now uses Bluetooth Low Energy aka BT 4.0 to communicate to the iOS device. I’m using the BLE Shield by RedBear Labs. I also coded a native App to have access to the iOS music library. So now it kan be used as a replacement for that cool, but expensive, infotainment systems integrated in cars. Mine doesn’t have one. On the other side Toyota’s infotainment systems aren’t cool. Hey guys take a look at Audi or BMW. And last but not least it has a new case with an aluminium knob. It looks very nice now. In addition it is enough space to put in a 9V battery to use it completely wireless.
THE KNOB II – Wifi-Hardware
You know, I’m addicted to rotating knobs. And this is my new version. This one works over Wifi. So it works for desktop and mobile, native and Adobe Air. It is build with an Arduino Leonardo, a RedFly Wifi Shield and a ProtoShield with 10 buttons, 1 rotary encoder and 3 LEDs.
On the software side I’m using the OSC protocol over UDP which is very fast and responsive.
THE KNOB I – a hardware iPad knob
Here is a video of my first hardware knob for the iPad
Maybe a little bit more later.
AS3 Simple UnTAR
The challenge: How to distribute additional content-packages for an Adobe Air App for iOS and Desktop.
The Answer: Inspired by this article I started coding my own ActionsScript tar version to unpack gnu-tar files. This format has some benefits. First it is one file, easy downloadable and shareble. Because it’s uncompressed, it is faster than any compressed format like zip. This doesn’t really matter because all files in my packages are compressed files like jpeg. I unpacked a 350 MB file on an iPad 2 in 18 seconds. Additionally it is very fast to extract only one file or data out of it, maybe for some metainformation. Possibly there is some potential to optimize the speed. It’s a common used format, so packing tools are available on all plattforms (Windows, Mac OSX and Linux). Because of this there is no need to code a special packing tool.
And last, I want to share this with you:
AS3 Simple Untar on Google Code
Have fun with it.