I’m working on a new wordpress community plugin for the contest at Weblog Tools Collection.

The contest blog is here.

The prize for the best community plugin is $500, so it’s got my attention for at least a few days.

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You can see some of the pictures here:
MAX756 DC-DC Step UP

I’ve built this for one of the LED projects I’m working on. Very good refresher on reading schematics and applying them to the real world. The power supply will provide 3.3V or 5V out with a minimum of 0.7V in. (Requires 1.1V to start.)

More info on the IC here:
http://www.maxim-ic.com/quick_view2.cfm/qv_pk/1167

[Update: 2006/05/15]

Made the MAKE Blog today.

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WordPress Plugin Competition Blog

My first entry to the WordPress plugin contest over at Weblog Tools Collection. If you have an unreleased plugin head on over and enter it into the contest!

I’ve been using a hacked together form of this plugin for a few months on lr2.com. This contest prompted me to get off my duff and clean up the code, add some automatic setup and fix the error handling.

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My first attempt at the Altoids Puck light. The switch is inside the can and you just twist the two halves to toggle power.

I’m not completely satisfied with this one. It’s a bit sloppy and I need to find a better way to make the holes. The metal bends too easy, maybe a thin coat of a metal epoxy would help before drilling. It uses 3 AAAs for power, and with a 68 ohm resistor drops the voltage to 3.3 at the LEDs.

I’m ordering 100 LEDs (21,000 mcd) from Hong Kong. I don’t have an immediate need for 100 of them, so I might sell half off on eBay to offset the cost.

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I gave you a taste of the shuffle function a few posts ago, here’s the finished script. Well, finished enough to work. There could be more error checking and it could write the songs to a list so you know what’s on the CD, but for my purposes it works great.

To start with I choose some music that I want to shuffle, or if I’m feeling adventurous I’ll just use my full playlist. To make a quick playlist from your mp3 collection try something like the following command.

# find /mnt/mp3/P.O.D. -name '*mp3' -size +1024k > pod.m3u

This should find all the mp3s in the P.O.D. directory greater than 1MB. I usually set a minimum file size to prevent things like greetings, hidden empty tracks that often get ripped, and very short songs.

I’m not going to try quoting the script here because it’s rather long and I’m finding some problems with the way characters are being displayed on some browser. It’s commented quite well and should be easy to read. If you have any questions, email me or post comments here. My email address is anton at lr2 dot com.

shuffle.001.sh

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This is going to be another simple lamp, but with better power management and a different form. I’ve seen some “puck” shaped lights on the net, namely the Indium from Angus Noble that retails for about $80.

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