Welcome to SWB Labs Displaying: Arduino

When I asked my daughter what she wanted to be on Halloween she said she wanted to have an LED dress like Katy Perry. After some discussion, it seemed that we’d need a white dress that both diffused but ... [More]

When they were first introduced, I ordered a couple of Adafruit’s NeoPixel Rings that have 16 RGB LEDs in a 1.75″ diameter ring. I hadn’t decided exactly how I was going to use them but when I saw Phil ... [More]

I was inspired by Phil Burgess' great electronic mask project and knew I had to build one of my own.  The project is detailed in a combination of Adafruit tutorials on Animating Multiple LED Backpacks ... [More]

In my last post, I explored alarm monitoring using the Raspberry Pi and Arduino.  I thought I'd give the Electric Imp a try as well.  The Electric Imp is a WiFi module and Cortex-M3 processor built into ... [More]

I spotted a post by Lior Hass on Hackaday a little while back where he described his Alarmino project where his alarm system now connects with an Arduino and a custom board to simulate the phone line and interpret Contact-ID ... [More]

I was reading the April 2012 issue of Elektor and spotted an article by Ludovic Mézière on building a Thermometer using Giant Gottlieb® Displays.  I was really intrigued by his use of large mechanical ... [More]

I was playing a game of Connect4 with my daughter one day and it occurred to me there might be a nice way of sensing the moves in the physical game in order to introduce a computer player. Looking at the ... [More]

I happen to have some old 12 inch optical disks made of glass. So when I saw Terry and Adam Clarkson's ClockOS project on Kickstarter, I recognized the potential for an awesome clock!The ClockOS board ... [More]

I first saw Pololu's 3pi robot in action at MakerFaire 2009.  It was an impressive and agile line follower with a well-designed compact body.  I brought one home and came to realize that it was even quicker ... [More]

The Secret Knock Gumball Machine is a project I built from the plans and instructions from Steve Hoefer's article in Make magazine (volume 25). Gumballs are dispensed only to those who use the secret knock ... [More]

I met the Macetech guys at Makerfaire 2009 in San Mateo and picked up a number of ShiftBrites.  This was my first of several multi-RGB LED projects.  I decided to array the 16 Shift Brites I had into a ... [More]

After attending Adrian Crenshaw's talk at DefCon18 (slides, video) on using the Teensy as an exploit tool, I was inspired to give it a try.  I took a Teensy and added an RGB LED, photo sensor, DIP switches, ... [More]

I was intrigued by Mikal's article on his Reverse Geocache Puzzle Box from Make issue 25.  This is a box which will open only in a very specific place (as determined by its internal GPS system).  The LCD ... [More]

My daughter wanted to dress as Hermione Granger for the Halloween party at her school. We thought we'd jazz it up a bit with a special book she could hold -- one which might play the Harry Potter theme ... [More]

As part of a larger project I had a need for an inexpensive XY table.  I've built a couple of high-precision CNCs before but in this case I didn't need such high accuracy and was willing to make some compromises ... [More]