Tim’s Blog

Wii Remote Projects

I saw this on the internet and decided I needed to buy a “Wiimote” (a controller for the Nintendo Wii). I started at the top of the page and went down. Each video described a more awesome thing than the one before it. I want to play around with it and get the IR camera working as a mouse under Linux. Currently I don’t have any time for personal projects, so we’ll see what happens.

Last weekend my sisters came and visited me. We had a good time (or at least I did) seeing the sites of Bozeman. We went on a hike, went to the Museum of the Rockies, toured campus, tried to go rock climbing and made some good food.

So far this week I have spent an average of 6 hours a day in lab. I have 3 classes with labs this semester: Circuits II (EE207), Logic Design (EE367) and Real-time Microcontroller Applications (EE465). This week has been especially bad for my microcontrollers class. I have spent about 4 hours every day this week programming assembly in the digital lab. We had a big project due today, and the next project is due a week from today. It never ends.

For Christmas I got a RFID reader and an assortment of tags. It has been a very fun toy to play with. I mounted the RFID reader at the entrance of my room and attached it to my desktop with a long USB cable.

A C program runs in the background of my computer and when a RFID tag is read, it executes a shell script with the 40 bit encoded number as an argument. The shell script then compares the code read to the code for the RFID tag I keep in my wallet. When I walk into my room, I brush my wallet against the reader and my computer unlocks. When I leave my room, my computer locks. For feedback, I have a sound play when I leave the room, and a random song starts playing when I enter the room.

This is the setup that I have been dreaming about for a long time. Now I have a security card for my room.

So I finally did it. I decided to scrap my old website and switch to Wordpress. It took a little bit of work to get all of my posts transfered, but with a short PHP script, I am pretty sure that I got everything. The change was prompted by some comment spam that I was getting on my old website, instead of changing my old code, I decided to scrap it entirely. Now this page is hosted from my house in Bozeman, instead of on my Dad’s server in Bellevue. Since it is now hosted from my room, the uptime may not be as good as it was before.