This was my last take on a circuit to drive the Sawyer Star, an 8×8 LED array that I have spent more than three years adapting from work from more than a dozen people — before I gave up. This schematic is basically the one drawn by Mike Ardai (N1ist) for his Color Stick project. I changed [...]

Hmm. Sixteen months. My how time flies when you aren’t posting to a blog. Life happens and my involvement in designing things that flashed LEDs wavered with my inability to get a working prototype for the Sawyer Star, a 64-LED array/matrix that is to be driven by

Last July I wrote about using Adobe Illustrator to design the schematics I publish here and why I prefer it (you can read that post here). In recent weeks I’ve come to realize two things: despite a great deal of effort on my part, I can’t really design printed circuit boards with Illustrator, and I [...]

It’s been a few months since I last posted here … I don’t think there are any constant visitors who’ve been bummed out about the lack of activity, but I apologize nonetheless. Since we last spoke I threw the LED matrix project out to the Do It Yourself Christmas community to see if I could [...]

For those of the opinion that I fell off the face of the earth, fear not: I merely got involved in non-electronics, such as dealing with a kitchen remodel and unwell pets. That said, I also focused a bit in recent months on my Christmas lights show and have documented there a few of the [...]

It isn’t that I was dying to have a blog — in fact, I’ve tried to stay away from blogging for years. A few months back it became clear that this electronics thing wasn’t going to go away. I was, in fact, going to be building more circuits over time and perhaps even designing them. [...]