Blinking a few LEDs… how hard can it be? As it turned out, harder than I thought it would be! As the LEDs draw about 1W each, and I am using 48 per lamp, thermal management is the main challenge. The desired function is simple enough – a controller that …

Lamps come in all sorts of shapes and sizes. For this first design, I wanted something relatively simple and small, but easily scalable to larger designs later if necessary. What I settled on is a rectangular desk lamp made out of acrylic panels, with LED chips, mounted on a custom …

Welcome to the first post of the blog series on Project UnnaturalLight, an LED lamp with adjustable colour temperature. Many Shades of White The sun changes colour throughout the day, as observed from a fixed point on Earth. In the morning, it looks orange/red, and as the day goes on, …

Rumour had it that one of the big Internet companies decommissioned and sold a bunch of their dual-socket servers at the end of 2015, and sent the second hand prices of some really nice Xeons plummeting to 10-20% the prices they were going for before. I didn’t hear about this …

Welcome to the first tutorial post! It’s a topic many people have asked me about, so I thought why not make it into a tutorial? It’s something I’ve spent a lot of time learning the hard way, and in the end, it’s actually pretty simple! It’s about switching loads. We …

Most modern mirrors are made out of one of two materials – silvered glass or mirror acrylic. They are constructed similarly – silver backing applied to one side of a transparent material (either glass or acrylic). Light enters through the transparent material, and gets reflected back by the silver backing. …

The only difference between screwing around and science is writing it down. –  Alex Jason to Adam Savage This blog turns my screwing around into science! I used to be a professional electronics/embedded engineer, and now work as a machine learning research engineer. But this blog is not about that. …