After years of using a traditional WordPress site for jumpoff.io, when it came time for a redesign of JumpOff’s own site, I decided not just to build a new theme. I wanted to provide a better browsing experience by incorporating more modern web development technologies while still using WordPress to manage my content. What I ended up with is a Netlify hosted React web app fetching data from a WordPress install via GraphQL...

Flocking simulations approximate the behaviors of birds, or fish, or whatever other agents might move and flock to one another. By giving each individual agent a simple set of rules to follow, very interesting and beautiful patterns will emerge in the flock. The flock will often appear to be moving as one single conscious organism, when in reality it is an emergent phenomenon caused by many smaller organisms’ following simple rules...

This is a quick update on the Throw project. It’s still moving along. The photo-transistors (sensors) are wired and working, and I’m able to read all 72 of them in under the millisecond that I needed! Here’s the wiring setup for that. Of course they won’t be plugged directly into the breadboard like this in the final product...

In a party-line vote, Republicans voted to roll back regulations passed during Obama’s terms that would have prevented Internet Service Providers from selling all your internet traffic information without your consent. The act was called “Restoring Internet Freedom,” but “Destroying Internet Privacy” would have been a more accurate title...

In the last post, we successfully got a laser/sensor pair working with the laser tripwire test. This is great, but my design calls for 72 of these tripwires (36 on the X-axis and 36 on the Y-axis). Unfortunately, the Arduino Uno only has 14 digital input/output pins. So we need to find a way to read signals from 72 phototransistors with only 14 IO pins to work with. In this post, we’ll be testing a method of reading many inputs with just a few Digital Input pins...