http://www.mattvenn.net music, improvisation, technology, design Sun, 29 Jan 2012 16:20:18 +0000 http://backend.userland.com/rss092 en Check the new maze puzzle box video here! The new site design will be going live in a few weeks... Thanks to James Baudouy at JimJam productions for shooting and editing the video. http://www.mattvenn.net/2012/01/29/new-video/ New designs for puzzle boxes by Gavin Wilshen. http://www.mattvenn.net/2011/12/22/new-logos-and-graphics-for-puzzle-boxes/ Last night of our excellent Haxmas in Leeds with Stuart, Dave and Scott. We made high voltage levitators, polargraphs, tesla coils, puzzle boxes, laser cut flexiwood notebooks, solar rainbow makers, and chocolate molds! Check the photos here. One of the great things was that we were all able to trade ideas and ... http://www.mattvenn.net/2011/12/22/happy-haxmas/ Finally finished my latest electronic track - this one features Crimzon Green (vocals) and Seb from Orange Way (guitar) [audio:/electronic/please dont play us.mp3] http://www.mattvenn.net/2011/11/08/please-dont-play-us/ I love it when I get to the stage of a project where I can finesse it! The maze puzzle box is now in its 15th iteration after a year's progressive design improvements. In this update I've improved the looks by removing all the visible cut marks on the top surface. ... http://www.mattvenn.net/2011/11/05/enhanced-style-puzzle-box/ This aim of this project is to build a small, adjustable DC/DC converter with an input from 1v -> 5v and an output of 5v->12v at up to 1.2A. With a 3v to 9v conversion at 1A it is 85% efficient. Photos taken during the design process are here. After much ... http://www.mattvenn.net/2011/09/26/dc-booster-pcb/ Understanding energy is difficult, even for engineers - as we can’t see, feel or touch it. Conventional home energy monitors try to address this through representations in numbers, screens or bar charts, but many of us aren’t inspired by this! The Polargraph Energy Monitor creates a physical record of our energy ... http://www.mattvenn.net/2011/09/19/polargraph-energy-monitoring/ Make a fun spiral drawing robot out of an old floppy drive and arduino! Here is the instructable. http://www.mattvenn.net/2011/08/24/floppy-drawbot/ Getting round to posting up some of my new improvisations on soundcloud. Granular bass by matthewvenn http://www.mattvenn.net/2011/07/25/soundclouds/ It's my 100th post! And to celebrate I've started monitoring my gas consumption! I'm using a hall effect sensor to spot when the dial turns on my gas meter, sending that via an xbee to a nanode. This then uploads the data to pachube, which provides the pretty graphs! Electricity ... http://www.mattvenn.net/2011/07/11/gas-monitoring-with-nanode-xbee-and-pachube/