The Narrative

Mosaic of things that draw life from light: finishing a project

Posted on by charlie

Back in May, I mentioned a project that I was working on, inspired from a line in a book, leading me to hack solar deck lights.

I just want to say that I finally put it all together. I made two candlelight-like motions-sensing solar-charged pieces, and one pice that also had LEDs for blinking like firelflies.

An aside: Fireflies?
A few years back, I made a gizmo that would turn on at dusk and blink a firefly pattern. Alas, it was only a single LED, and a very crumple circuit.

For this latest project, I also wanted to do LEDs flashing, but chose to do six lights, randomly flashing, all to the same firefly pattern.

I will admit that I used ChatGPT to help me figure out the blink patterns and then program it. Alas, I first asked ChatGPT to program in CircuitPython, so I could use my Raspberry Pi PICO. But something wasn’t right and I think I fried two of them. SO I chose to them just do it with an Arduino Nano clone. ChatGPT was kind enough to convert the code (tho, don’t tell it that it did a mediocre job and I had to clean up the code).

In the end, the third part of the project was a candle-light motion-sensing solar-charged piece that also blinked for fireflies.

The other light-driven part
Now that I had the three solar-power parts, I filled up a flowerpot and spread wildflowers around (see image, right).

And waited. Until the flowers grew.

Now I have a pretty flowerpot with flowers that draw life from light and three candle-light electronics that draw life from light (see upper left image for dusk and day views).

Now to send a note to Becky.

Strategy

Going with the reflow: building my own oven for Level One Manufacturing

Posted on by charlie

A while back I read an interesting article that placed hobbyists making things (Level 1 – 1-100 units) on the same axis as big manufactures (Level 3 – 5000+ units) [as an aside, the writer now has a robust 7+ person company making tools for Level 2 manufacturing].

I’m definitely in the Level 1 side of things. I often make just one of something.

But in the world of electronics, often you end up with multiple boards for really cheap or you want to make a few dozen of one board for your own use. Assembling things and soldering components is a pain at that scale, especially if you want to use the more compact surface mounted components, and especially if those surface mount components are really teeny.

Easy Bake
I find being able to use free tools to design a circuit board, easily print the boards, and then use cheap components to build your own circuitboard as a kind of superpower. The range of creations out there that anyone can design and build is wonderful. (can I interest you in #badgelife?)

What a lot of folks do when they have a bunch of boards is either use a hot gun to solder a boardful of components, or do as the pros do: use an oven.

There are hacks and such of folks manually reflowing the solder, following a solder reflow profile of different temperatures. But the ease of tools-beget-tools means there are controllers one can use to automate the oven process.

Unexpected purchase
In the process of moving house, my mother had a toaster oven that no one needed, so I claimed it specifically to make a reflow oven. [🤔Hm, I wonder if I would have ever started along this path to making an oven if I didn’t have this free toaster].

I then picked up a controller from a great guy, who, by the way, went thru the three layers of manufacturing in the past seven or so years – he’s now a Level 3. Indeed, the origin of his reflow oven controller was from his time as a Level 1, before he bought a proper oven as he stepped up to Level 2.

I ripped out the guts of the toaster, rewired it to be directed by the controller, and ran a test run.

Alas, seemed like my oven (in green) couldn’t keep to the desired temp profile (in pink).

I did some reading. Saw a lot about oven volume and element strength, insulation.

So I figured I need to insulate the oven big time and get things in order.

Interesting but a non-experiment
I wrapped the insides in a insulating blanket, plugged up some holes, added some reflectors. And then, excited, ran the test run again.

WTF. No better than uninsulated. Then I see that the controller maker never insulated his oven. And thinking of it, the time frame is so short, probably doesn’t make a difference (which of course the data supports).

Then I wondered if my two elements just couldn’t hit the temps, even though they should.

A test run at really hight temps showed that the elements and oven are more than able to reach the temps in time, albeit, not matching the desired curve.

Then, in what are those, ‘fuck, why did it only occur to me now after all the work I put in?’ moments, I realized I could tweak the controller to hit the needed reflow temps by just raising the desired temps in the controller profile.

Worked. Now, even though (left below) the pink measured temp don’t match the green desired temps, I am hitting the right temps for my reflow.

Indeed, I was able to match the required temp curve for my solder paste reflow profile (right below).

Keep calm and make something
Of course, all this was leading up to a board I wanted to make.

As this was the first board I made in a reflow oven, I learned a lot in the process: This was my first proper project to use solder paste, meaning getting a stencil and making a jig to hold things. The components were the smallest I’ve ever used. The board was double-sided, so needed a tricky two rounds of reflow. The chips had closely spaced pins, so needed to clean that up – rework. And I had some thru-hole parts that had to be added, that were easy peasy.

And, yes, the product worked as designed. And that’s why I made it myself as there was no one selling something similar. Fortunately for me, someone had designed this one and graciously made the design available.

What’s next?
Funny thing is, when I bought the controller a while back, I had a lot of ideas on things I wanted to make. But now, my head is elsewhere and the oven has not been used since the run of a few copies of the board above.

Hm, could also be that the price of just having someone else assemble the boards is falling fast, and, well, after buying all the oven and components and boards and all, and putting in the time needed, this board might have been cheaper just having it assembled for me. This also means perhaps I now have a higher hurdle to make it worthwhile to use the oven.

Let’s see.

From China with Love
As with most purchases of boards and components from China, when you want only one, you end up getting more than 10 of everything (soo inexpensive!). Therefore, I still have a handful of extra unassembled boards. I might just complete all those and sell them (at cost, most likely, as they were not designed by me).

And for the boards I had in mind way back when, I think I will have to balance the cost of me assembling them verses someone else in China doing it.

Looking back and ahead
Two things are constant in the maker world.

One is, why buy it when you can make it for more?

Two is, often it’s the journey that counts, not the destination. In the process of doing, you learn, you share, you discover new things that open new doors.

I did spend a pretty penny on building that reflow oven and making one copy of that board. And who knows if I will ever make that money back in savings making my own boards, in these days of cheap assembly. Nonetheless, I do feel the whole journey was fascinating, granted me a whole level of abilities, and opened up a range of new things I can do.

Let’s see where that path of this journey takes me next.

The Narrative

Is the future of the web the past?

Posted on by charlie

Elizabeth Lopato has been on a roll. I feel she’s been the Prophetess of Web 3.0. She’s written a series of great articles on “the decay of Google Search and, with it, the findability of archive material; the destruction of Twitter by the coward Elon Musk; the AI glurge polluting the open web; the needless login prompts.”

Two recent articles she’s written tie together for me: the demise of Web 2.0 and the out of control time-suck of the torrent of Web 2.0 on our phones.

Get in, loser, we’re going back to Web 1.0. We have the opportunity to get out from under the algorithms. So maybe it’s time to think about what a web of people looks like now.

Source: What would the internet of people look like now? – The Verge

The wicked witch is dead, Jim
In the past year, Elizabeth has articulated so well the unravelling and dysfunction on the web. She compares that to the early days of the web (say, pre-2005) where the ubiquity of phones and feeds didn’t exist. And she rues the dominance of the algorithms from behemoth controllers of the internet.

I was there on those early days (this blog has a lot of commentary from back then). We were excited about closer social connections across space and time, of democratizing content creation for all, of breaking the shackles of powerful incumbents.

Alas, we changed one set of shackles for another. And, as anyone knows who builds selection algorithms, be careful what you select for.

Phone it in
And back then I was an ambassador to the new world of carrying a smartphone, hovering up your life thru notes, pictures, and videos and sharing them with the world (indeed, part of a team building such an app). I also took it to the next level, promoting (actually, also trying to build) the brave new world of finding, mixing, and publishing social feeds online.

Ah, the hope of it.

Dyst-hope-ia
Well, you know where that got us.

Elizabeth echoes so much of where I’ve been going. I got off of all social media. Hang out now in bulletin-boards, aka Discord. I mostly use my phone for group chats and looking up information. And lots of phone calls.

We’re not alone
Elizabeth is not just articulating a personal feeling she senses, but has tapped into the zeitgeist. Just check out the enthusiasm in the comments of her article (OMG, interesting and considerate comments – how early-days Web 2.0).

There’s hope for where we go from here.

I, for one, have been trying to get back my blogging mojo from the early days of this blog. I think I also need to get better at reading other folks’ blogs.

Maybe the future of the web is to go back to the past of the web. Indeed, Elizabeth exhorts folks to avail of the new tools that make it easier than ever to build their own internet, with their own friends, and connect to the people that matter.

I like that.

Now get out and touch some grass.

 

Image from my post “Foreground:Background. Can watches save us from our phone attention deficit disorder?” Note _everyone_ at the station is looking at their phone. And the more folks around me looking at their phone, the less likely I pull my phone out. This is one of those instance, s’sure.

Strategy/The Narrative

Will adding AI to note-taking apps make us better thinkers?

Posted on by charlie

Casey Newton from The Verge has an interesting ‘state of note-taking apps’ article. Prompted by the arrival of generative AI, he looks back at his use of note-taking apps and ponder the use of actually thinking with them.

the arrival of generative artificial intelligence could make the tools we use more powerful than ever — or they could turn out to be just another mirage.

Source: Why note-taking apps don’t make us smarter – The Verge

Memory vs insight
I’m an inveterate note-taker.

I’ve been a daily user of Evernote for something like 15 years. And even before that, I had some sort of database or collection of digital notes of some sort.

I wouldn’t say I use Evernote for great insights, since, as Casey points out, note-taking apps are not really geared for that. I do use it as an outboard memory, saving snippets of things I later search for.

I also use it as my lab notebook, for all my maker projects (and perhaps some other projects I want to capture process for). Tho, a few months (and projects) had passed before I realized I should be documenting my work like I did on paper as a grad student and post-doc.

AI?
Evernote has added some sort of AI summarization feature, which I have still to try out. I suppose I am not so much interested in a summary of a single note, but perhaps a summary of multiple notes.

Tho, as Casey points out, while wishing for something similar, the nature of AI summaries these days leaves much to be desired.

In the end, Casey realizes that expecting a piece of software to do the thinking for you is the wrong path to try. “Thinking takes place in your brain,” he says. And “it is a process that stubbornly resists automation.”

Indeed.

Tool use
He then refers to Andy Matuschak, a thinking on notes and note-taking:

“The goal is not to take notes — the goal is to think effectively,” Matuschak writes. “Better questions are ‘what practices can help me reliably develop insights over time?’ [and] ‘how can I shepherd my attention effectively?’”

Source: Why note-taking apps don’t make us smarter – The Verge

In a way, that’s how I approach any tool – how does a particular tool fit into the habits I have to achieve something? In the case of notes, I am constantly evaluating the value of Evernote and other options for how I collect, save, navigate, and recombine my morsels of information (heck, Evernote is quite good at screwing things up and forcing all their users to question Evernote’s value, haha).

Right now, after so long using Evernote, I have a way that works for me. And there are only a few tweaks I’d do to Evernote to better fit how I use it (alas, many are features that were lost – say, support for GIFs, or modern document and card scanning).

Future?
What would I want AI to do in Evernote?

Not sure. Of course, some sort of overlay to organize info and find connections, rather than a co-writer, would be useful (maybe like the nascent NotebookLM Google?).

I really don’t want it to try to be smarter or as smart as me.

BASAAP is always much better for an assistive digital tool.

Let’s start there.

The Narrative

Galt’s Gulch? Freeside? The Raft? AKA: Rich people fleeing

Posted on by charlie

Update below (04sep23)

This article got me thinking of Galt’s Gulch in Rand’s Atlas Shrugged, or Freeside in Gibson’s Neuromancer: places the wealthy run off to to escape mainstream society. Indeed, what this article talks about isn’t something that echoes these fictions, this is an actual escapist effort in our own reality.

Reid Hoffman, Marc Andreessen, and Laurene Powell Jobs reportedly all contributed to the venture to build a new city with ‘tens of thousands of new homes’ and ‘orchards with over a million new trees.’

Source: Tech leaders spent $800 million trying to build new city beside San Francisco – The Verge

“Impact of privilege and isolation”
I was trying to remember other similar books that had this or something similar as a plot tool, such as in Sagan’s Contact or Stephenson’s Snow Crash. So I had a conversation with ChatGPT about this and then had it summarize a few for me:

Certainly, the concept of wealthy individuals or groups leaving mainstream society to establish their own secluded enclaves is a recurring theme in literature. Here are a few more examples of such settings from various novels:

“The Diamond Age: Or, A Young Lady’s Illustrated Primer” by Neal Stephenson: In this novel, there are gated communities known as “phyles,” which are separate cultural and societal groups. Each phyle has its own rules, norms, and values. Some of these phyles are quite wealthy and have their own advanced technologies.

“Jennifer Government” by Max Barry: The novel is set in a dystopian future where corporations have replaced governments. There are affluent enclaves where company employees live, separated from the general population. The divide between the wealthy and the rest of society is stark.

“Snow Crash” by Neal Stephenson: While not exactly a refuge for the rich, this novel features the “Raft,” a massive floating city made up of scavenged materials, home to a diverse range of people including refugees and outcasts. It’s an example of an alternate society outside the mainstream.

“The Circle” by Dave Eggers: While not a gated haven, the novel explores a powerful tech company that seeks to create an all-encompassing online community where people live their lives. The company’s influence blurs the lines between private and public spaces.

“Super Sad True Love Story” by Gary Shteyngart: This satirical novel portrays a future where society is deeply divided between the technologically elite and those who are left behind. The wealthy elite live in protected enclaves with advanced technology, further isolating themselves from the rest of the population.

“Parable of the Sower” by Octavia E. Butler: While not centered around wealthy individuals, the novel explores the concept of intentional communities known as “acorn” communities, where people come together to create self-sufficient and sustainable communities in the face of societal collapse.

These novels offer various takes on the idea of exclusive enclaves, intentional communities, or alternative societies created by the wealthy or powerful. While the nature and motivations behind these settings might differ, they all contribute to the exploration of social dynamics and the impact of privilege and isolation.

Truth v fiction
Sometimes you read things in sci-fi and just can’t think it could be real. But then sometimes sci-fi is really just a mirror to help us see what is happening around us in our own reality.

  

Update 04sep23: And more ‘California Forever’ website touts the city tech billionaires are trying to build
Update 03sep23: Interesting new developments on Boston.com Billionaires’ secretive plan to build a new city is backfiring

Image from Randian OSI

The Narrative

Does the generation of AI have to be so grim?

Posted on by charlie

How many humans does it take to make tech seem human? Millions.

Source: Inside the AI Factory: the humans that make tech seem human – The Verge

Back in 2005-2006 I already saw that there was going to be a need for humans to be in the loop, specifically for annotating data to contextualize the quickly growing content and social streams on the web.

I used to say there were three ways to add context to data: just watching what folks do, tagging as you go about your day (Delicious was big back then), and what I called ‘librarian’ duty – actually having folks annotate data to provide context.

Benign benefits?
Fast forward to 2016 and I was working with a company that was using AI to annotate medical notes. I started thinking again about annotation in general and was wondering if there was some way we could employ folks to annotate. What’s more, realizing that, for so much annotation, you really just needed a human, regardless of education level, I had envisioned a benign system where the annotation was educational and beneficial to the annotator.

I kept thinking of places like West Virginia, where there were deep shifts in society as the coal industry fell apart. What if we could not only tap into all these unemployed, who would have more than enough skills to annotate, being human and all, and, through the annotation process, educate them, provide them with skills to help them into their next non-coal job?

Then reality catches up
So it goes without saying that this article in the Verge really struck me hard.

Of course, if the tech-bros could find a way to pay by piece or sweatshop their growth, they would.

And now we have the sad backstory to all our amazing AI of today.

Will the ethics of the generation of the AI contextualizations and annotations become a larger topic for discussion? Will companies use the ethics of their annotation as a marketing differentiator? Will there be a label or rating for ‘ethicallly annotated AI’ (“no humans were harmed in the creation of this AI”)?

All I know is that we’re missing an opportunity to actually make annotation useful to the annotator as well. And I think that’s a fantasy world I’ll never see.

The Narrative

I see so much of my own past in how Google Reader died

Posted on by charlie

Great article looking back at the growth and termination of Google Reader.

Google Reader was supposed to be much more than a tool for nerds. But it never got the chance.

Source: How Google Reader died — and why the web misses it more than ever – The Verge

I was a big Google Reader user and also used it as an example of the morselization of the web, at the time. I also thought there was a need to have some sort of aggregator for all the content and people in our lives.

And, I must say, I also was a victim of being a Cassandra in a large organization that had bigger issues and scale requirements to tackle.

I sometimes forget that even folks who have all the money and all the smarts also fail spectacularly. Good to know I’m not alone.

The Narrative

Social media’s end: a long decline seems so sudden

Posted on by charlie

Maybe we should all embrace the downfall of social networks, and maybe my (and our) need for a global water cooler is just a vestigial feeling we’ll all be rid of in a few years. But even before this era fully ends, before Twitter and Reddit turn into MySpace and Friendfeed and basically disappear from my life, I find myself longing for what they once were. Still are, maybe, just not for long. I miss everybody, and I don’t know if I’ll ever find them again.

from So where are we all supposed to go now? (The Verge)

I was there in the heady days of 2004-2007. We saw that we were all becoming compulsive data capturers (text, video, images), that data was emanating from us like contrails as we went thru life, that the internet was breaking up into morsels, and we’d all want to search for, keep up with, and recombine those streams and morsels.* And we were watching in real time as a billion people took up mobile phones, changing expectations of connection, communication, and access to information.

We talked about social objects, ambient awareness, digital pheromones, the mobile lifestyle (and manifesto, haha), lifestreams, tight-loose-pubilic connections, the mobile aspect of sensors. I even tried to capture all this in one story I wrote called “One Night“.

And the phone, already the best peer to peer social networking tool, would be the doorway to all of that (disclaimer, I was at Nokia at the time).

I even tried to build upon that doorway, reflecting what I thought was the future of connecting people.

Rotten at the foundations
While actively promoting and using social media, as the growing beast was named, I quickly soured on it. Already back in 2008 I had killed my LinkedIn and Facebook for the first time. I became more particular of who and how I used social media. I became more a corporate user than a personal user.

I recall, also, seeing how the promise of the Cloud was actually corporate control in disguise. “Take back the Cloud” was my call to federate social media networks, put it back in the hands of the users. Yes, almost 15 years ago.

Suddenly after a long time
In the past few months, rotten foundations have finally crumbled spectacularly. Now everyone is finally pointing at the emperors for the bare villains they are.

Twitter is the poster child for this implosion. But for years folks have been circling around social media companies – government, commentators, tech publications – realizing that, really, we selected for the wrong things and ended up with the shit we selected for.

There have been some good articles listing out the process of ‘enshittification‘ of social media networks. There’s hope that maybe Mastadon and ActivityPub** – ways to federate social media networks – are the future, the savior. Alas, I think that’s trying to do the same thing a different way – might not be enough to fix what’s broke.

Where from here?
Go read this article, that I’ve quoted above. The article has a good overview of the long overdue collapse of social media and ponders what remains and where things might go.

Echoing a bit the quote I use above, I hope that we don’t try to redo the past 10 years in another form only to fall back into our bad habits (“be careful what you select for”). What I hope is that we understand the situation and potential outcomes and ask ourselves what is it we want (our hopes), what we don’t want (our fears), the tradeoffs we’re willing to make and not make, and what course of action best serves that understanding.

I’m not the one to answer these questions, even tho I do have my own answers.

I just know that we shouldn’t try to rebuild what we had in different clothes, that doing something over and over again and expecting a different result is nuts.

I also know the suddenness of the social media networks collapses were long in the making and the majors were laughing all the way to the bank (just see the date on my links above).

He’s dead, Jim
Technologies never really die, they just end up being de-emphasied. People still use buggies and buggy whips, but not like before. Don’t mention faxes to me. Even Myspace is still around.

And every year we have some darling tech that changes our expectations of what communication, connection, and information should be like.

I look forward to see what comes next, what the complexification of our connections, society, and organizations will look like, and who the next behemoths leading them will be.

What about you?

Image courtesy of DALL-E. Prompt “the death of social media as a dense collage”. I chose this one perhaps because I just finished watching Season 4 of Stranger Things and that sure looks like a gate.

 

*This article on Google Reader also triggered me to make this post.

**This is not the first attempt. As the article rightly points out, folks have been working the last 15 years on distributed social network protocols (heck, just see my comment on lifestream aggregators).

Innovation

Work in progress: Life from light

Posted on by charlie

I try to only post after I’ve completed a project, but this one has so many pieces (and is not done yet) that I wanted to already post some interesting things that have happened.

Inspiration
In Becky Chambers’ “A Psalm for the Wild-Built“, the main characters reach a mountain retreat. The imagery of the description of the building’s roof, striped with solar panels and grass, was described as:

glossy blue contrasting with buzzing green, an attractive striped mosaic made of things that drew life from light

Inspired, I set off to make something that mixed solar panels and plants – things that draw life from light.

Grand hack
I started ruminating on mosaics, solar panels, lights. I searched for examples in architecture, arts, flower pots, and even asked DALL-E to help out (see some images, right).

I considered what the project ‘said’. For example, I wanted to do construct it in PLA filament, because PLA filament broke down in the sun. I even dabbled, unsuccessfully, with wood PLA, to make it seem more natural.

Thinking of the hardware, my previous solar panel project had these small panels and supercapacitors to power a power-sipping chip and a single LED. I could use those and wire those up, like before.

I then started to think of larger panels and batteries, to drive more power-hungry NeoPixels, that would be animated with a fully-powered chip. That would require a proper battery, tho not LiPo, as that doesn’t do well in the cold, some charging circuit, maybe a beefier solar panel.

Then I realized I had some solar-powered outdoor lights on my deck and porch. They had come in a pack of six and we had only used five. So, yep, I busted the remaining one open.

Just for parts
These solar-powered outdoor light have a large solar panel, a panel of LEDs, a motion sensor, a button switch, a large 1800mAh LiIon battery (that I know works thru the winter), and, inside, a board to control, charge, and respond to everything.

All the parts I needed for $5.

I analyzed all the chips and paths on the board, to reverse engineer how it works. The brains of the board is an 8-pin chip. I was able to figure out all the traces, how the chip read the solar panel’s state, turned on LEDs, and responded to the motion sensor and button switch. And I could measure and follow the power paths.

As is usual in this day and age, there was a video that did a tear down of a similar product. That product had more LEDs and a more complicated structure, but the board characteristics and function were very similar to the one I had. And the video was helpful in confirming what I was seeing and understanding the parts.

Layer upon layer of surprises
I was really pleased that I could use the board to power things – all the parts I needed in one place, all ready for me to use.

But the real surprise was when I noticed the VCC and GND pins of the chip (pin 1 and pin 8, respectively) reminded me of one of my favorites: the ATtiny402. Not only were those two principle pins the same, but the footprint was the same. That meant I could remove the existing chip for one my own that I could program and use to take control of the board.

To be fair, the ATtiny402 isn’t a perfect fit for this board. Pin 6 on the board turns on the LED panel. In the ATtiny402, that is the programming pin, best left like that, tho it can be programmed for a signal pin (but not so good). In any case, there might be some bodging needed.

Sidebar surprise
Interestingly, identifying an unknown chip, based on pin mapping, is hard. I just happened to be browsing Hackaday and they were talking about cheap MCUs. One thing led to another and I was checking out the cheap chips on LCSC when I got the idea to 1) filter for SOIC-8 (the chip package on the board); 2) look at the data sheets for the cheapest. Yes, I was looking for a possible chip from the solar light.

Wouldn’t you know, the three four five six cheapest (three different vendors) that came up ALL had VCC on pin 1 and GND on pin 8. And these are ALL 8-pin SOIC150/SOP150 – the same size as on the board..

Cool!

Interestingly, four of the six were OTP – “one-time-programming.” I will guess that the ones used in the solar lights were of the same category of these cheap OTP chips.

Sidebar of the sidebar
The UPDI programmer I had for the 402 was no longer working, and I had a bunch of bricked 402s I wanted to revive, so I decided to make a HV UPDI programmer. And rather than cobble something together, I thought I’d make a proper programmer board.

I ordered the PCB for this board and got the components, only to find that the components were frakkin’ small and impossible for me to hand-solder with the equipment I had.

In the spirit of “When you give a mouse a cookie“, I realized I had to finally make use of my toaster-oven reflow oven. Tho, to make a long story short, my first test suggested I had to do some heavy insulation of the oven. I plunked down money to get the materials, insulated the oven, and nothing changed. Then I just tweaked the reflow profile and all was good.

Gah.

Alas, I am about to use the reflow oven – I haven’t had much time to do it properly. But I hope after spending money on a bunch of boards, components, oven insulation, and the reflow controller (which I’ve had for a while), I’ll get one decent (and damn expensive, haha) Serial HV UPDI programmer.

Back to the main story
In any case, not satisfied with my pace of making the oven, I just decided to build something.

After a few iterations, I came up with a patterned translucent case to hold the switch and motion sensor, the solar panel, battery, and the control board. I then soldered it all back together and used it to power an ATtiny45 animating a fire-like flicker with NeoPixels (everything shoved in the case, image, right).

The battery and solar panel are plugged into the board as usual. And the motion sensor and switch work as usual, telling the board’s chip how to behave, time out the lights, detect the state of the solar panels. The chip thinks it’s turning on the LEDs, but instead it powers the ATtiny45, which then animates the NeoPixels (see image of it lit up at top).

The light was well received. Tho, of course, I am fighting the temptation to keep iterating on it.

In progress
You might be wondering why I called this “in progress” if I built something cool. With the sidebar of the sidebar and mice and cookies, you’d be forgiven for forgetting the impetus of this project.

The inspiration was for a mosaic, and I have only hacked the solar lights so far. I want to make a few more of these lights and integrate them, as originally planned, with some plants or grass.

Not to mention, I hope to get around to assembling that HV UPDI programmer so I can hack the board with my own chip.

So, we’re not done yet.