Darryl Lai

In regards to the last post, I’ve gone live with a site for a client. The website is for a new iteration for an existing book about flight attendants and their history. It’s quite a fascinating coffee table book and has some great pictures to boot. Airline and flight aficionados need to see this if they haven’t already. Anyway, the website is built on the default WordPress Twenty Eleven theme with many theme modifications. Some of them include:

• Moved the page navigation to the top
• Customized the header for a header image logo and background
• The showcase feature template is modified for use as a author slider and landing page
• Custom template for full page width

There’s tons of minor things but overall, I really enjoyed using Twentyeleven, great theme and it even looks alright on mobile devices with it being fluid. There was also a lot of image work that I did, but everything came out pretty nicely I think. I’m still working with the client on smaller tweaks, but the layout is there.

Visit http://comeflywithus.org to check out the book and see the site. There’s a lot of images from the book and there’s something for everyone!

This past week I got to work with a group that published Come Fly With Us! The book is a pretty neat record of the history if flight attendants and has a ton of cool photos from way back when. I was asked to do a website for the newest 10th anniversary edition which will be out in 2013 with new chapters and pictures. Here’s a rough draft of the site!

Some notes: I’m still at odds with the header, but I’ll be fiddling with that. The rest of the page I’m quite happy with, I felt like the background stitching kind of looks like a seat belt, somewhat fitting in an airplane! Also, this site is built on WordPress Twenty Eleven theme, I liked the simplicity and versatility and it was a great exercise in fluid page widths, CSS3, HTML5 and more. Thanks for looking!

Malmo's Turning Torso in Sweden

I’ve gotten time in the past couple of weeks to begin making changes to the site as part of a continuous improvement. I still am using the Yashfa theme as a core and often times I wonder if I will get to creating my own WordPress theme, but right now I’m happy with the customizations I’ve made. If you compare the original theme to this one, they are quite different and even more so now.

I’ve recently made changes so that each page is a custom page template with potentially custom, widgetized sidebars and headers. The front page is still similar with featured content and basic contact info. Blog page now shows post titles nicer, and posts show up without strange borders as per the original theme. Perhaps the biggest visual change is the background that I applied.

Up on the list of things to do? Revolutionizing my portfolio page (temporarily gone for now), and eventually revamping the site.

Today we will be looking at the internal components of the control box for my motorized slider. My last post looked at the slider itself, with some photos and video of how it works. Hopefully you get a decent idea of how all the parts come together. The real genius though is behind How the servo works and is controlled.

I started out with a project box I got from Fry’s and an Arduino Duemilanove. To power the Arduino, I bought an 8 AA battery holder and used this to power both the Arduino and servo motor. Heres a brief list of components inside the box:

• Arduino Duemilanove
• Power switch
• 8 AA battery holder
• Control knob / potentiometer
• Lots of wires
• A button
• 6V voltage regulator

So how it works is the 8AA batteries provide 9.6 volts directly to the Arduino and runs a program that interacts with the control knob, button, and servo. The power switch disconnects the circuit directly from the batteries and the Arduino. Typically servos are suggested to only run with a maximum of 6 volts, and Arduino provides a 5volt output. this works but I want to get a 6 volt source, so I used the 9.6 volts from the Arduino’s VIN pin and applied a 6 volt regulator with then outputted to the servo. To connect to the servo, my brother had some pin connectors that i simply hot glued to a carefully drilled part of the project box. Note that with servos you have power, ground and PWM connectors. The reason I chose to use an Arduino is because the PWM allows for great accuracy and reliability of timing and speed.

Lastly, the button I mentioned is used to switch to a time lapse mode, moving a slight bit every ten seconds, right now I haven’t worked on making this time variable but changing it is as easy as changing a couple values in the program on the Arduino.

A couple things if you’re wanting to do something similar and haven’t done it much before. Take your time and plan out your attack, know how long wires have to be and where grounding will come from. Also be careful with shorting connections and blowing up electronics. I blew out 2 servos before getting it down correctly. Remember to do your research ahead of time to prevent any unwanted accidents! If you’ve any questions, let me know. Hope the pictures are helpful if this wasn’t!

So here’s the first of a couple of posts about my motorized slider I’ve made. In this post I’ll cover the slider aspect of it; what I used and what holes I drilled, etc. After that, I’ll explain a bit about the control unit that is powered by Arduino and future plans. I won’t exactly outline what I did, but more of the concept of it so you get an idea of it all.

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