My hobbies don't stray too far from my work, but here are some things that feed, or fed, my ADD.
Heaven's Billiards
We mounted the pool table on the ceiling, complete with a block and
tackle for easy raising and lowering. This was done to avoid blocking
the 12 foot movie screen. More info.
PIC Programmer
I built a low-voltage,
programmer for use on PIC18F2455 and PIC18F2550 chips
(free samples!). These are
very nice, Flash programmable ICs with USB tranceivers. I used this
as a starting point, then redisigned it such that it was no longer an
in-circuit programmer. Then, to make it work
with the 12VDC transformers I had sitting around, I tossed on a voltage
regulator circuit to power it. Even managed to get MPLab running under Wine.
The eventual plan is to build a music activated switch (solid state relay,
actually) for parties. Of course there are many other things I would like
to build but that's first on the list. If you plan on building a
programmer, I have my parts lists and can draw schematics if needed.
pic1,
pic2
NPR Transcoder
Converts NPR's Real media stream into MP3's. There are probably programs out there to do this, however when I wrote it, none existed. Checkout software for (newer) bash variants.
Just Another Clone of Tetris (JACT)
I like Tetris, so I wrote a clone named JACT. However it is incomplete,
and has known bugs, so use at your own risk. (Bear in mind this was the first "real" program I ever wrote.) This animation demo served as a
tutorial to gain a better understanding of threads in Java and was
useful for designing JACT. JACT, demo