Welcome to Jeff McBride's Cyber Shack!

Who is Jeff?

I'm an electronics nerd who enjoys building things, especially embedded computing systems. I enjoy code that interacts with physics. In the past I've worked on unmanned aerial vehicles, camera stabilization systems, multispectral sensors, an agricultural remote sensing data service, digital microfluidics devices, and more. Here, I mostly post fun projects. Often silly, rarely useful, but hopefully educational and interesting, at least to a few. I live in Edmonds, WA, just north of Seattle.

If you want to chat about any of the projects here, about collaborating on some other projects, or about anything really, don't hesitate to get in touch!

Projects

KiCad Python API

I've somehow ended up doing a lot of software-generated PCB layouts in KiCad. Including, Creating thisComponent Layout plugin A tool called CurvyCad for laying periodic traces along a curve An article about creating a color wheel, instantiating LEDs and assigning nets dmfwizard, a python tool dedicated to designing digital microfluidic device layouts

Electronics/Software Projects

The Gauss Speedway: A magnet racetrack on a PCB An acoustic phased array for direction finding A High Voltage Amplifier with +/- 200V output range. Tapper is an open-source design for a general-purpose STM32 dev board in a box, with easy to customize IO wiring, a large touchscreen, and three 6-pin connectors for plugging in your projects. Here's a classic DIY toaster oven controller built with an ESP32 and a React front-end for control I built a 64-bit magnetic core memory. I wrote some notes on testing how well a single core stores a bit, and on the full 64-bit array built with a Lattice FPGA for controller. This article describes my custom wireless humidity and temperature that can mount on an AC outlet and has an epaper display. This article describes how I actually ended up collecting sensor data from commercial sensors with a linux SBC and RTL-SDR software defined radio. I wrote about my first steps using an M5Stack I wrote about my attempts to reverse engineer the Nikon CLS flash control system, and my analysis of D90 shutter delay I built this Toepler Holtz Electrostatic Generator a long time ago Here's a simple ultrasonic acoustic levitation demo Janissary is a log analyzer which parses recorded Age of Empires II games and renders an HTML report of the action for analysis

Photography

I enjoy fun photography setups from time to time.

• I had a water drop collision phase
• Here's some melting ice
• And a flaming martini