Year of Ideas
103 posts100 ideas project retrospective (2023)
Looking back at 100 days of daily project ideas in 2023, what got built, what got scrapped, and why I burned out doing it.
Read postIdea 100 - Lavender Farm
Plans for a Gulf Islands lavender farm with distillery, beehives, chickens, and a hillside field for retirement.
Read postIdea 099 - Stevens projects club
A Patreon subscription where members receive one of Steven's small hardware projects twice a year.
Read postIdea 098 - All that are lost
A resin-covered pendant with a round LCD and GPS that points toward a new geohash location each morning.
Read postIdea 097 - Modern decoder ring
A decoder ring replacement with a screen and buttons that encrypts messages using modern public-key cryptography.
Read postIdea 096 - Boom numbers go up
A top-down survival game in the style of Crimsonland and Disgaea where everything can be leveled up.
Read postIdea 095a - Light Graffiti Projector
A cheap stencil projector made from a plastic lens, cardboard tubes and a flashlight that casts a message onto a building.
Read postIdea 095b - Dot Matrix water printer bike carriage
A bike-towed carriage with a row of 16 water nozzles that spells messages in dots of water on the sidewalk.
Read postIdea 100 plus
Ideas that came after the 100 day project or missed the cut, starting with a capacitive touch Ouija board that doubles as a MIDI controller.
Read postIdea 094 - Quickest way to rank a list of ideas
A quicksort-based web tool that ranks a long list of ideas with the fewest possible head-to-head comparisons.
Read postIdea 093 - Video Quotes and Truisms
A video series of puppets reciting popular quotes and truisms, posted to YouTube, TikTok and Instagram.
Read postIdea 092 - Command line tools as desktop applications
Electron desktop apps that wrap common command line tools in a friendly UI with help text.
Read postIdea 091 - Honeypot terrarium
A Conway's Game of Life visualization of bots attacking fake BACnet honeypot devices exposed to the internet.
Read postIdea 090 - Dead Bug electronic circuits jigs
3D printed jigs for building dead bug style electronic circuits without a PCB, with tutorials for Instructables.
Read postIdea 089 - Wheres Wren?
A Where's Waldo style search book for each region where a wren in a striped bobble hat hides among local birds.
Read postIdea 088 - Glass room of perspectives
A walk-in dome with many head-sized windows that looks like the inside of a kaleidoscope.
Read postIdea 087 - Crowd sourced life planner
A website of crowd-sourced flowcharts for life choices, in choose-your-own-adventure style.
Read postIdea 086 - Origami Terrarium Diorama
Paper origami flowers and plants sealed in a glass terrarium or mason jar so they stay dust-free.
Read postIdea 085 - Carved wooden postcards
Baltic birch plywood postcards, one for every mammal in BC, mailed through Canada Post.
Read postIdea 084 - Pressed lotus flower lamp
A lotus-shaped lamp of LED-lit acrylic shards holding pressed flowers, in a 3D printed base.
Read postIdea 083 - Dried flower art installation
A staircase tunnel of dried flowers sandwiched between acrylic plates and lit from within.
Read postIdea 082 - Classic video games maps posters
A poster of level maps from classic 80s and 90s video games such as Mario Bros 3 and Super Mario Kart.
Read postIdea 081 - Experience confidence scores
A system for third parties to vouch for a person's skills with Open Badges and a confidence score, dropped as LinkedIn with more steps.
Read postIdea 080 - Real Identity provider
An identity provider for online platforms that proves who someone is through social trust instead of documents.
Read postIdea 079 - Gorilla water quality monitoring device
A $10-20 citizen science sensor for streams that logs several data points to flag unusual water quality.
Read postIdea 078 - House to Tree house telephone system
Old corded phones wired point to point between a house and a tree house over cheap RJ45 or three-wire cable.
Read postIdea 077 - Equilateral triangles LED panels
Equilateral triangle LED PCBs that join into regular polyhedrons; built as the Dodecahedron PCB.
Read postIdea 076 - The Vancouver Tone
Cheap wind-chime devices tossed into Vancouver's boulevard trees to give the city its own ambient tone.
Read postIdea 075 - Birdnet festival mesh network
A festival mesh network of birdhouses that pass messages to each other with ultrasonic bird chirps.
Read postIdea 074 - Dandelion Galaxy
A dandelion-shaped sculpture of a reflective earth sphere with steel tubes ending in LEDs that show the night sky from outside.
Read postIdea 073 - Glowing tentacle eyeball monster
A 20-foot glowing tentacle monster made of flexible vinyl ducting and LED strips, with eyeball monsters in a Pepper's ghost dome head.
Read postIdea 072 - Reminders for basic body needs
A sensor that reminds you to eat, drink and move when deep focus makes you forget your body.
Read postIdea 071 - Levitating 3D Mouse
A 3D mouse for CAD that is a magnetically levitated cube with a 9-axis motion sensor inside.
Read postIdea 070 - CNC Pointillism
A CNC machine with a paintbrush holder that paints a photo as 2mm dots, one dot at a time.
Read postIdea 069 - One Liners
A dump of 36 throwaway one-line ideas, posted on idea day 69 to clear the backlog.
Read postIdea 068 - Talking Toy story teller
A Furby-style robotic toy that uses ChatGPT and text to speech to tell interactive stories that children steer with three buttons.
Read postIdea 67 - Deadmans vault SAAS SafePassage
SafePassage, an end-to-end encrypted online vault for messages that read-only recipients can open after the owner dies.
Read postIdea 066 - Tilt Pacman
A one-pixel Pac-Man on an RGB LED matrix, steered by tilting an accelerometer.
Read postIdea 065 - Atari Space Invaders LED Matrix pendent
A necklace pendant with an LED matrix that plays Atari Space Invaders animations.
Read postIdea 064 - Inflatable crowd
A matrix of mini inflatable air dancer figures made of fabric tubes and controlled by sound.
Read postIdea 063 - RootedIn
A spoof social network for Vancouver's 100,000 public trees, each with a generated name, hobbies and a wall of ChatGPT conversations.
Read postIdea 062 - Music festival dancing painting robotic marionettes in a million parts
A robotic marionette that listens to a music festival and turns the sound into generative artworks, one per slice of time.
Read postIdea 061 - The Dark Side Of The Moon in a million parts
Generative line drawings in sand, one per song on Pink Floyd's The Dark Side of the Moon, drawn by a CNC zen garden.
Read postIdea 060 - The Little Prince in a million parts
Layered paper craft light boxes, one per chapter or planet of The Little Prince.
Read postIdea 059 - Alices Adventures in Wonderland in a million parts
Stained glass windows, one per location in Alice's Adventures in Wonderland, built with the digital stained glass technique.
Read postIdea 058 - In a million parts
A series of small artworks, one per quotable line from a book, movie, or album, made and shared on a steady schedule.
Read postIdea 057 - Movie Mogul Mania
A fantasy movie league where players draft actors, directors and films and earn points from awards, box office and release stats.
Read postIdea 056 - Great people make great movies
A movie recommendation site that scores the actors, crew, companies and locations of movies you like and suggests films with the highest scores.
Read postIdea 055 - Truchet tessellating bathroom tiles
Ceramic bathroom and kitchen tiles based on Truchet tiling patterns instead of the usual plain squares and hexagons.
Read postIdea 054 - Digital Dices
A six-sided die with an LCD on each face and an accelerometer inside that shows a random number in a range when rolled.
Read postIdea 053 - HTML and CSS photo book for Blurb
Build the yearly Blurb photo book from HTML and CSS, exported to PDF, instead of using Blurb's BookWright tool.
Read postIdea 052 - Landscape Table
A coffee table with a CNC-cut topographic map in layered plywood, about 6 inches from lowest to highest point, topped with glass.
Read postIdea 051 - Enigma machine kit
A kit that recreates the German Enigma cipher machine using PCBs.
Read postIdea 050 - Tessellating Illuminated Origami Wall Sculpture
An interactive origami tessellation wall sculpture with an individually addressable RGB LED in each cell.
Read postIdea 049 - Cheap meals if you follow directions
A deal where diners get cheap meals if they finish a 10-restaurant challenge, review each place and file expense claims on time, betting most will not.
Read postIdea 048 - The beat of the crowd - badge
A small six-LED badge that broadcasts a Bluetooth beacon every second and pulses faster as more badges come near.
Read postIdea 047 - Weekly Scavenger Hunt
A fully automated global scavenger hunt that posts 15 random objects every Saturday at noon and ranks players by how fast they upload a photo.
Read postIdea 046 - Cherry Blossom Timelapse
Time lapse videos of the cherry blossoms blooming in the park, shot on a GoPro, a Raspberry Pi camera and a Sony a6400.
Read postIdea 045 - Spread your genes
An outdoor game where players scan each other's alien-looking QR glyphs to spread their DNA and create offspring.
Read postIdea 044 - Bio Punk Conference badge
A conference badge with an animated electronic pet whose DNA mixes with another badge's pet when the two are connected.
Read postIdea 043 - BACnet MSTP Testing conference Badge
A sub-$10 conference badge for BACnet plugfest that works as both a BACnet server and client for testing equipment.
Read postIdea 042 - GPIO tester breakout board
An 8-position DIP switch breakout board for setting dev board GPIO pins high or low while testing.
Read postIdea 041 - BioPunks Garden
A screensaver-style game where you breed genetically engineered plants by combining DNA from different species, meant to be played over a year.
Read postIdea 040 - Growth Commander - Tower defense
Idea: a tower defense game without towers, where you direct mutations and send your army out to gather food and fight enemies.
Read postIdea 039 - Growth a game
Idea: a game where you start as the smallest living thing and evolve based on the actions you take most.
Read postIdea 038 - Club House co-op
Idea: a club house owned by its members and open to them for their own use.
Read postIdea 037 - Chatbot Task Organizer
Idea: a chatbot that organizes simple tasks by date, location or person.
Read postIdea 036 - Kaleidoscope Chandler
Idea: a ceiling light where rotating colored glass casts moving washes of color onto the ceiling.
Read postIdea 035 - Update your address book automatically
Idea: a tool that gets your contacts to update their own details in your address book.
Read postIdea 034 - 20 questions for people
Idea: a website that asks 20 questions and tries to uniquely identify you, which raises the question of which questions work best.
Read postIdea 033 - AI Grant Writing
Idea: use AI to take on the labor-intensive work of writing grant applications.
Read postIdea 032 - Cistercian stained glass Swatch internet .beat clock
Idea: a segmented clock display combining Cistercian numerals with Swatch Internet .beat time.
Read postIdea 031 - Fabric Floral Cyberpunk Armor
Idea: cyberpunk cloth armor for raves, based on the pattern of a Japanese cloth armor from the 1800s.
Read postIdea 030 - Chatbot Journaling
Idea: a chatbot that gives daily journaling prompts, asks follow-up questions, and builds up knowledge about you to give feedback.
Read postIdea 029 - SproutSwipe
Idea: an app that uses phone sensors to list plants suited to a space, then shows them in augmented reality, like a dating app for plants.
Read postIdea 028 - Finite Future Clock
Idea: an A2 LED panel that shows a progress bar of how much of your life has passed and how much is left.
Read postIdea 027 - Print on demand Keyboard Keycaps
Idea: a website where users upload their own glyphs or images to be printed on keyboard keycaps.
Read postIdea 026 - Digger game
Idea: a tile game about digging, with resource management, worker placement and exploration.
Read postIdea 025 - Skull card game
Idea: laser-cut or PCB versions of the Skull card game.
Read postIdea 024 - Call to Adventure
Idea: a mystery letter full of puzzles whose solution gives directions to a meeting place where an adventure starts.
Read postIdea 023 - Light painting rod
Idea: a programmable strip of LEDs mounted on a rod for light painting photos.
Read postIdea 022 - Translink map PCB
Idea: a live, interactive TransLink metro map of Vancouver built from LEDs on a PCB.
Read postIdea 021 - AI auto summarization / Auto cliffsnotes
Idea: an AI tool that boils large amounts of information down to brief notes and main points, like automatic CliffsNotes.
Read postIdea 020 - Many styles of Vancouver
Idea: a photo of the Vancouver skyline with each building painted over in a different artistic style.
Read postIdea 019 - Big Red Button
Idea: labeled buttons installed around the city to see which ones people push the most.
Read postIdea 018 - Just the tip skyscraper coffee table book
Idea: a coffee table photo book of only the tops of very tall buildings, the top few floors.
Read postIdea 017 - Traveling 3D printed sculptures
Idea: a traveling art exhibit of every sculpture by one great master, 3D printed to look like marble.
Read postIdea 016 - Lego RGB Addressable LED blocks
Idea: addressable RGB LEDs for Lego builds, with the Lego bricks acting as light pipes.
Read postIdea 015 - AI Create your own story book
Idea: an AI-written personalized children's story book that works in details you provide and follows common plots like the hero's journey.
Read postIdea 014 - AI Pictionary
Idea: a Pictionary-style game where an AI draws the picture and players guess the prompt that generated it.
Read postIdea 013 - Speech to Text, always listening, ear badge
Idea: an ear-shaped electronic badge that records speech to text 24 hours a day using OpenAI Whisper, feeding a personal AI assistant.
Read postIdea 012 - LED Constellation Star map
Idea: a constellation star map PCB made with overlapping LEDs.
Read postIdea 011 - Birdhouse Crypto Puzzle
Idea: birdhouses that double as cryptographic puzzles for humans to solve.
Read postIdea 010 - Polyhedron Papercraft Mobile
Idea: a hanging mobile of regular polyhedrons and other geometric shapes made from papercraft.
Read postIdea 009 - Princess Peach castle stained glass window
Idea: a replica of the Princess Peach castle stained glass window, made with the digital stained glass method before the Mario movie release.
Read postIdea 008 - Reconnect a postcard project
Idea: a series of postcards mailed in packs to friends and family, who send them onward to reconnect people.
Read postIdea 007 - Emoji Macro Pad Keyboard
Idea: a macro pad with the most commonly used emoji as keycaps, for answering messages with one key press.
Read postIdea 006 - Procedurally generated Glowing Mushroom PCB
Idea: procedurally generated mushroom art PCBs for the GameOfShrooms art project, with backlit LEDs for a glow.
Read postIdea 005 - Scream Photo Booth
Idea: a photo booth that only takes the picture when you scream loud enough, so the photo captures a real emotion.
Read postIdea 004 - Universal Serial breakout board
Idea: a USB to serial board that supports TTL 3.3V and 5V, RS232, and RS485 2-wire and 4-wire, with DB9, DB25 and screw terminals.
Read postIdea 003 - PCB Art of Every Mammal in BC
Idea: a series of PCB art badges, one for each of the 130 mammals in BC, with LED eyes and an SAO connector for an art show display.
Read postIdea 002 - Keyboard Flute
Idea: an electronic flute PCB the size of a ruler with hot-swappable keyboard switches, a MEMS mic for breath control, and an ESP32.
Read postIdea 001 - Cherry Blossom Profile Photo Booths
Idea: a free portrait photo booth in a park during cherry blossom season, as practice for portrait photography with consenting strangers.
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