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About Steven Smethurst a Vancouver based maker, hacker, and installation artist
A list of blog posts made by Steven Smethurst a Vancouver based maker, hacker, and installation artist
A list of blog posts made by Steven Smethurst a Vancouver based maker, hacker, and installation artist
Timeline of Steven Smethurst projects, workshops, exhibits, talks
AI/ML created birds for the Flocking AI project
What am I thinking now
What am I doing now
A list of project that Steven Smethurst has worked on
A list of tools that Steven Smethurst uses regularly
Projects
A Magic 8 Ball with a tiny LLM living inside it, writing your fortune from scratch
A cassette-shaped PCB you can actually record on
A community-built map documenting public art before it's gone
A daily game idea written to a group-chosen theme, collected as a list of 100 pitches.
A deck of cards that prompts creative work, starting with one card that says to add a new card, inspired by D&D's Deck of Many Things.
A two-month treasure hunt in Burnaby, BC where players scan QR code posters of local animals hidden around the city.
A timeline of the sky's average color from web cams around the world, sampled every 5 minutes.
A big button in a park that resets a 24-hour countdown each time it is pressed. If the timer hits zero, the project ends.
A family of LED polyhedron lamps, each face its own welded PCB panel
PCB maps of metro and transit systems, lit up station by station
The Skull bluffing card game remade as PCB disks, with Midjourney art, manufactured at JLCPCB.
A project to pitch one new project idea on the blog every day for 100 days and collect public feedback.
A daily Midjourney-generated bird image posted to social media, with the top voted birds collected into a printed book.
A single-month habit tracker board with physical buttons, inspired by Simone Giertz's Every Day Calendar.
A Lighthouse prize redemption arcade machine converted into a liquor and glassware cabinet.
A deck of playing cards with photos of birds taken around Vancouver.
A 48-hour horror comedy short film about the feelings of a puppet, shot in October 2020 for the MyRodeReel contest.
Visited every Vancouver city park during COVID-19 and took a selfie at each one.
An illuminated stained glass sixteen segment display that can show upper and lower case letters and numbers.
An LED-lit stained glass tetragonal trapezohedron sculpture with 28 patterns and a phone app, made for Vancouver Maker Faire 2019.
A series of hexagon stained glass windows lit from behind by programmed LED patterns.
Color-changing fluffy clouds hung over the crowd at the Asics New York pop-up shop in August 2017, built with HFour Studios.
An electric bike carousel for the Fairmont Pacific Rim hotel in Vancouver, lit by over 5000 addressable LEDs on 18 spokes.
A circular light box with 16 servo-mounted laser diodes that sweep out twisting fractal patterns.
A Guitar Hero-style game played on a single strip of LEDs up a 5 meter pole, made for Vancouver Mini Maker Faire 2017.
A 60 cm pillow-fluff cloud lamp with LEDs and sensors that flashes its own lightning storm, made for the Luminescence II art show.
A laser-cut wooden icosahedron with flower of life panels and NeoPixel LEDs, carried as a marker to find me in festival crowds.
A low-poly fox head mask laser cut from coroplast with WS2812 LEDs on the faces that run animated patterns.
A laser-cut silhouette of tree branches lit from behind by color-changing LEDs.
A Zen garden where a CoreXY CNC platform moves a magnet under the sand to drag a steel ball bearing through patterns.
A plan to hang 20 to 50 origami-style plastic hearts with internal LEDs from a tree in Mount Pleasant. It was never built.
A Google map of interesting places around the world to visit, added to over time.
Plans for a 10 foot wooden icosahedron dome lined with mirrored Mylar and WS2811 LEDs, with a button and slider controller inside.
A 2015 run of the 100 Day Project: one small make each day, from a fractal triangle to an arcade button MIDI controller.
A giant claw game built for Vancouver Maker Faire 2014, with a motorized gantry, relay-based controls, and several claw prototypes.
A laser-cut wooden map of Vancouver with a year of my GPS location data pulled tight in coloured thread.
Flocking AI
Posts
The first 20 Mixxtape boards arrived from JLCPCB. One boots, the voltage regulator overheats, and there is a list of changes for version two.
A 320 × 280 mm PCB map of the Tokyo subway with one RGB LED for each of its 248 stations, part way through routing
A 160 mm square PCB map of the Montréal Métro with one RGB LED for each of its 73 stations
Where to find art and events in Vancouver, last updated September 2026
The third redesign of the Vancouver SkyTrain PCB, built from real map data instead of hand-drawn artwork
A cassette-shaped PCB, sized to fit a real Norelco case, that actually records
A game idea for a Jackbox-style voting game that eliminates players who vote differently from the group, so the best play is to get knocked out early.
A comedy game idea where you join a local choir to meet people and find out it is a cult, though its members are decent drinking buddies.
A game idea for an eco-horror where bridges between two identical Earths are used for dumping and mining until the mass imbalance wrecks the planet's orbit.
A game idea for a clicker where you guide early humanity toward one goal, the perfect cup of coffee, with technology as a side effect.
A game idea about the last magic user, an immortal who absorbed everyone's powers, and the boy who sets out to defeat him and release magic back into the world.
A Duck Hunt style browser game about the frustration of photographing small songbirds through a telephoto lens.
A horror story of forced backwards time travel in a fated universe
A robot crossing the country over 10 years, controlled by daily votes from Patreon contributors
Sell flowers to townsfolk who love you, while harvesting the flowers from the town, making the town gloomier and the demand higher.
An interview with the washed up hero who publicly saved the world from an evil most foul at sixteen
Every child in the world gets one wish. Sometimes that wish creates a monster
A galactic religion feeds human consciousness into an AI black box of Doom in exchange for technology. This is the story of the resistance
A Jackbox style masquerade party game where players talk to NPCs and use magnetic poetry words to build a strange fetish.
A puzzle game where you are a lifeform building up your senses from scratch, until you can cook a meal for an otherworldly being
A man discovers his stool samples contain embroidered scrolls that accurately predict his future
Fool the doctor into giving you a sick note. A Fibbage style bluffing game of fake symptoms
You're a detective hunting a Time Looper bomber
A puzzle platformer with a snake style expanding body. Eat enemies to gain their powers, but every meal makes your body bigger and more unwieldy
A Jackbox style road trip game with a shared half-missing map and each player's hidden, competing goals.
A Jackbox style mini game collection about who gets to pick the radio station on a road trip.
A Jackbox style game where each player controls one off-key instrument from their phone and the group works to sync up key and tempo.
A Micro Machines style racing game with tiny cars on oversized tracks like a breakfast table.
Hunt monsters, take their genes, make new monsters, repeat
A web game where you describe a complex object like a dam using only the most common words, in the style of Up Goer Five.
A game idea for a Guess Who-style party game played with a field guide of 100 cryptids and urban legend monsters.
A story idea about a 10,000 year old AI war machine trying a string of ill-fitting jobs in a post-scarcity universe, until it finds work as a metal recycler.
A game idea for a dialog-driven potion shop where an apprentice wizard serves customers and makes judgment calls from incomplete recipe information.
A game idea for an XCom-style strategy game where you play a hive mind assimilating the population of Earth's cities while rival hive minds compete.
A game idea for a Ticket to Ride-style board game where corporations send generation ships to build a wormhole network between star systems.
A game idea for a puzzle mini golf game where every hole must be a hole-in-one, guided by ghost lines of every other player's shots.
A game idea for a rhythm game where a strong, tired hand drags a terrified inky mass through the environment, ripping its tendrils free on the beat.
A Seek and Find game set in a living town updating in real time. Spot what the cultists are changing and stop them before they summon their evil god
A top-down game where you drag your kid to a doctor's appointment, like Katamari Damacy in reverse.
On June 21, 2026 the site moved from Jekyll to Astro with a theme rebuilt from scratch. Here's why.
Bookmarks from March 2026: maps, 3D printable trail generators, tools, and references.
The CounterProductive button went offline June 28 to July 4, 2025 after a WiFi and MQTT failure, and version 5 adds a backup server.
Status update on the Counter Productive button, which hit 1000 presses in 71 days, and the Sky Pixels project.
A few tools I keep coming back to when making PCBs: EasyEDA2Kicad, Gingerbread, and KiKit.
Ratings of the movies and TV watched in 2024, from Deadpool & Wolverine to Joker: Folie à Deux, with notes from the Plex server.
Retrospective of a Tetragonal Trapezohedron lamp built from eight kite-shaped LED PCBs welded together.
How to get a Seeed Xiao ESP32-C6 board up and running with Adafruit CircuitPython 9.1.1 and blink an LED.
ChatGPT pretends to be a useless machine and tries to stop you from flipping the switch.
Retrospective of the Vancouver SkyTrain and Washington DC Metro PCB maps with LEDs that light up as trains arrive.
What went right and wrong building a dodecahedron lamp from twelve LED pentagon PCBs, about $60 USD from JLCPCB for 25 panels.
Design notes for a pentagon PCB panel with addressable LEDs, twelve of which weld together into a dodecahedron lamp.
A roughly $150 DIY battery for a Resmed CPAP built from a USB-C PD power bank, a trigger cable and a 24V boost converter.
A TamperMonkey script that re-enables copy and paste on websites that block it, written for Brim Financial.
Added /now and /uses pages, moved old /about content to a /timeline page, and made /about the new home page.
Looking back at 100 days of daily project ideas in 2023, what got built, what got scrapped, and why I burned out doing it.
A 2024 snapshot of the software, hardware, camera gear, and shop tools I use day to day.
Ratings of the movies and TV watched in 2023, after dropping Netflix over password sharing and moving to Plex.
Plans for a Gulf Islands lavender farm with distillery, beehives, chickens, and a hillside field for retirement.
A Patreon subscription where members receive one of Steven's small hardware projects twice a year.
A resin-covered pendant with a round LCD and GPS that points toward a new geohash location each morning.
A decoder ring replacement with a screen and buttons that encrypts messages using modern public-key cryptography.
A top-down survival game in the style of Crimsonland and Disgaea where everything can be leveled up.
A cheap stencil projector made from a plastic lens, cardboard tubes and a flashlight that casts a message onto a building.
A bike-towed carriage with a row of 16 water nozzles that spells messages in dots of water on the sidewalk.
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.
A quicksort-based web tool that ranks a long list of ideas with the fewest possible head-to-head comparisons.
A video series of puppets reciting popular quotes and truisms, posted to YouTube, TikTok and Instagram.
Electron desktop apps that wrap common command line tools in a friendly UI with help text.
A Conway's Game of Life visualization of bots attacking fake BACnet honeypot devices exposed to the internet.
3D printed jigs for building dead bug style electronic circuits without a PCB, with tutorials for Instructables.
A Where's Waldo style search book for each region where a wren in a striped bobble hat hides among local birds.
A walk-in dome with many head-sized windows that looks like the inside of a kaleidoscope.
A website of crowd-sourced flowcharts for life choices, in choose-your-own-adventure style.
Paper origami flowers and plants sealed in a glass terrarium or mason jar so they stay dust-free.
Baltic birch plywood postcards, one for every mammal in BC, mailed through Canada Post.
A lotus-shaped lamp of LED-lit acrylic shards holding pressed flowers, in a 3D printed base.
A staircase tunnel of dried flowers sandwiched between acrylic plates and lit from within.
A poster of level maps from classic 80s and 90s video games such as Mario Bros 3 and Super Mario Kart.
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.
An identity provider for online platforms that proves who someone is through social trust instead of documents.
A $10-20 citizen science sensor for streams that logs several data points to flag unusual water quality.
Old corded phones wired point to point between a house and a tree house over cheap RJ45 or three-wire cable.
Equilateral triangle LED PCBs that join into regular polyhedrons; built as the Dodecahedron PCB.
Cheap wind-chime devices tossed into Vancouver's boulevard trees to give the city its own ambient tone.
A festival mesh network of birdhouses that pass messages to each other with ultrasonic bird chirps.
A dandelion-shaped sculpture of a reflective earth sphere with steel tubes ending in LEDs that show the night sky from outside.
A 20-foot glowing tentacle monster made of flexible vinyl ducting and LED strips, with eyeball monsters in a Pepper's ghost dome head.
A sensor that reminds you to eat, drink and move when deep focus makes you forget your body.
A 3D mouse for CAD that is a magnetically levitated cube with a 9-axis motion sensor inside.
A CNC machine with a paintbrush holder that paints a photo as 2mm dots, one dot at a time.
A dump of 36 throwaway one-line ideas, posted on idea day 69 to clear the backlog.
A Furby-style robotic toy that uses ChatGPT and text to speech to tell interactive stories that children steer with three buttons.
SafePassage, an end-to-end encrypted online vault for messages that read-only recipients can open after the owner dies.
A one-pixel Pac-Man on an RGB LED matrix, steered by tilting an accelerometer.
A necklace pendant with an LED matrix that plays Atari Space Invaders animations.
A matrix of mini inflatable air dancer figures made of fabric tubes and controlled by sound.
A spoof social network for Vancouver's 100,000 public trees, each with a generated name, hobbies and a wall of ChatGPT conversations.
A robotic marionette that listens to a music festival and turns the sound into generative artworks, one per slice of time.
Generative line drawings in sand, one per song on Pink Floyd's The Dark Side of the Moon, drawn by a CNC zen garden.
Layered paper craft light boxes, one per chapter or planet of The Little Prince.
Stained glass windows, one per location in Alice's Adventures in Wonderland, built with the digital stained glass technique.
A series of small artworks, one per quotable line from a book, movie, or album, made and shared on a steady schedule.
A fantasy movie league where players draft actors, directors and films and earn points from awards, box office and release stats.
A movie recommendation site that scores the actors, crew, companies and locations of movies you like and suggests films with the highest scores.
Ceramic bathroom and kitchen tiles based on Truchet tiling patterns instead of the usual plain squares and hexagons.
A six-sided die with an LCD on each face and an accelerometer inside that shows a random number in a range when rolled.
Build the yearly Blurb photo book from HTML and CSS, exported to PDF, instead of using Blurb's BookWright tool.
A coffee table with a CNC-cut topographic map in layered plywood, about 6 inches from lowest to highest point, topped with glass.
A kit that recreates the German Enigma cipher machine using PCBs.
An interactive origami tessellation wall sculpture with an individually addressable RGB LED in each cell.
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.
A small six-LED badge that broadcasts a Bluetooth beacon every second and pulses faster as more badges come near.
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.
Time lapse videos of the cherry blossoms blooming in the park, shot on a GoPro, a Raspberry Pi camera and a Sony a6400.
An outdoor game where players scan each other's alien-looking QR glyphs to spread their DNA and create offspring.
A conference badge with an animated electronic pet whose DNA mixes with another badge's pet when the two are connected.
A sub-$10 conference badge for BACnet plugfest that works as both a BACnet server and client for testing equipment.
An 8-position DIP switch breakout board for setting dev board GPIO pins high or low while testing.
A screensaver-style game where you breed genetically engineered plants by combining DNA from different species, meant to be played over a year.
Idea: a tower defense game without towers, where you direct mutations and send your army out to gather food and fight enemies.
Idea: a game where you start as the smallest living thing and evolve based on the actions you take most.
Idea: a club house owned by its members and open to them for their own use.
Idea: a chatbot that organizes simple tasks by date, location or person.
Idea: a ceiling light where rotating colored glass casts moving washes of color onto the ceiling.
Idea: a tool that gets your contacts to update their own details in your address book.
Idea: a website that asks 20 questions and tries to uniquely identify you, which raises the question of which questions work best.
Idea: use AI to take on the labor-intensive work of writing grant applications.
Idea: a segmented clock display combining Cistercian numerals with Swatch Internet .beat time.
Idea: cyberpunk cloth armor for raves, based on the pattern of a Japanese cloth armor from the 1800s.
Idea: a chatbot that gives daily journaling prompts, asks follow-up questions, and builds up knowledge about you to give feedback.
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.
Idea: an A2 LED panel that shows a progress bar of how much of your life has passed and how much is left.
Idea: a website where users upload their own glyphs or images to be printed on keyboard keycaps.
Idea: a tile game about digging, with resource management, worker placement and exploration.
Idea: laser-cut or PCB versions of the Skull card game.
Idea: a mystery letter full of puzzles whose solution gives directions to a meeting place where an adventure starts.
Idea: a programmable strip of LEDs mounted on a rod for light painting photos.
Idea: a live, interactive TransLink metro map of Vancouver built from LEDs on a PCB.
Idea: an AI tool that boils large amounts of information down to brief notes and main points, like automatic CliffsNotes.
Idea: a photo of the Vancouver skyline with each building painted over in a different artistic style.
Idea: labeled buttons installed around the city to see which ones people push the most.
Idea: a coffee table photo book of only the tops of very tall buildings, the top few floors.
Idea: a traveling art exhibit of every sculpture by one great master, 3D printed to look like marble.
Idea: addressable RGB LEDs for Lego builds, with the Lego bricks acting as light pipes.
Idea: an AI-written personalized children's story book that works in details you provide and follows common plots like the hero's journey.
Idea: a Pictionary-style game where an AI draws the picture and players guess the prompt that generated it.
Idea: an ear-shaped electronic badge that records speech to text 24 hours a day using OpenAI Whisper, feeding a personal AI assistant.
Idea: a constellation star map PCB made with overlapping LEDs.
Idea: birdhouses that double as cryptographic puzzles for humans to solve.
Idea: a hanging mobile of regular polyhedrons and other geometric shapes made from papercraft.
Idea: a replica of the Princess Peach castle stained glass window, made with the digital stained glass method before the Mario movie release.
Idea: a series of postcards mailed in packs to friends and family, who send them onward to reconnect people.
Idea: a macro pad with the most commonly used emoji as keycaps, for answering messages with one key press.
Idea: procedurally generated mushroom art PCBs for the GameOfShrooms art project, with backlit LEDs for a glow.
Idea: a photo booth that only takes the picture when you scream loud enough, so the photo captures a real emotion.
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.
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.
Idea: an electronic flute PCB the size of a ruler with hot-swappable keyboard switches, a MEMS mic for breath control, and an ESP32.
Idea: a free portrait photo booth in a park during cherry blossom season, as practice for portrait photography with consenting strangers.
Year in review 2022: Lori moving in, painting the townhouse, cherry blossoms, a CBC interview about the bird cards, travel, and fostering a puppy.
Post mortem from showing the Flocking AI bird gallery at Maker Labs during Eastside Culture Crawl 2022: the wall layout, what people said, and what to fix.
A gallery of MidJourney-generated 4K UHD artwork sized exactly for Samsung The Frame TV to avoid the mat border, free to download.
Tools and equipment used in 2022: VS Code, KiCAD, Sony a6400, Sigma 150-600mm, Logitech MX Master 3S, and a Pixel 6 Pro.
Year in review 2021: 31,893 bird photos, 363 species, moving from Vancouver to Burnaby, and a year of working from home stats.
Beginner birding resources for Vancouver: intro videos, local birding sites, and notes from making the Birds of Play card deck.
The software, gadgets and gear Steven uses day to day in 2021, and what changed since 2018 after the move to working from home.
February 2021 brain dump on getting into birding with a Sigma 150-600mm, plotter twitter projects, and a 52-card bird playing deck plan.
Rant on why Steven will not buy from Dell again: a failed order cancellation, lost rewards, a monitor shipped to the wrong address, and useless chat support.
A list of boardgames, card games, drawing games, trivia, and social deduction games to play remotely with friends during COVID-19.
Podcast list for March 2020 with new picks like Clarkesworld, Stack Overflow Podcast and Hello Internet, plus Reply All and 99% Invisible.
February 2020 bookmark roundup: pocket operator pinouts, CNC squid kits, maze dice sculptures, photo ideas, and the Hub16 macro pad.
January 2020 brain dump: links on polyhedra, plotter art, LED lava lamps, capacitive touch PCBs, and tools for makers.
Walkthrough of every panel in the digital stained glass window series: beehive, mountains, stars, hexagon weave, heart, sun, and more.
Post mortem from the September 2019 digital stained glass workshop at Maker Labs: what worked, what broke, and what six attendees built.
A workshop at MakerLabs Vancouver where attendees design a 9x9 inch illuminated stained glass window with WS2811 LEDs and CNC-cut foam.
The 2019 tools and equipment list, with notes on the switch to PlatformIO and Firefox and away from Samsung phones.
June 2019 bookmarks: a Casper nightlight teardown, the Etch-A-Snap Pi camera, SVG Nest, and stacked paper stained glass.
Slides from the March 2019 ESP8266, NeoPixel, and FastLED workshop taught at Maker Labs.
Bill of materials for one stained glass panel: pixels, acrylic, plywood, and laser time totalling about $156 CAD.
Why blog.abluestar.com moved to a fresh Jekyll theme, plus a 20-year history of CMS choices from plain HTML to static sites.
The February 2019 podcast list, with a starter episode picked for each show from Reply All to 99 Percent Invisible.
February 2019 links on Arduino LED projects, an Etch A Sketch CNC, a zombie ESP8266 game, and James Clar's neon art.
What worked and what didn't on a two-month trip through South Korea, Vietnam, Cambodia, Thailand, and China.
Two days at the Huaqiang Road markets in Shenzhen and the pile of LED strips, switches, and Pi cases brought home.
Snapshot of the software and hardware used in 2018, from VS Code and PlatformIO to a Surface Pro 3 and Sony WH-H900N.
November 2018 bookmarks on Wobble Garden, PCB art, SI playing cards, sand tables, and Islamic geometric design books.
May 2018 grab bag of links: pen plotters, ESPEasy firmware, the TWANG dungeon crawler, and a wooden lego planter.
Building hexagonal baltic birch frames for the stained glass panels on the table saw, with a grooved channel holding the acrylic.
Writing the firmware for the stained glass panels with FastLED on an ESP8266, using LED offset sets to drive randomised patterns.
Parts list for the stained glass windows: white acrylic, square WS2812B LEDs, a Wemos D1 mini, and a 5V 5A supply.
How the stained glass panel patterns are designed in Fusion 360 and Inkscape, then exported as SVGs for the laser cutter.
Tech demo notes for the stained glass windows: gluing acrylic, building cardstock dividers, and killing LED hotspots.
Inspiration for the stained glass windows project, from Lumina Lab's Stoicheia dodecahedron to mandala work on Instagram.
A python script that hunts kangaroo words, smaller words hidden inside larger ones, across the 20,000 most common English words.
Notes on dropping Evernote for are.na, TeamViewer alternatives, blockchain art, the Ice Cold Beer game, and a pile of bookmarks.
How to buy Bitcoin and Ethereum from Canada using Coinbase, LocalBitcoins, and Quadrigacx, with the fees and signup time for each.
A Wemos D1 and OLED shield that polls the Coindesk API every five minutes and shows the current BTC price and running profit.
The projects shown at Vancouver Maker Faire 2017: the LED Pillar rhythm game, laser kaleidoscope, fox mask, thunderstorm cloud, and more.
May 2017 links: ESP32 sniffers, a giant laser-cut Bulbasaur, an 8-bit computer from scratch, Big Poop Data, and the BLACK 2.0 paint.
A Vancouver earthquake kit built for under $30, with a parts list and the personal items to add yourself.
Showing the 200 most recent posts here; the full archive remains available through year, tag, and category routes.