Protofusion is a group of college students who develop open-source hardware and software. Check out updates from our various projects below, or check out our projects page.

The new official deployment of SlatePermutate is now live on slatepermutate.org! Course data is available for the following institutions, with more to come soon:

• Calvin College
• Cedarville University
• Community College of Baltimore County
• Hope College
• Michigan State University
• University of Maryland
• University of Michigan

Want your school supported by SlatePermutate? Let us know!

I recently purchased a used Gaggia Classic machine on Amazon. After realizing that it was not as “lightly used” as the seller denoted, I took apart the entire machine to clean it up. I’ve written this guide as a teardown guide, but feel free to read it from bottom-up to get a clear understanding of how to assemble this machine. Feel free to drop a comment if you have any questions or information to add.

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Background

If you have a working BOPM installation, you are trying to prevent abuses of your IRC network effected through anonymity services such as proxies. BOPM has built-in support for scanning for open proxies. It also has support for looking up clients in DNSBLs, which are used to publish lists of misbehaving or malign hosts. One such DNSBL, called TorDNSEL, provides a way to check users connecting through the Tor anonymity service.

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As of Arduino 1.0, interrupts are not supported on the Arduino Leonardo. I’m working on a project using the atmega32u4 with the Arduino IDE which needs interrupt support for both software serial and frequency counting, so I investigated ways to add interrupt support for this device. I began by checking out the Leonardo pins definition file to see what was missing for interrupt support. Long story short, I ended up copying the macros for interrupt bitmasks/registers from the Teensyduino project, which has a mega32u4 target board. In addition to modifying the pin definition header file, I also needed to modify WInterrupts.c—swapping out the default AttachInterrupt() and DetachInterrupt() funcitons with those from the Teensyduino project.

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The first prototype ZonCoffee v3 boards have arrived and are nearly up and running. I’m currently porting the code over to Arduino 1.0, as this board uses the Arduino Leonardo bootloader. Read on past the break for more info on the new board.

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I acquired a free Sigma 24-70 f/2.8 lens that had a few issues–namely, autofocus was broken and the zoom was incredibly hard to turn. After using the lens in full manual for a while, I determined that I would attempt to repair it.

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When you’re trying to grow a bunch of plants in a field where a water source is lacking, things can be a bit tough. Hauling water on-site is a very arduous process, even with a tractor/trailer full of buckets. After hauling 5-gallon buckets to water blueberry bushes for months, we began to work on a better reservoir irrigation system that was cheap and easy to automate with expandable capacity.

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MNL is a multi-node high-power RGB lighting system. It consists of a controller (PC or embedded system) and multiple light nodes networked with RS485. The first prototype nodes are up and running, and we will be developing the second revision of prototypes in the coming months. Read on past the break for more information.

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Want a nice hearty printed circuit board desktop background? Well, here you go (right-click, save as). The PCB is an older Arduino NG board placed on top of one of our 10W MNLC lighting nodes (still under development, more information to come).