Bryan Guess

(This is a now page. And if you have your own site, you should make one too.)

2024 Projects

This little DIY website has been up and running for about a year now. I update it regularly, because I find it fun, and so it has transitioned from "project mode" to "operations mode" in my mind. Some of my other recent dabblings and personal projects include:

• ☔ building a web-connected weather station
• 🚀 making a video game about space pirates

When I'm not working on those projects or spending time with friends and fam, I am currently...

• 📚 reading: The Graveyard Book by Neil Gaiman and the Meditations of Marcus Aurelius
• 🕹️ playing: Slay the Spire and D&D, mostly
• 🍿 (re-)watching: The Lord of the Rings trilogy (extended editions) and a lot of Game Changer and Make Some Noise on Dropout

Weather Station

July

The wind-and-rain sensors we were eyeing have been on backorder for a while. And we recently bought a 3D printer, so...

We decided to make our own parts! This was more in line with the spirit of the project --to learn as much as we could by making as many of the systems as possible. Thanks to this handy guide, we were able to print the physical components. (We also printed a junction box to serve as housing for the Pi.) After purchasing a few cheap sensors from Adafruit, we have started building the system for detecting wind speed, wind direction, and rain.

May

Using this project from the Raspberry Pi Foundation as a starting point, we recently began building our own weather station. The idea is to build it, install it near our home, and ultimately connect it to Weather Underground. We want it to be able to measure temperature (air and ground), atmospheric pressure, windspeed, wind direction, and rainfall, at a minimum.

Getting started was fairly easy. We already had an old Raspberry Pi (Model 3B+) on hand, as well as a handful of miscellaneous sensors and simple prototyping bits, like breadboards and jumper wires. We had the temperature and air sensor connected, coded, and working in less than an hour, though it doesn't look like much now. (See photo below.) We will need to make some sort of housing for it to protect it. Some of the active mechanical sensors, like the anemometer and wind vane, will need to be bought or made by us.

Game Dev

June & July

My friend/colleague/co-conspirator has been pulling most of the weight this summer. So he gets all the credit for our progress lately. We now have a functioning, testable combat system. Next, we will make enough characters, equipment, and enemies to give it a real gameplay test. We should have a combat demo available to show friends and family by late August. Maybe it will even be fun! 😆

I'll post pictures when we have the demo running.