Electronics, Tech, Software, Hardware… and anything else that ends up here.
I have been working at this for months. A couple of years ago, I found out about the RepRap project. The idea behind the reprap (if you haven’t talked to me recently) is to create 3-dimensional objects on a computer, and produce them in reality by “printing” them. Today, I printed my first object.
So you’re pretty fond of your Arduino. You make blinking lights, and beeping noises. You’ve made a robot that was pretty cool. Or maybe you didn’t. Who cares, You’re ready for the next step. You want to extend it. Although you can just plug in wires, there’s something very appealing about making a shield. Instead of a rats-nest of wires piled about and plugged into your prototyping breadboard, you can have a nice clean shield with labeled connections and a smaller footprint. So here I’m going to tell you everything you need to know to make a schematic and PCB layout, and get a beautiful shield that will plug into the top of your Arduino.
Continue reading ‘A Beginner’s guide to making an Arduino Shield PCB’ »
That is to say, my first PCB that I actually designed. I recently began attending a bi-weekly electronics hobbiest group call Dorkbot PDX. It’s basically an opportunity for nerds to show off their random electronics projects to people who might actually be interested.
So you just finished your first PCB in Eagle. Good job. Me too actually, and after a few days I came across something very cool. Eagle3D. Eagle3D takes your Eagle .brd file and renders it as a 3D image, so you get to see the board in a photorealstic way. (I think I’ve been saving up photorealistic to use in a post-1995 context. I really don’t think I’ve seen it used to describe anything since the box of Myst). So you download Eagle3D, you download POVray, you copy your include files over there, generate your .pov file, and you launch POVray in anticipation… and then it crashes.
Continue reading ‘Eagle3D on a Mac when POVray won’t work…’ »
There’s been a lot of wondering I think, about whether or not the Nissan LEAF EV was going to offered in anything other than that blueish color they’ve been parading around. Well, today the LEAF reservation email came today and one of the steps they offered was to choose your reservation color. Since the question has been sitting on a lot of peoples’ minds (including my own) I answer with a triumphant “Yes!”.
Today was the iPhone OS 4 announcement/meeting/thing – Basically a press conference for Apple to tell the world how awesome they are. This is not an uncommon thing and the reaction isn’t uncommon, but I am getting tired of it. It goes something like this:
Me: “Hey Cool, iPhone OS 4 has multi-tasking in it”
iPhone Detractor: “[Android|Palm|WinMo] has had multi-tasking forever, iPhone is lame, and you suck.”
Or possibly:
iPhone detractor: “Apple fanboys are so thick-headed. They always talk about how awesome the iPhone is, but [Android|Palm|WinMo] has been doing since version x.x and it has feature y…(ad nauseum)”
I should start out by warning you that this is not a build-log. My friend Isaac reminded me that before we started this project, this was blogging gold, and he didn’t have a blog. He was implying that I should be the one to write this all down. I didn’t, but this should be interesting anyway.
So last night I was looking for a song that I’ve heard a million times, but have never known the name of. It’s an instrumental, and I’m pretty confident that you’ve heard it too. I would describe it as a sort of peppy, upbeat, 50′s ad spot background theme. Lots of sticatto plucking of strings. After several unsuccessful attempts, my wife offered a trade. She would look for my song if I would go find the paintbrushes she was looking. Surprisingly, it worked! She found an album containing the song and I found the paintbrushes.
The song was written by a man named Laurie Johnson. He is a British composer and the song is called “Happy Go Lively”. It’s owned an licensed by a company called Associated Production Music. Production Music, is a term given to music that’s essentially made for the sole purpose of licensing it out for productions (movies, television, etc)
Considering how well-known and familar, but unidentifyable this song is, I thought I’d post it to a page and stick as much google-glue as I could on it. If you found this page through a search engine after having some difficulty, give me your search terms and I’ll put them in the keywords, so people like us don’t need to struggle to find this delightful little song.
Here’s a little clip:
Well, I tried, and everybody I know tried. None of us made it. It’s unfortunate, but I don’t think any of us are going to die. If you haven’t heard about SparkFun Electronics’ Free Day, it may be that you just don’t care. If you didn’t care, it seemed to me for a moment that you were the only one.
Christmas is upon us, and we have gotten ourselves a Christmas tree. My wife and I are dedicated Tree-Killers Live-Christmas-Tree-Advocates. We just like the feeling of a live tree. We moved into a house this year and have been enjoying a vaulted-ceiling. While at the tree-farm, we decided to pick a taller-than-usual tree and ended up with this Behemoth. It didn’t seem this tall at the farm, but getting it in, we realized how big and beautiful of a tree it was.