If you are writing code for your Arduino on a Mac and you’ve previously written code using Apple’s FREE Xcode IDE, you know that the standard Arduino development environment is lacking in functionality, especially those which professional software developers have had in their IDEs for years. My personal favorite is Apple’s Xcode IDE, which is the primary IDE used in developing applications for the OS X on the Mac and for iOS applications on Apple’s mobile platforms (which are technically ALSO running Apple’s OS X operating system). Find out how easy it is to use a professional-grade IDE to do your Arduino code using embedXcode from Rei Vilo Hobbies.

What is electric, goes somewhere between 15 and 20 miles per hour and has an Ikea chair on it?

The Office Chairiot Mark II is the second generation of motorized office chair brought to you by yours truly. Why motorize an office chair? That’s a silly question and I will not dignify it with an answer. Office chairs are boring. Plus, on a hot summer day, I walk too slowly between our office buildings in ARIZONA. The Office Chairiot Mark II can do it in a fraction of the time and I sweat far less driving it.

iPotti #2 is the latest incarnation of iPotti, the custom bathroom availability monitoring system I built for my employer, meltmedia. I started designing and building the original iPotti in 2010 and it went into operation in early 2011. At the time, there wasn’t anything like it that we were aware of. Lately, some other similar systems have popped up and their inventors have done some pretty cool stuff with them. I’ve found inspiration to reinvent iPotti. Plus, at meltmedia we’d like to use the device for marketing purposes in the near future.

Since 2011, meltmedia has outgrown its original office where iPotti (“number one”) is installed. At that time there were about 20-some-odd meltmedians. Today, there are over 60 of us and we now occupy TWO different office spaces on the same campus. On the plus side, with the growth in the number of meltmedians came a growth in the number of pottis at meltmedia to service those meltmedians. On the not-plus side, there is only ONE iPotti #1 and it only watches TWO of the 9 or 10 pottis across two buildings. This situation needed to be rectumfied. [snicker]

Over the past year plus, I’ve gotten a handful of emails about donations to StuffAndyMakes.com. I’ve also been offered payments for customizing PCB designs or even just making the files available. Some have requested kits of the Iron Man Arc Reactor for payment. I hadn’t taken the time to get it set up. Well, no more! I set up a Donate page, thanks to the amazing people at Stripe! Stripe is a fantastic and ridiculously easy-to-use card processing system built specifically for developers. It’s easy to sign up, they take a little in fees per successful charge (2.9% + 30¢) and it even works in your mobile apps. Best of all: It ain’t PayPal! Woot!

From their website:

You don’t need a merchant account or gateway. Stripe handles everything, including storing cards, subscriptions, and direct payouts to your bank account. Stripe.js lets you build your own payment forms while still avoiding PCI requirements.

 

Some of you regulars may have noticed that comments were magically not appearing at the bottom of some of the posts on this blog. I snooped around in the code behind the theme and discovered one line of PHP that caused comments to sometimes show and sometimes not show. I’d like to share what I […]

Yikes, that title was a mouthful, but I wanted to make sure the search robots gobbled it up with their mouths so that people in my situation would find this article. Short attention span version: I can’t seem to get Mac OS X Lion to connect to my FreeNAS iSCSI drives. Lemme essplain what I […]

So, we have this issue at the office with our single-person bathrooms. We have one “m” bathroom and one “w” bathroom. We have 40+ people in the office. Many people who sit out-of-sight from the bathrooms often walk all the way across our office only to find out that someone else has beaten them to […]

Until I find a home for my little snippets of code, here is where they will go. While building an iOS (iPhone) application, I needed a quick little method in Objective-c that would take strings of color codes from data provided by web developer peeps and convert those string values into UIColor objects. For instance, sometimes […]