Every few months I organize a hack day at the office, usually on a Saturday. This past Saturday we had our 5th installment of hack/make/tinker day at meltmedia and the turnout was great! Attendance was 8, up from 3 the last time around. YESSS!

Nick put together a little video of the goings on:

Or click here to see meltmedia Hack Day | April 6, 2013 from meltmedia on Vimeo.

We had all manner of making and designing, but most importantly, around 1:30-ish, we had PIZZA!!

Lynn, our R&D designer person and responsive design specialist at melt, was working on a redesign for a website.

Christian, another R&D person and resident Java Jedi Knight, was continuing work on his ultra-swanky-cool chess move software.

John, a newcomer to the fun world of hobby electronics and Arduino, was building a cool IR rotational encoding contraption that may or may not end up in a real life project. It's for funzies, at this point.

Nick, third member of the meltmedia R&D team and Javascript Master Chef, was working on audio recording in preparation for some podcasting he was going to be doing for an outside project.

Mike, our CTO, was tinkering with a string of addressable LED lighting to be used as an indication board for Travis continuous integration builds. Below, it looks like Mike has discovered blue! Another sweet thing about this project is that he's doing it with a Raspberry Pi.

Sadly for me, I left my primary project at home in a box because I forgot to load it in the truck when I left. Sadness. I also forgot my flux pen. More sadness. So, I had to run to Radio Shack to get paste (ick). Fry's Electronics, as usual, had craptastic inventory. Every time I go there to get something in an emergency, they lack inventory. I dislike them, right now.

It's kinda hilarious that I forgot my main project when I brought just about everything else from the electronics area of the man cave:

I used this giant-ass Pelican Case for safely carrying my skydiving camera equipment around for years and years. It served me well. Since I've retired from skydiving, I reconfiggered the pluck-out foam to hold all of the junk I carry to hack days. Works great! It has wheels. It has a pull-out handle. It has awesomeness written all over it. It has skydiving stickers stuck all over it.

So, without my main project with me, my project du jour became getting my Texas Instruments MSP430 LaunchPad kit  working on a Mac. I used the Energia platform to do it. They took the Processing (also Arduino) IDE and ported and converted everything for use with the MSP430 microcontroller from Texas Instruments. Worked awesome! I highly recommend it. I blinked and LED within seconds. Magic.

Did I mention we had pizza, courtesy of our wonderful employer meltmedia?

'Twas an excellent Saturday O'Hackery, to be sure. If you other meltmedians missed, bummer. Not to fear, there will be more.