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At the meltmedia office we’re making a video podcast once a week. Our design team made a cool backdrop for the little studio area we use. It’s a big-ass inkjet direct-print on a full 8′ by 4′ sheet of foam core. As you can guess, it was a bit floppy and needed some kind of support behind it. It also needed to be lightweight because we wanted to be able to hang it on the whiteboard behind us so we could easily remove it and replace it when we needed the whiteboard. I looked around the garage and all I had that was long enough was an 8′ 2×4. So, the entire frame is made from that single pine 2×4. I ripped three 1″ strips from it. to get the top, bottom and sides. The sides are just a long piece cut in half.
It’s been a little while since I posted an update on the latest version of the Office Chairiot motorized office chair (the, “Mark II”). I usually add little pieces of updates to the project site for it on Local Motors’ personal project website, since I plan on utilizing their facilities to push it to 11.
I found out late about this year’s National Day of Making, but I still managed to find somewhere to go and something to make: Local Motors down the road from me is doing an Arduino Build Night, Wednesday, June 18 from 6 PM to 9 PM in their Chandler, AZ lab. Here are links to the Facebook invite and the blog article:
Blog Article: Local Motors Arduino Build Night for National Day of Making 2014
On Facebook: RSVP for Local Motors National Day of Making Arduino Build Night
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.
Saturday (March 22, 2014) I attended the 1st Annual Southwest Maker Fest in Mesa, AZ. It was very cool for a 1st annual version of a fest, I must say. I’ve officially been calling myself a, “maker” for about 5 years now and I had never been to a maker-anything to speak of. This was a lot of fun.
The very first thing I saw as I walked from the parking lot was one of the amazing Rally Fighters from Local Motors.
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.
It’s been a while since I posted the article on building my backyard fire pit. A good portion of the traffic to this site is because of the fire pit, so I thought I’d post an update with some new photos and tips on how the fire pit has been improved since it was built. Here is the completed fire pit sanctuary in the back yard, complete with 400-lb. steel pergola and new fire rocks.
I use git to protect myself from myself. When I write code for AVR, Arduino, iOS, OS X or even the web, I stick it in a git repository on bitbucket.org (it’s free to have many private repos, so check it out) (thank you, Atlassian!). At the meltmedia office, we use the gitflow process of source code management to manage our projects and it works wonderfully. So, between home and the office, I use both github and bitbucket. Source code management (“SCM”) is s-m-r-t smart and easy as pie (assuming making pies is indeed easy) with git. If I mangle the source code in my project, I can roll it back to a working state. If I want to try something out that will require major fiddling with the code in a project, I branch and fiddle. If it works, I merge it back in. If the experiment fails, I dump the branch like it never happened.
Lately, but not for very long (as of the writing of this article), there has been a bit of buzzy-buzzy around Apple’s iBeacon technology. It’s a mixture of software and hardware that allows iOS devices to receive one-way broadcasts from little Bluetooth “beacon” devices. It was touted to be the big “NFC killer” (NFC = Near Field Communications). I would add an asterisk to that statement: It’s an NFC killer as far as retail and point-of-purchase, but probably not as far as supply chain (container tracking), security (door fobs, badges) and other non-retail uses. Edit: Apple does now include NFC on the iPhone 6 and 6+ and utilizes NFC in their Apple Pay system.
I didn’t think much about the technology at first. “NFC killer” seemed like a pretty bold statement. How can you beat the simplicity of just touching your phone to a thingie at the point-of-purchase (“PoP”)? It’s basically “tap-to-buy.” However, after some thought and discussions with business development peeps at the office, the possibilities beyond PoP started to become obvious. I started to realize just how flippin’ cool this unassuming technology really was. Lemme ‘splain…