I stumbled onto an article about touch screen technology through Twitter via Atmel. They gave a tiny little piece of history on touch screens and have a great infographic on it. I took one of the names and started searching and found cool little nuggets of useless but fun information on the subject and wanted to compile it here. Most of it is just regurgitating Wikipedia, but it’s still nice to have it all written up concisely and not so encyclopedically-sounding. If you’d rather read all this unfiltered, it’s at Wikipedia here (about touch screens in general) and here (about multi-touch). I’ve just reorganized and distilled it all. Accuracy is not guaranteed and was not at all verified. If I were to write a book about it, I’d go double-check all this stuff. This is a blog. It’s not worth the pixels it’s printed on. As stated in the Atmel article, touch screens are EVERYWHERE now. So much so that children think screens that do not respond to touch are simply broken. A monitor without touch is, well, quaint. Remember that scene from the movie “Star Trek 4: The Voyage” where Scotty talks into the MacIntosh mouse? “The keyboard… How quaint.”
If you’re like me, and I know I am, you have spools of wire or solder sitting around. I generally put mine in the cabinet above my desk. Lately, with more projects going on, I find myself pulling them down out of the cabinet constantly. I had a collection of the most used spools sitting on the workbench cluttering it up. Well, no more, I say! Here’s how I organized them and made it easier to pull pieces from them quickly.
I built a machine to walk my FitBit for me. I call it the FitBit Cheat-O-Matic! Why? Our office is having a FitBit competition this month (November 2013). In preparing for the competition I overworked my Achilles tendon and could not participate. So, I adopted the mantra:
If you can’t join ’em, beat ’em.
The FitBit Cheat-O-Matic is a machine that shakes my FitBit for me 24 hours a day, 7 days a week and does it faster than my normal walking pace. I suppose it’s actually faster than most people can run, for that matter. Sure it’s cheating! Not only is it cheating, but it’s cheating at a level that’s so blatant it can’t be mistaken for anything else! It’s fully disqualified from the competition, of course. But the point is no longer to win the competition, but to be totally ridiculous and to rack up outrageous FitBit stats and make people laugh or maybe shake their heads.
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.
I put together a guide pamphlet for our group’s annual trip to the Kentucky Bourbon Festival and for the Kentucky Bourbon Trail. It included quite a bit of collected and learned information on my favorite adult beverage: Bourbon. Here’s the page that contains the “Bourbon To-Drink” checklist, if you’re interested! I thought I would reformat it a little and put it in a blog entry.
How many times has this happened to you? You have a little LED project with an AVR ATmega328 microcontroller (or Arduino) at its core and you need to light up a boatload…. A dingyload of LEDs. Maybe it doesn’t happen a lot to you. It’s happened on three recent projects for me. My latest two LED projects are a timekeeping piece that illuminates 21 characters from behind and a simple LED chaser thing.
As usual I wanted to keep the component count down on these projects. I also tend to prefer not to use a ton of ICs with busses between them and whatnot, if I can help it. So much darn soldering and stuff. Meh. Luckily, back in 1995, so the Wikipedia story goes, a super-smart dood named Charlie Allen at Maxim Integrated devised a super-ingenius way to control a large number of LEDs using a not-so-large number of microcontroller pins. The method is called, “Charlieplexing” and it seems a but daunting, at first, but it’s not that bad once you figger it out.
Today at the office, I walked by a coworker’s desk and something was different: She’d put an Ikea table and shelf together and set them on top of her desk. Nutty, at first glance. Purposeful, after 0.25 seconds of thought. Here’s the story of what I saw: Inexpensive IKEA furniture repurposed for other ingenius uses.
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!
I guess I forgot to post an update to the update of my workbench. Not only did I clean up the gigantic mess that had accumulated on it, I improved the lighting and workspace availability: Prior to this upgrade, I had fluorescent lighting under the blue cabinets over the bench. They extended down about 3 to 4 inches […]