An unintended consequence of placing glue traps around the garage: A desert spiny lizard, which is very beneficial to our yard as a pest control device, stuck itself to one of our "research" glue traps. These glue traps were intended to catch the various little bugs that might wander in through the space between the garage door and the door frame.
This is the short story about how I rescued her with a drizzle of olive oil.
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.
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...
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."
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.
