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 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.”
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.
2012 was the second year I visited Kentucky for the Bourbon Festival. Just like 2011, it was a hoot. This time around (see my previous post) I was able to hit the entire Kentucky Bourbon Trail in one trip. The combination of the two made it that much more enjoyable. Because I was sloppy about […]
I now make the yearly pilgrimage to the Kentucky Bourbon Festival. I start out by flying into Nashville, Tennessee to make the road trip with my best friend, Dan. I’ve known him for 30 years (insert old jokes here). He works at Country Music Television (insert country music jokes here). I can’t stand country music (insert… […]
Consumer Safety Protection Commission FAIL! This blog is all about making things, tinkering, DIY, etc. It’s not a political site. However, when I heard that the Consumer Safety Protection Commission was filing a lawsuit against Buckyballs, I had to join the fight to keep the Nanny State out and help push personal responsibility. Please join […]
A friend and coworker of mine sent me a text today asking if I had instructions on how I built my benchtop power supply from a computer power supply. I realized that I had not written about that on this blog. That was dumb. Simple oversight. Anyone coulda done it. I’ve been using that silly […]
I work for an amazing company that has an equally amazing culture: meltmedia, in Tempe, Airzona. Those without a sense of humor need not apply. We do things like company outings in the middle of the business day to the movie theater to watch a cool movie opening, drive-by Nerf® dartings, and amazing company holiday […]
I received an Allegro AC756KCA-050B from my friends over at Element14 (Newark.com) and I wanted to see if this little gadget would make it easy to sense when the doorbell was ringing. As it turns out, it’s completely overkill for the task, so I won’t use it for my remote brass marine bell door chime […]
At the office, we decided we were going to have a stocking decorating contest for Christmas. The rules were pretty lax, so I immediately thought of interactivity and electronics and blinky lights and whatnot. Well, that, and there was no way in you-know-what that I was going to hot glue glitter and spongy letters to a stocking […]