crazy

So Rae and I are in Seattle on reconnaissance for our move this spring.
Looking at real estate, trying to do some professional networking, trying not to go insane from the expanding possibilities.

I found out last night that I landed a talk for the upcoming Ignite Seattle on Tuesday (that by the way is tomorrow). Very exciting!
My topic is "fun without function" and I am going to present the codification of our experiences with makephilly and the maker challenge. I am really looking forward to this!
It has been a while since I spoke to such a large crowd, and now is the nervous part. I know I can talk for 5 minutes, the real challenge is how to say it all in JUST 5 minutes. That and how to choose the best pictures (thanks flickr).

blue LED POV and the Diecimila hack

I really wanted to make something cool with my new toys before the last make:philly meeting. I knew there was not much time, so I settled on a POV device. I figured that would be easy to show off, and would be a good way to interest people in the hacktory arduino/freeduino class. As it turned out, the hardware was the easy part. Here you see my attempts to get it to spell MAKE. Obviously I still had some work to do...



I found these great little smd leds on a junked keyboard pulled from the trash. Soldering them down with their individual current limiting resistors was a challenge. Unsoldering them from the keyboard was a nightmare! In the end I only ruined one. I really want to build a hot air rework unit.



Along the way I came across this post. Pure freakin' genius! I used an smd cap instead (because I had it and I am addicted to soldering tiny things), but other then that I can't add anything useful other then to say it works like a charm.