2 DIY Cases for the Arduino and TouchShield

Mark has a writeup over at his website about some serious hacking on the TouchShield Slide API. He's been hacking it for a while now, and has optimized and recoded the original API that Chris and I wrote a long time ago.

DIY Hard Case

The funny thing is, at the bottom of Mark's page, he also has a line of pictures of a 3D printed case for the Portable MegaPalm, and Mark calls his project the HackBerry. It's printed with a special printer that takes a CAD file, and generates a complete enclosure for the MegaPalm.

These pictures show the MegaPalm HackBerry with Mark's mac operating system icons... incidentally the screen is rotated 90 degrees which I still need to ask him about, because the last time I saw these screenshots, the screen was rotated lengthwise.

This picture is probably my favorite, because it shows the MegaPalm HackBerry with the matrix code running down it:

DIY Soft case

I don't know whether I should be proud of this fact, or not, but for Christmas I got a sewing machine. This has caused me a great deal of introspection over the past few days as I ask myself, "am I ok being a guy who owns a sewing machine?"

I think the answer is yes.

But I think I also need a few more weeks for it to settle in... I will probably only selectively disclose to my friends the fact that I own a sewing machine.

Naturally, when someone has a sewing machine and a bunch of Arduino's and TouchShield Slides laying around, the first thing one does is try to make a sleek looking leather case. So I did the following steps:

• I found an old leather jacket from high school that I got as a present but it never fit, so it's stayed in my parent's closet ever since
• Trace out a set of squares onto the back of the jacket
• Cut out the back with scissors
• Dissect a USB hard drive case long enough to figure out how they made that thing a zipper case (and determine that I don't own the proper zipper raw materials)
• Go to an old JoAnn's fabrics store (I was the only male in the store at the time) and buy a set of sew-in zippers
• Spend hours at a sewing machine trying to replicate the stitching

The end result looks like this - here's a picture of me holding the end result against a brown leather background (you can actually see in the upper left my first attempt using canvas that didn't turn out so well):

Here's a picture of the case sitting on my laptop's keyboard, about 15 minutes after being finished... it's flipped inside out, because that's how I had to make it. You can see the little square I cut out in the middle of the case, and sewed back to frame the TouchShield Slide:

The case is about the size of my palm:

Here's the TouchShield Slide sitting inside the zipper case:

Here's a "glamor" shot of the case resting on the cutting mat I used to cut and trim the leather pieces:

And here's the finished product:

And here's a picture of the case sitting on top of my pile of Make magazine back-issues that Phil gave me (thanks, Phil!):

Ok, I don't mean to make excuses or anything, but this thing took me like a solid 3 hours to make. One case. I learned quite a few things while making this case:

-You can sew thin leather without breaking a needle (I thought you could only sew cloth)

-Sewing machines are loud obnoxious pieces of machinery that need to come in other colors besides white with baby blue trim. If there was a "manly" sewing machine in black and silver, with dark colors, I would swap it for mine any day

-Red thread on black leather looks cool

-As an aside, I also now have serious respect now for anyone who works in a sweatshop building clothes and cases on sewing machines all day... that's some seriously hard stuff...

Ok... now back to my new year's resolution list :-)

The First 10 Things Everyone Does with their New Arduino

A lot of people got Arduinos for Christmas (and holiday) presents. Welcome to the world of Open Source Hardware, DIY electronic tinkering, and learning physical computing and programming... it's a long journey, and I started on it about 2 years ago, and it's been a pretty fun adventure.

As an aside, this is my favorite week of the year, because I have just enough time off from the day job to do some serious hacking. And that's what I'll be doing over the next couple days, getting ready for some serious fun in January.

I don't usually write beginner's guides, because I'm not that good at it, and also because I try to do harder and harder stuff with my Arduino every time, and try to push the limits. There are lots of Arduino tutorials and startup and setup guides, but most of them assume the read has tons of wires, sensors, and - most importantly - a few years of programming experience and are comfortable doing some DIY tinkering. Few of them assume you just have an Arduino, just the Arduino, and only the Arduino... which is what lots of people get and give as Christmas presents (if this past couple of weeks is any indication!)...

So this is my top ten list of fun things to do with a newly-acquired Arduino - I do quite a bit of tinkering with the Arduino, Arduino MEGA, and Illuminato Genesis boards, in fact these days I carry them in my travel bag pretty much everywhere I go, just to play around. The Arduino is like my swiss army knife of electronics, and the Illuminato Genesis is my favorite board for when I want to hack devices, reverse engineer protocols, or do generally "hackier" things.




1 - Make it blink

This one is pretty obvious... just download the Arduino IDE (or the Antipasto Arduino Aardvark IDE for Windows or Mac if you want to play around with some extra features), and then download this code into the main section, run it, and download it to the Arduino board.



2 - Make it blink faster (or slower)

This is almost universally the first thing anyone tries to do immediately after the blinky sketch is up and running... get comfortable with the settings by screwing around with the blink settings, by tampering around with the delay and timer settings. Whenever I'm teaching someone or showing someone else how to use an Arduino, I always suggest changing the timing, or copying and pasting the digitalWrite() and delay() lines several times to get comfortable with the programming language, and to see your code reflected in real time instantly...



3 - Make a function to make the Arduino blink

This is almost like the step above, except that now you're getting comfortable with putting your blink inside a real C function wrapper. The major difference is that I made the void myBlink( void) function. As soon as people get the hang of functions, usually a light goes off in their heads as they figure out the power of modern programming languages: code modularity (a fancy term for little chunks of reusable code):



4 - Send stuff over the serial port from the Arduino to your PC

You can blink an LED, and you can put code inside functions. That means you've now mastered about 90% of the hardest parts of using an Arduino. Now, you want to have the Arduino communicate with the computer. This is a tiny little program that sets a variable, called "counter", sets it to the number 0, then prints a little message "Hello over Serial" from the Arduino to the PC, and then loops the counter from 1 to 25, printing the number over the serial connection. Just type this code into the Arduino IDE window, download it to the Arduino, and then open up the Serial Monitor (that's one of the little blue buttons underneath the menu bar):



5 - Merge the LED blinking with the Serial

I think it's pretty cool how quickly things can add up when you have the basics down. This is basically the same thing as the previous sketches, only added together. Every time the counter reaches past 25 and resets to 0, it calls the blink-LED function, which is the same one we wrote up above - so the functions really are re-usable...



6 - Send something from the computer to the Arduino... and back...

Now we want to send something from the PC to the Arduino. Put this code onto the Arduino, then open the Serial Monitor again, and this time in the little box next to the send button that shows up, type a character, and press the Send button. The character will get echoed back. For instance if you type and send "a", you'll see the "> a" come back. This is literally the same thing as the serial read example except with no comments, which get in the way. By the way, I also encourage anyone new to Arduino to type this out by hand, instead of just copying and pasting, because it seems to give a better idea for what each line of code does.



7 - Combine the Serial sending with blinking

This time, we'll add the code function for the LED blinking, and a couple lines of code that basically say, if the character we sent from the PC to the Arduino is the letter "a", then blink the LED light in the myBlink() function:



8 - Put everything together in one big mega program - count, blink, echo, and blink again

This one's pretty self-explanatory. Now, we've just added all the components together. All the variables get defined up at the top, the serial connection gets initialized in the setup() function, the counter cycles from 1-25 over the serial connection, blinks every time it reaches the top, checks to see if the PC sent a character, if we did, the Arduino will echo the character back to the PC, and if that character is the letter "a", the Arduino will blink again.



9 - Copy and paste the following code:

The Arduino is all about copying and pasting code. This is hugely helpful, because it speeds up hacking, but it's kind of like how word-checker is destroying my abaility to spell words :-) If you always just copy and paste stuff, it's no fun because half of feeling comfortable programming and hacking with the Arduino is feeling comfortable pulling code out of thin air, and experimenting with the syntax... but that's just my opinion!

int counter = 0;
int ledPin = 13;
int incomingByte = 0;

void setup() {
Serial.begin(9600); delay(100);
}

void loop()
{
counter++;
Serial.println(counter);
if(counter == 25) { counter = 0; myBlink(); };

if (Serial.available() > 0) {
incomingByte = Serial.read();
Serial.print("> ");
Serial.println(incomingByte,BYTE);
if (incomingByte == 'a') { myBlink(); };
}

delay(100);
}

void myBlink( void) {
digitalWrite(ledPin, HIGH); delay(500);
digitalWrite(ledPin, LOW); delay(500);
}


10 - Meet people on the web who use Arduinos

Arduino is about the interweb, and forums, and chat rooms, and blogs, and twitters, and youtube instructables and vimeo facebook wallposts and all kinds of "social media" that I have no idea how to use, but am trying to learn.

It's also about being an open community, and instead of so many types of technologies and new things that are inaccessible and hard to learn, Arduino is about sharing and hacking with other people. So in that spirit, please email me, or twitter me, or whatever!

2010 is going to be a year filled with Arduino hacking for me, and my goal is to meet as many other fellow hackers as possible, and to show off more cool Arduino hacks :-)

inthebitz at gmail

Smart grid meets ... cake?

Dave sent me a photo of the coolest cake I've ever seen. Of course I'm partial. This is a DIY hand-made cake (something that if far beyond my abilities), made in the form of an Illuminato X Machina.

The resemblance is ridiculously amazing. The details, even down to the exposed solder pads that hold the advanced "weapons-grade" power sensory chips, has been replicated. Using large slabs of chocolate, the chef of this cake replicated the quad connectors too.

Totally ridiculous. Dave is checking with the chef to see who it is that I can give proper attrition (nutrition? ha) to for this work of art.




Wow.

Open Source Licenses and Business Models

Recently, I’ve been a bit disturbed by the quality of discussion on Open Source Hardware, and I want to do something about it. I want to up the ante :-) I’ve seen people who aren’t lawyers, and who aren’t experts in law, making comments about Open Source licenses, and I’ve seen a handful of people who don’t run businesses and don’t understand business models writing about Open Source business models. This is funny to me. I want to try things that are different, but I want to be thoughtful about them, because if Open Source Hardware is really going to become something new, and if it really stands for something different and creative, then it should be treated that way! I’m not trying to be discouraging, actually I think it’s great that people write and do Open Source Hardware. Instead, I want to address people like consultants and writers who make money by following trends rather than contributing to them – Open Source Hardware means something important to me, and I don’t want it to be trivialized by some newspaper editor looking to boost his struggling paper’s sales... oh well, I guess everyone needs a good rant from time to time :-)

So here’s what I’m going to do about it:

Over the next couple of months, I’m going to interview friends of mine that are lawyers, especially intellectual property and contract lawyers, and I’m going to talk to professors of law and business here in Boston. My goal will be to understand, really, what the issues are behind Open Source Hardware as far as intellectual property and legal strategy are concerned. On the business side, I’m going to try to categorize and model, analytically, the economic and business operating models that have sprung up for Open Source Hardware. That way, I’ll be able to compare and contrast Open Source Hardware business models with traditional ones, to understand what, if anything, is the same or different about them.

I did something like this last time, and it turned into the Open Source Hardware Bank project, which currently has over $90,000 "invested" in various Open Source hardware projects (a lot more than I ever expected!) And all but one of those projects came from the internet, from people reading about the Open Source Hardware Bank, and who liked that Justin and I were trying to think about really new models for financing a small set of Open Source hardware products, especially in the middle of the Great Depression 2.0.

I’m going to try to follow the Socratic process, and ask questions as I go. Like all my research projects, I'm going to start with a list of questions, and expand them and develop them over time. This is definitely not a definitive list, but a starting point. I want to address questions like:

Open Source Hardware Licenses

• What is an Open Source Hardware license?
• What licenses are people currently using, what are they trying to protect, what are they giving away?
• What are the major components of an Open Source Hardware license?
• How is it similar and different from Open Source Software, or from traditional hardware licenses?
• What is the relationship between Open Source Hardware and intellectual property? Patents?
• How would the District Court and Supreme Court rule if they found someone Infringing an Open Source Hardware license?
• How would a legal team establish precedent for OSHW violations and protections?
• What are the community and internet expectations for an Open Source Hardware license?
• Which freedoms and liberties in usage of OSHW projects and products previously protected or covered by other forms of intellectual property protection, e.g. “trademark”, “copyright” law?
• What are the major trends in intellectual property protection, and how do they apply to the sharing of tangible projects online?

Open Source Hardware Business Models

• How are people making money in Open Source Hardware today?
• What’s the market size for Open Source Hardware?
• Who’s participating in Open Source Hardware?
• What is the role for companies vs. individuals in the OSHW “market”?
• What are the major OSHW platforms and how are they different?
• When is a business’ products Open Source Hardware?
• What is the relationship between today’s Open Source Hardware movement and the traditional electronics and semiconductor industry?
• Where does Open Source Hardware profit come from, how is it generated, what mispricing is it taking advantage of?
• Do traditional business strategy concepts apply to Open Source Hardware?
• Innovation in business models is a term thrown around often, how do those concepts apply to hardware?
• What are the major trends in hardware production business models? Especially in the internet age of advertising and link and connection-based payment models?
• Does Open Source Hardware work best on or off the internet? Who are the companies or entities most threatened by Open Source Hardware? Who is most advantaged?

This is an Open Source research project, and I want to involve as many people as I can. I’m going to start with interviews, then do some analysis and research of my own, and finally publish everything in a report in the new year. If you want to be a part of the research project, just let me know at inthebitz at gmail…

Also, if you want to add questions to my list, just shoot me an email!

Here goes nothing :-)

New Haven Holiday Maker Meetup

Hope everyone had a happy Thanksgiving! Just a quick reminder that the Eli Whitney Museum will be hosting the New Haven Holiday Maker Meetup this coming Tuesday.

What: New Haven Maker Meetup, Christmas Edition
When: Tuesday, December 1, 7:00 pm (note the earlier start time)

Where:
Eli Whitney Museum (directions)
915 Whitney Avenue
Hamden, CT 06517
(203) 777-1833
How Much: Free
RSVP (preferred): kl@eliwhitney.org

Mike and I will bring down some holiday themed projects (the turkey may be a little greasy), and the Museum will have the A.C. Gilbert trains running, along with some other very neat demonstrations that I’m quite excited about.

Thanks to everyone who’s already emailed me – jhuynh at gmail, and I look forward to catching up and seeing everyone (and some cool projects) there!

A walk down calculator lane

I'm at my parent's house, in Connecticut. Which is odd for several reasons. Mostly, it's odd because it means I sleep in my old bed, in my old room, which I haven't done for a long time. But otherwise, it's odd because I get to dig through all my old boxes of gadgets and electronics projects. I did, and I found my first hardware hacking project ever, an overclocked TI82.


Now I have to say up front: I did this in middle school, so I did *not* know how to read schematics yet. Instead, I only knew how to follow tutorials, and that's how I slowly taught myself electronics. This was my first major undertaking.

I followed some great instructions online, which are actually still hosted online! This was perhaps the most pivotal and inspirational tutorial I've ever followed, because it was the first time I'd ever used a soldering iron. In some ways, I credit Mr. Rich with motivating me to get interested in hardware hacking to begin with. So whoever you are, Rich, thanks a lot!

Speaking of Kevin Bacon, I learned engineering because of Mr. Rich, who taught my over the internet how to overclock my TI82, which led me down a long road to learning engineering, but! Rich apparently knows the guys at Solarbotics, who are doing Arduino stuff too, and Solarbotics is the company by Mr. Mark Tilden, who does BEAM robotics, and who used to be at Los Alamos, which is where I was visiting just a couple weeks ago. Insert Twighlight Zone music...

But I digress. I had two TI82 calculators throughout middle school and high school. Who wouldn't?


One had an Apple logo on one side, and a Linux logo on the other. Brand loyalty starts from an early age, apparently :-)

Naturally, I only overclocked one of them, because the acceleration ruined the graphing capabilities (the pixels plotted too quickly and overwhelmed the refresh rate of the display). So I was *that* kid in middle school, and PROUD OF IT, who walked around with 2 calculators. One overclocked for algebra and simple TI programs, and another for graphing. I credit my math teachers, who let me use both calculators on all my math tests!

What good is an overclocked calculator if it doesn't have a fan? Exactly. Does it need a fan? No. Does it look 10000 times cooler with a fan? Yes. Am I embarassed about this, years afterwards? No. Two words: middle. school.

So naturally, I put a fan on the back, and wired it into the battery pack. That also meant I needed to put the battery pack on the outside in a special holder...


I should note, that however cool I thought this looked at the time, I can safely say now, this did not net in any additional dates with girls.

Flash forward...

I thought to myself, why not line up all the big hardware projects, left to right, starting with the first TI-82 calculator I ever had, then moving on to the first real hardware hacking undertaking overclocking project, then on to the Arduino, the OpenBerry, the Portable MegaPalm, and of course the IXM. My current project is to the right of the IXM, but I'm not telling anyone what it is until January ... it's top secret, and only a few people in the world know about it. Not even the government agencies know ... hehe. :-)



Now, of course, I'm not in middle school any more, but I still have a thing for carrying around two calculators:


That's a CFX-200 (of course!) and the powerhouse HP-17BII+, which is the most under-rated calculator in the history of calculators. And believe me, I collect calculators, and I have used almost every calculator known to mankind. The secret little trick that no one but me knows is that the HP 17BII+ has this this feature called SOLVE, which is a one-key equation solver, which is fully programmable. BUT! The calculator itself looks understated... it just looks like a normal calculator, so no one thinks you're a super nerd just for busting out a graphing calculator in a relaxed meeting, but then you're like BAM-I-can-factor-primes-instantly-and-reduce-multi-variable-equations-instantly. And then everyone looks at you like you just did it in your head, and you're like, "what, me? no... this is nothing, if you think that's impressive, you should see my overclocked calculator collection from middle school."

:-)

4 Operating Systems for the Arduino

I was working in the lab, late one night, when my eyes behold an eerie sight... Yes, Halloween is a long time ago, but that stupid song is still stuck in my head. I miss Halloween. I never got to post up pictures of my skeleton running off IXM's. :-)

Anyway, I was browsing the Arduino forums and saw this cool post about DuinOS, a real-time embedded "operating system" for the Arduino.


DuinOS by RobotGroup

It's a simple little realtime OS (RTOS) built by the guys at RobotGroup (hello!), and can be downloaded here. It's meant to have a simple function scheduler, implementing a basic form of multitasking (not quite multithreading, but something like round-robin scheduling I think). That let's someone code multiple functions at a time, that get executed in turn, so that a single Arduino could be executing multiple types of "apps" or "sketches" at the same time.

Well, that's something of a stretch, but it's getting there... we won't get into context switching an RAM page swapping just yet :-)

So then that got me thinking, why not write up the other "OS's" out there for the Arduino platform. So here are the other 3 Arduino operating systems I'm aware of...


Pyxis OS by ArduinoWill

This is a graphical OS built on top of the Arduino and TouchShield platform, and is written by ArduinoWill (aka Thom). Thom is ridiculous, and extremely talented at coding. He has been prototyping some of the craziest stuff I've seen on the MegaPalm kit, DOSonChip, and the TouchShield Slide.

Ok. Here's a video of Pyxis OS in operation, which is quite ridiculous:



ArduinoWill also figured out a crazy hack to implement portrait and landscape mode...



And I'm not even going to mention the Super Mario level port:



Pretty insane... 12 fps. 0x000C. 00000110b frames per second. I'm still trying to figure out how you did this...

ArduinoMacOS by Mark

Mark managed to port a few apps to the Slide, including... um, I don't know... a GPS, Tic Tac Toe, Tetris, a Calculator, Oscilloscope, Breakout, The Matrix Screensaver, and a Canvas Drawing program. And the Control Panel. And Hex editor. And a Graphics Demo. And an analog Pin Visualizer.

And it's all zipped up over at the Open Source App Store here.


I wish I still had screen shots... I've searched my hard drive inside out, but instead, I just have the source code :-( EDIT: I finally found some pictures, and uploaded them above...


TaOS by Ziplock

Here's another lite-weight operating system, this time built by Ziplock. It's a simple embedded GUI that focuses on assigned blocks of code to little squares. In essence, it's the epitome of a miniature, lightweight script execution OS. Applications are like mini-apps.

If every operating system were written with this little overheard, I'd be running Quake on an 8 bit Motorola 6800 written in assembler...

Anyway, I digress, but the code for TaOS is all available over here.

What's The Best Instant Coffee for Hacking?

Chris and I just spent the last couple weeks completely strung out coding and hacking the IDE. There were a number of problems, but they all stemmed from two simple issues that could be summed up in one word: "suck".

1) Apple deciding to modify the binary java application launcher in preparation for 64 bit java compatibility (which broke the Aardvark IDE), and

2) Windows 7 sucking. Billy G. locked down certain folders, changing the way programs have to deal with temp files (which also broke the Aardvark IDE)

Anyway, Chris wrote a blog about how we solved the issues technically speaking. But this is a differenty kind of blog. This is the one that describes how we solved it biochemically speaking. With coffee, of course.

We drank a lot of coffee, especially late at night, and when Starbucks or the local joints are usually way past closed. So I figured it was a great excuse to do some double-blind taste tests of the various instant coffees I could find at the grocery stores around me.

Here are the five types we taste tested, from left to right, Maxwell house, Medaglia D'oro, Starbucks Bold Via, Starbucks Columbian Via, and Mount Hagen. You pretty much have to live in a bubble not to have seen all the advertisements for Starbucks Vias recently, so this was also Chris and my attempt to cut through all the marketing B.S. out there...


Naturally, we took out a piece of paper to document the experiment:


The Via's needed scissors to open, which sucks. Everything else was easy to use, but needed a spoon, which is a more readily available "kitchen" tool as far as I'm concerned. On the other hand, the lab space always has scissors lying around, so I guess it all depends on where you fix your coffee.


Here's a close-up of the different looks of the instant coffee. Mount Hagen sort of looked like bacon bits, and perhaps as a result, looked the most appetizing. Medaglia was sandier, while the others were more like little piles of dirt.


Here's the full get-up. I followed the recipe marked on the label in every case, down to the amount of grinds, and water.


Here's me pouring out the microwaved water into one of the cups:


And this is what all the glasses look like when they're filled:


And after I stirred each glass:

One thing to note is that the Mount Hagen is the only one with foamy bubbles at the top. This is weird. It would have been fine if I'd put milk in there, and stirred it up. But I didn't. It just somehow likes to keep its foam. For some reason, this foam stayed there the whole time. Not good, not bad, just different.

To clear our pallates in between sampling, we used Diet Coke. Why? Because it's another liquid that commonly makes it's way around the lab, and is often the chaser Chris and I use when drinking coffee. There's something satisfying about drinking a hot cup of coffee, then a cold glass of diet coke, then another hot cup of coffee, then about cold glass of diet coke.

Hi, my name is Matt, and I have a caffeine problem.


While we drank, we kept notes on the first imrepssions, tools needed, time to prep, amount of water needed, smell test, taste test, and even what each type tasted like after waiting a while. The rationale went like this: a lot of times, I make a couple cups of coffee at a time, pour them out, and bring them from the kitchen into the lab. Inevitably, one of the glasses gets cold. Drinking cold coffee is a fact of life in a lab :)

Finally, we ranked each of the 5 in terms of total experience, and provided summary notes.


I even typed it up:


The bottom line

If you can get over the weird foaminess, the Mount Hagen is the best tasting coffee, hands down. The Italian Roast Bold Via is the next best taste, but you have to drink it all quickly, because it starts to taste a little stale after sitting around. The Columbian Via holds its flavor better, but that's because that flavor is bland. Maxwell House has a chemical, synthetic taste in my opinion, kind of like that smell you get when you drive on I-95 through New Jersey, and you drive past that big chemical refinery and the air smells like pancakes which is normally good but you start holding your breath because you know it's not really pancakes, it's actually acetyln glycol esther mercury fumes. Medaglia D'oro was 3 European ounces of just plain horrible - they had me at the smell - which is tart and sour and nasty and frankly has no business belonging in any cup I'm drinking.

So in conclusion:

1. Best - Mount Hagen if you can live with the weird foam
2. Runner up - Italian Roast Via
3. So so - Columbian Via
4. Eh - Maxwell House
5. Get out - Medaglia D'oro

Aardvark 0.8.36 Released

This is the next installment of the Aardvark 0.8.x series. Notable new features include:

• New Library menu that's board friendly
• New Library reference docs
• Larger reference panel
• The library example list auto repopulates when the board changes.
• Added JeeNodes library (Ports, RF12)
• Arduino Duemillanove upload bug fixed, thanks Fred!
• Misc startup fixes
  

Download @ Illuminatolabs

I've added a Library Menu that dynamically changes with each different board. Here, we see the standard libraries for the Arduino family of boards:



I've also included new reference docs for the Libraries, which load up a library is pulled into the sketch. Below, we see a quick reference for the AFSoftSerial library:



Tip: A quick way to show the reference panel is to click Help->Reference.

Thanks for all the code contributions that made this all come together.

New Haven Maker Meetup, Christmas Edition

I’ve been getting a lot of emails about the next New Haven Maker Meetup, so it must be about that time again.

The Eli Whitney will be hosting the second Maker Meetup in the first week of December, so Christmas themes are welcome, though Thanksgiving projects are certainly interesting too. Actually, I wouldn’t mind seeing some neat Halloween costumes or setups either, but that’s just me. 

What: New Haven Maker Meetup, Christmas Edition
When: Tuesday, December 1, 7:30 pm - 9:30 pm

Where:
Eli Whitney Museum (directions)
915 Whitney Avenue
Hamden, CT 06517
(203) 777-1833

How Much: Free
RSVP (preferred): kl@eliwhitney.org

Here’s a couple projects Mike, Chris and Matt did for the holidays last year that might make another appearance:

The 8-bit embedded TurkeyShield

This year, maybe a 32-bit embedded turkey with the IXM?

Mike’s Christmas Tree Upgrade

And it’s always fun to make lights blink in cool new ways :-)

Give me a shout if you’d like me to send a reminder email, or if there’s a project Mike and I should bring to this meetup – jhuynh at gmail. Hope to see you there!