This past weekend was Maker Faire at San Mateo. I took some pictures and video while I was there of the various sights and sounds.

http://krux.org/gallery/v/events/Maker+Faire+SF+2010

Here is a quick build I did for this year's Christmas party. I decided to take a couple hours to hack together a pair of Steampunkish Christmas Goggles using an inexpensive set of Oxy Acetylene Welding goggles and things I had around my work bench.

This year's Defcon had a hardware hacking kit you could buy featuring the Parallax Propeller chip, a nifty eight processor microcontroller.

And what better way to test out that the board works than to solder up a nice vga/ps2/audio shield so I could check out the Turbulence Demo.

The Defcon 17 HHV Propeller Board

Adafruit has an updated version of their open sourced TV-B-Gone Kit, a universal TV off button. The Adafruit kit is a high power version of the TV-B-Gone keychain remote, and can extinguish TVs over 150 feet away.

I had the previous version of the TV-B-Gone, but the ATTiny85 microcontroller stopped working. Obviously not being able to turn off any TV was a problem, so I decided to order the updated kit and use a Vojo mint box to house the project.

My latest project is a Knitting Row Counter, which helps you keep track of which row you are on when knitting complex patterns.

Morgan, my girlfriend, recently aquired the addictive hobby of knitting. She needed a row counter to keep track of where she was in multiple projects. Instead of paying up to $12 to $30 for an store bought electronic counter, I decided that I had enough parts laying around where I could build one for a fraction of the price.

I based the counter off the Parallax SX28 microcontroller, an I2C EEProm for data storage when the device is powered off, three seven segment LEDs for the display, and a few lego pieces for buttons.

Just a FYI, the Las Vegas Adobe User Group is going to have a presenter from Phidgets, Inc demo some Adobe Flex / microcontroller interaction.

UNLV Paradise Campus Room 511
851 E Tropicana Ave
Las Vegas, NV 89119

July 7, 2009 at 07:00pm

More info: http://groups.adobe.com/posts/c09b77c844

Today in the mail I got a sample from SchmartBoard. Not a real circuit board, but rather more of a key chain with some traces you can solder on to get a feel for the product.

They included a SMT quad opamp which could prove useful in a future project.

So I picked up the through-hole Bus Pirate kit from Fundamental Logic. The Bus Pirate is a neat little device that lets you interface with most serial interfaces (SPI, I2C, RS232, JTAG, 1wire, etc) and is controlled by a simple serial terminal.

Here is the picture of my assembled bus pirate:

I love the old analogue synthesizers, the Korg PolySix being one of my favorites. Had a great sound, has some nice features for an analogue synthesizer of the time, and is just fun to tinker with.