The EAGLE Layout Editor is a great way to design custom printed circuit boards for Arduino-based electronics projects. However, while Arduino uses the ATMEGA168 and ATMEGA8 microcontrollers from Atmel, the EAGLE libraries I’ve found online don’t use Arduino’s simplified pin labeling.
Therefore, I’ve created a custom Arduino-AVR library for EAGLE with the proper Arduino pin indicators to make it easier to create custom boards like the ones we use for the new Botanicalls Kits and several other projects I’m working on that are not yet public. Download the new Arduino-AVR library here.
The final day of 5 in 5 was happy-dirty, telepathic, deliciously chilly, retro-reflective, recursively meta, southwardly mobile, ephemerally illustrated, dubiously conversant, cartographically challenging, mixed, mashed and lovingly recycled.
Andrew Schneider was our final Guest Star and meta-chronicled the waning day of five. As promised, the fivers headed to Odessa where their personal bartender concocted the 5-in-5-Dead-or-Alive cocktail. The ingredients are a poorly guarded secret, but suffice it to say that there’s five kinds of booze and (true story) five of the fivers had five of them each. Outside of the hangover, the week was a great success–creative, interactive, productive and prolific. In five days they completed over 60 projects. Check out the blog for details or read all my posts for a summary.
Days: 1 2 3 4 5
Working on a prototype for a future version of the Botanicalls Kit, we’ve started toying with a leafy motif….
The first prototype of the XBee LilyPad open-source wearable radio has arrived and is working properly. All the lights turn on, the connections are just great and getting a proto in hand has spawned all kinds of new ideas. The push for the next version is to move all the components out from under the XBee so that it can sit flush to the board, making the LilyPad thinner if it is soldered directly on. We’re also going to add a voltage regulator so the board can be used with a 5 Volt supply if desired. Headers for programming the XBee and a single jumper to control the debugging LEDs will add useful flexibility. Thanks to Tom Igoe and Zach Eveland for their helpful suggestions.
The prototype with female headers:
Zach performs a wearability test with the help of scotch tape:
7 in 7 is now a fond memory, so the participants got together and did a little post-mortem evaluation on the scheme. The week was clearly an overall success. Everyone felt that 7 in 7 got their creative juices moving and provided motivation to attack projects that in some cases had sat on the to-do list for months or even years. Things got done.
Even so, there’s room for improvement. The universal feeling was that seven days is an unwieldy length of time. It was impractical to put everything else in our lives on hold for that long. Five days, or as little as three would be much easier to manage, and improve our ability to focus on the creative tasks at hand. A shorter timeframe would also create a more cohesive group, so that everyone could attend kick-off meetings, sanity breaks and a celebratory completion party. Managing the pressure to produce came up several times. Several people commented that while the social motivation was excellent, they sometimes felt intimidated by the visibility. Keeping things inspirational and stimulating while maintaining a supportive and informal environment is clearly the balance to strike for success.
Other advice was to avoid embarking on a big project or doing too many things you didn’t know how to do already. Reserving some minimal time each day for attending to other tasks, remembering that documentation can take a significant chunk of time at the end and making sure that you’re comfortable making the project public were all suggested.
Some great ideas came out of our wrap-up meeting including:
- doing a swap where everyone works on someone else’s project for an hour or two
- having a common creative warm-up exercise each day
- planning for documentation, and having extra help around to accomplish it
- having help running the event from people who aren’t currently busy participating
- keeping fresh by repeating this event on a regular basis
We’ll definitely keep these ideas in mind for next time, which might be a 3 in 3 sometime in August or September. In the meantime, several of the one-day projects have inspired interesting larger ventures. I’m personally excited about trying this all again, with fresh new faces added to the mix.
Blog: 7 in 7 Days: 1 2 3 4 5 6 7
7 in 7 is bold scheme to do seven creative projects in seven days. The Resident Researchers at NYU’s Interactive Telecommunications Program are pioneering this venture beginning June 8th, 2008. The mandate is as follows:
- Do a creative project every day for seven straight days, starting Sunday, June 8th
- Projects must be completed in a day, so they need to be as compact as they are creative.
- Each project needs a name and documentation posted at the end of the day. It should be a stand-alone accomplishment.
A preview of project ideas include Physical Flight Tracker, Door Twitter Sign, Salad Dress, Robot Phone, Window Ghosts and an album about a dangerous water park. Documentation will be aggregated on the 7 in 7 blog.
The May 15th edition of BBC World’s Click program covered the release of the Botanicalls Kit in their News beat. This is the second time the BBC has touted Botanicalls to the English-speaking world of leaf-lovers and hopefully we can keep them all as perennial fans now that they can buy a kit.
Normally, I let my sister’s talents speak for themselves. However her new book The Terror Dream received such a flattering review in the New York Times Sunday Book Review today, I’m compelled to post a link and bask a moment in reflected glory. As her brother, I’ve always been a fan. This latest opus features her most eloquent, intricate and articulate writing to date. Sue will be soldiering through a book tour for the remainder of this month and I’m looking forward to seeing her speak on October 23rd at CUNY Graduate Center in New York.
Radio is tough to understand intuitively. There’s plenty of physics to describe its behavior, but it can’t be seen, smelt, felt or heard without special equipment. Radio waves travel without a medium, so the common terminology of “airwaves” is quite misleading. There’s no need for air. Defining it as “wireless” is not helpful. That doesn’t tell us what it is, just what it’s not. Radio is gerbilless too but so what?
In an effort to better describe radio phenomena to my class, I came across several great posters that are freely available as PDF files. One from Unihedron depicts the full electromagnetic spectrum. Another from the NTIA shows the full frequency allocation for radio in the United States. Finally there’s a politically motivated poster from the New America Foundation that shows the financial value and politics of radio spectrum allocation (back).
A printed version of each poster is available from that publisher for a nominal fee. I strongly recommend checking them out.
As part of my gig with Microsoft Research, all of us interred here in Redmond for the summer were invited to a BBQ at Bill Gates’ home. We arrived on shuttle buses after being stripped of all cell phones, cameras, metal objects, even pens. It’s ironic that the man who amassed a fortune selling technology has discovered that it completely threatens his privacy and personal well-being. We didn’t get to see most of the house, but did come down the grand staircase on our way out to the back yard by Lake Washington. Dinner was hamburgers, with a chicken option. And Bill came down to mingle and answer questions for over an hour. Pleasant and surreal.
Here’s some more info on the house from Evan Carmichael’s site:
“Everything about the home is large, from its eight bedrooms and four building levels, to its 2,100 square foot library and 1,500 square foot theatre. It has a 17 x 60 foot swimming pool with an underwater music system and a glass wall you can swim under to get to the terrace outside. It also has a 2,500 square foot exercise room, a 1,000 square foot formal dining room, a guest house, an underground garage, a grand staircase, and offices, as well as an elevator and an estuary replete with salmon and trout.”
Oh, and those gray grids on the end of his dock? They’re for landing helicopters, which apparently is something he avoids doing because it stresses the neighbors. We saw ducks and a beautiful heron on the property. The heron flew in from the lake and hung out by a little pond, blissfully unaware of his host.
