DorkbotPDX people doing strange things with electricity

I wanted a board that shows the state of all I/O pins on LEDs with all of these properties....

• Works for Digital Input, Output, and Input Pullup
• Pushbutton to drive the pin high, very weak pulldown (much weaker than on-chip pullup)
• Works for analog pins (thumbwheel pot), but also works when the same pin is used for digital
• LED shows actual analog level - LED current should be linear to actual voltage
• LED current does not interfere with analog voltage
• LED does not interfere with weak signals, or input pullup or pulldown
• Inexpensive - under $0.50 per pin - many parts are ok, as long as they're cheap!

"Read More" for the circuit details and photos.....

A few months ago Charles Buckingham told me about a crowd participatory composition idea he had where every person in a large crowd would have a smart phone that made sound which they could control, to some extent, that combined would form a work of music. After we together made several iterations on the idea: reinterpretations, misinterpretations, experimentation, research, etc. the project became a composition idea for a crowd participatory experiment using home made mylar balloons making buzzing tones and clicking sounds with pizeo transducers, lit up with RGB LEDs and finally popped with model rocket igniters and gun powder.

I go into a lot more detail here: http://blog.x37v.info/2012/10/24/balloons-and-electronics

Here's the video for the talk I gave on Tuesday.  I give an overview of Dorkbot and DorkbotPDX and discuss the kinds of things we do.

I gave a talk today at Christof Teuscher's Nuts and Bold Seminar about DorkbotPDX and what we've been up to.  The slides are available here:

http://goo.gl/yyIuV

or for those who don't do google:

http://dorkbotpdx.org/files/DorkbotPDX%20...%20Teuscher%20Lab.pdf

Thanks to everybody who showed up and contributed!

After moving twice this summer, I finally got my workbench set up again (at least enough to start building stuff again). So I was able to build the latest version of the LCD ARM dev board (http://dorkbotpdx.org/blog/scott_d/arm_lcd_development_board). It works fine and I think all the errors from the previous version are fixed. So I've attached the Eagle files and the BOM.

[1]

Several months ago, I was approached by the Portland band Starfucker (STRFKR) to build them an LED video wall for their upcoming tour. It needed to be large, bright, and durable, but also lightweight, portable, and easy to set up and tear down. They wanted to be able to plug in an iPod or iPad and play videos that are synced up along with their click track so everything goes along perfectly with the music. I enlisted the help of Alex Norman to take care of the software side of the project, and got to work trying to figure this thing out. It seemed like it could be made with mostly off-the-shelf components, and indeed that turned out to be the case. We decided that we would open-source the entire project, for the good of all mankind.

CLICK HERE FOR A VIDEO FROM ITS FIRST PERFORMANCE.

Anyone going to be in New York for the World Maker Faire? I would love to get you in for free if you mind hanging out in my booth for a couple of hours.... I'm kinda worried how busy its going to bee..... Feel free to bring a cool project to show off too!

http://makerfaire.com/newyork/2012/index.html

Full details are at this Teensy 3.0 Kickstarter Page....

I built a small battery-powered amplifier today.

Not too long ago, I bought a small, inexpensive amplifier kit from tindie.

Long story short: the GuruPlug JTAG wouldn't even debug the GuruPlug, let alone any other board I tried it with. I knew my freshly-compiled bleeding-edge OpenOCD was at least somewhat functional, because it was able to talk to my TI Evalbot through an onboard FTDI2232 USB-JTAG/UART chip. But it wouldn't talk to the FTDI2232 in the GuruPlug JTAG dongle.