DorkbotPDX people doing strange things with electricity

Recently I built electronics for Lostmachine Andy's fire effects on his awesome pirate ship for Burning Man.

"Read more" for technical details....

Introduction to eTextiles – Sew a Circuit!

When: August 28th, 2011 from 1-5pm

Where: ADX, 417 SE 11th Avenue, Portland, OR

Cost: $25

Please bring: - Scissors - A bag or garment to modify – please choose something made of a non-stretch fabric.

Please register here: http://pdxetextile.eventbrite.com/

Dreaming of bike gloves that light up to keep you visible at night, or an awesome illuminated costume? Or maybe you’d like to add a bit of extra sparkle to your living room with a glowing throw pillow… Whatever project you have in mind, if you’re curious about the process of integrating electronics into fabric, this workshop is a great place to start.

A month or so I suggested what I thought would be a one-day project. I asked my colleagues at the Indie Web Camp to create the Smallest Federated Wiki. The idea was that wiki would be simpler if I kept my pages and you kept yours. Somehow we'd share pages through some sort of "refactoring" browser. Well, the prototype is working and showing well. I invite you to watch the 2-4 minute screencasts I've posted on my new Wiki Channel on vimeo. Here is the introduction.

I got an IOIO from spark fun a few weeks ago and have been fighting to get the tool chain brought up on a linux host.

Feeling in the "message in a bottle" spirit, but more like an 8-pin DIP in a locket sort of mood, I ordered EEPROM from Sparkfun. I'm sort of a noob and have only been to a few meetings so far. So it took me a couple hours today, but I uploaded a sketch I gathered from a YouTube video and wired it up like a picture on Fritzing's site and got it all running. I can lock away 256 characters for up to 200 years with no power attached on a tiny chip!

I recently completed a collaboration wih the multi-talented Suniti Dernovsek and David Stein of bobbevy for 10 Tiny Dances. (Video above)

My part of the collaboration was to generate audio/music for the dancer (Suniti Dernovsek), and to create a physical object facilitating audience interaction with the sound/music for the dancer.

While neatening up my shop I got to thinking how nice it is to just measure something on a whim. Next thing you know I'm logging the temperature of my soldering iron. It's Currie controlled. But how fast and regular are it's cycles? I didn't know.

Initial Soldering Iron Temperature Measurement

Fifteen minutes later I'm looking at the waveforms in a spreadsheet chart that just happened to have three lines, one for each of the DS18B20s that I happened to have in the setup. Each response was noticeably different even with them that close together. I also saw large variations that might be due to air movements. Hmm. Let's improve the apparatus.

Directional Temperature Gradient Detector

Now this thing responds. I can blow gently on it and see a response within seconds. Gently fanning it with a file folder from a foot away works too. So then I leave the room to see what the air does while I'm gone.

I recently got around to making a color fading el wire driver, which actually tries to shift the color by changing the AC frequency.

"Read more" for technical details....

At the Open Source Bridge hacker lounge, Ward Cunningham was talking about borrowing a Mac Mini to run his Txtzyme Sparkles at an art show.

Rather than go home at a reasonable hour, I thought it'd be fun to try implementing all the math directly on the Teensy++, using only the Arduino IDE. Making it run was easy, but doing the math as fast as the computer+USB was quite a challenge.

"Read more" for the stand alone Arduino-based code.... which can run as fast, even faster than the USB communication allows.

I needed to use one of the Digi/Maxtream OEM RF modules in a project. There's no Eagle library I could find for them (the maxstream library only has the Xbee). So I drew one up. it can be downloaded here if you have comments, please drop me a note in the comments section.