DorkbotPDX people doing strange things with electricity

Workshop Title: Introduction to PCB Layout Using EAGLE

Sunday, September 25th, 2011 (1-5pm)

ADX Portland (417 SE 11th Ave)

Cost: FREE

No RSVP required. Just drop in.

The Styloid Process gallery has posted some setup and opening night photos from the recent Dorkbot group show:

Enjoy!
http://styloid-process.com/?page_id=202

Thanks again to Janiece for offering up her gallery and hosting, and a major thanks to everybody that contributed work for the show!

Update: This code was committed to Arduino's github repository on Dec 16. It should become available in the next version of Arduino, eg 1.0.1.

Sunday has been a hot day in Portland. I know for a fact that it is even hotter in the community garden shed where Russell and I installed Wikiduino today.

shed temperature

I've described our good luck creating conectivity in a previous post. Now I'm excited to have real data wrapped in wiki pages streaming from a version 1.0 Arduino program. I upgraded to the 1.0 beta 3 version to use Paul Stoffregen's implementation of Strings. Thanks Paul.

The Nokia 5110 LCD was my first LCD I bought for my Arduino. After working on other stuff for a month, I got it running on my TAD Arduino I got from 3D. Like any talented cow, I did my own precision bitmap editing for the entire thing. Pics/code attached.

Next steps: 1.) Understand how to use the while or do words in software in order to loop audio on a piezo buzzer. 2.) Also perhaps loop an RGB that cycles through rainbow colors. 3.) Make a cheap shield that does all three and give it to my friends.

Tangential project:

A good architectural test for any protocol is to squeeze it into an under powered computer like an Arduino. For this and a few more reasons I've latched on to a project to publish field data from the Nike Community Garden as part of my work on the "Smallest Federated Wiki" (project videos).

Russell Senior helped by rummaging together enough radio gear to provide WiFi. Here's his install on the roof of a friendly neighbor with the garden in the distance.

Russell Senior installs WiFi for Ward Cunningham's Smallest Wiki

Coding the server proved extra challenging due to limited literal text space. I solved that by including several custom DSL's, one for HTML and another for JSON. With them I can assemble full pages from short text fragments that are reused in numerous places (See code). Here is the loop that reports discovered one-wire thermometers:

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

"Read more" for technical details....

Dorkbot PDX and Styloid Process are proud to present a collection of 11 works by local artists doing strange things with electricity:

• Where: Styloid Process Gallery (map)
• When: Opening First Thursday, September 1st, 2011, 6-10pm

The event is free and open to the public. Beverages (donation suggested) will be provided.

Connection:

1. : causal, logical, or contextual relation, sequence, or association
2. : a relation of personal intimacy
3. : coherence, continuity

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.