UptownMaker

A friend of mine recently posted to Twitter a picture of an object that his 19-month-old identified as "K". That got me to thinking- clearly, she knows what a "K" is, but it doesn't exist in the "privileged class" of objects that we arbitrarily refer to as "letters". Hence, she was able to spot a "K" someplace an adult would never even look for one. At her age, she still sees nouns everywhere she looks. That doorstop LOOKS like a "K" so she identified it as such. As adults, we live in a world of verbs. We look at that object and see a doorstop- which is to say, we see what it DOES rather than what it IS . There's an important distinction there, for makers and artists especially. We tend to be so wrapped up in the verb form of the world that we forget the noun. My personal experience with this has also been that even when I succeed in considering an alternative solution to a problem, I STILL verb-ify my solution,...

Too busy to blog lately. I need to change that. Today I'll be doing lots of gateware builds on a project so I'll have some free-time. I attended a seminar last week about the picoPower capabilities of Atmel's UC3, Atmega and Xmega processors, and it got me hankering to start working with the Xmegas. It did not, however, give me a good answer to a fundamental question: what the heck is the difference between the 'A' and 'D' family of Xmega parts? Some Google searches failed to turn up a result, so being a good little creator of value, I thought I'd do the research and make a post about it. For more information about the Xmega in general, EMSL have a good starter article . In short, they are high-ish pin count, 3.3V microcontrollers that add some really nice features to those available in the Atmega parts. They come in two flavors- 'A' and 'D', with 44, 64 and 100 pin count devices and QFN, BGA, and QFP package options. They also have...

Elegant (adj.): “I’m being an unnecessarily clever d!ck about this, and that’s going to open up a lorry-sized hole in my design that I won’t see because I’m being too smug about how clever this solution is. Oh, and it’ll be harder to fix, understand, build, troubleshoot, and use, but I saved $.000001 on each unit by committing untold future resources to solving the problems I don’t know I just made. It also took far longer to design than it would have had I done it in a more conventional manner, but that’s okay, because design time is free and per-unit cost is king.” KISS is the alternative to "elegant", and frequently results in designs which are MORE elegant than trying to be clever produces.

No, not that first time (well, not exclusively). Think about the first time you did something that scared the hell out of you.  For me, the best example is the first time I set out to ride a rollercoaster and actually enjoy it.  Before, the tiny number of times I'd been on coasters were all profanity-laced panic-attack-like attempts to assert my masculinity.  This time, however, I decided to seize my fear and enjoy the ride.  It worked- that summer, and the two years thereafter, I bought a season pass to the local theme park and racked up literally hundreds of out-and-back trips, and I made a couple of special trips to other theme parks to hit THEIR coasters, too.  Something that had been previously unimaginable became a source of tremendous enjoyment to me. What about the first time you used a tool you'd never used before?  I was terrified of the vertical milling machine until the first project I used it for; now I can't imagine NOT having access to it...

I've long suffered from notebook envy.  Not envy of any particular notebook; I just always wished I could be one of those people that carries a notebook around and jots down notes on everything - stuff they want to look up, buy, make, write about, talk about, whatever. I never HAVE been one of those people, for a number of reasons.  I'm scatterbrained, so even if I did have a pen and notebook, they'd have to be pocket-sized so I can not have to carry them around, or I'll lose them.  I hate writing (I actually have a mild learning disability which affects my ability articulate ideas with a pen and paper), so I'm not likely to be writing draft blog posts or a novel in my notebook.  I can't draw for crap, either, and I don't have much interest in developing that skill.  I also never found a notebook I really liked- they're too big, or too rigid, or the paper is too thin, or they are lined/gridded wrong.  I'm very Goldilocks on this. I like the Maker...

In mathematics, a degenerate form is one that cannot be perturbed in some way without being rendered a member of a larger, more complex class.  For example, a circle is a degenerate ellipse- change the constant multiplier of one of the terms and you push the form out of the class of circles into the larger class of ellipses. Next time you're solving a problem, ask yourself: am I solving for a degenerate form?  And, if the answer is yes, is that important?  Let me give an example where the answer to both questions was "yes".  I was tasked once with supporting some motion code which was intended to align a circuit board on a conveyor belt under a camera. The code as written worked fine in the lab, but in the field, customers began to complain of erratic and unpredictable behavior- boards which would be incorrectly positioned at the start of inspection, pushed off the end of the conveyor, etc.  It turns out that the code had originally been written to the dege...

Whenever you put a project out there in the community, be it on your blog, a community board, or as an article in another venue (or if it gets picked up by say, Hackaday or Make), you're bound to get some comments that are, shall we say, worth less than the calories they took to type.  Worse still are the times you get these comments from someone to whom you are explaining (in meatspace) your current pet project- those times can be a SERIOUS buzz kill and I've lost the will to finish a couple of projects after comments like this. "You know, Target sells something that [does that]/[does almost exactly that]."  This is more common in meatspace than on the web, I think, because the web audience self-selects for people who understand that the joy is in the making, not the having.  And, frequently, the "almost" is where the bugaboo lies- I want EXACTLY that, not ALMOST exactly that. "Arduino is for losers."  Or some variation thereon.  Arduino, as a p...