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I will be there to promote the electronics classes that I teach, and also have Rachel’s products for sale and on display. Come one and all. It will be fun!
This Month Essential Circuits: 555 Timer December 8 & 9 7-10PM
And through the month of January Intro to Circuits & Electronics, a comprehensive introduction to analog electronics and circuit building from schematics. 5 Wednesday sessions in January and the first week of Febuary.
This makes me so happy! Go get the details, and warm up your robots!
btw, did anyone else notice that boing-boing got hacked last night?
First got turned on to fractals from James Gleick’s book ‘Chaos’. Which I read after seeing the Nova show in 1989. My quick search turned up only this link to a text reference to it. There’s alot out there now online to see and hear about the work that he’s done and been a part of. It’s easy to show what it is, harder yet to show what it meant to see it as it was happening. The possibility of knowing organic structure and growth became possible. Computation in a very pure form opened itself up to design as a possibility and we are living with the results, to the varying degree that they are rendered, every day. To Rushkoff’s admonition that we must ‘Program Or Be Programmed’ I would add ,’Design or be Designed’. We must know and be aware of the structural root from which our environment springs: whether it’s geometric representation of organic forms, or formal mathematical representation of iterative processes, Turns out it’s all the same.
Hey! We’re moving! Not websites, ‘tho it would be nice to upgrade, but physical location. Being tied up in that activity has slowed down the blog-rate… In the works we have some tutorials on the 7-Key Slider/Wheel breakout, and the 10-Key Touch Sensor breakout.
here’s a preview image!
We’ll als0 be bringing you more on the SolarDuino next week after we unpack everything! The plan is to offer assembled and tested SolarDuino prototypes to folks who have a good project to use them on. It will be a Solarduino Beta Tester Essay Contest. Details arriving soon. In the mean time, enjoy your weekend!!
There were more than a few people at the Maker Faire who wondered about the protocol used to communicate with the IC at the heart of the Mouse Eye. Everyone over 40 said that it must be PS/2. I knew about the connector, but not the protocol until now. Not much need to tap a PS/2 device lately…
The old IBM Personal System/2 gets origination credit for the old barrel connector and protocol. Based on the wave forms on this very informative source, its closest cousin seems to be SSI. The clock line idles high, and data is sent one byte at a time LSB first. There’s start, stop, and parity bits along for the ride. In contrast, the ADNS2620 IC that we use in the Mouse Eye has a much different flow. It’s a synchronous protocol, but there is none of that start, stop, parity business. If you mumble your bits, you just don’t get listened to. Here’s a head to head wave form comparison.
Above you have the PS/2 clock and data lines. Bytes are sent one at a time, and it takes 11 clock cycles to send 8 bits (image from this site). Below are images taken from the ADNS2620 datasheet (here you go).
First thing to notice is that there’s no parity, start, or stop bits. All the timing is done on the rising and falling edges of the clock. The two bytes sent are continuous in this Write Operation. 16 bits, 16 clock cycles. Data is MSB first.
The only difference with the Read Operation is the Detal ‘A’ and Detail ‘B’, which are timing considerations to allow the ADNS a chance to take control of the data line there in the middle where it starts to send the byte of interest to the host, and then release it at the end. This is about as far from PS/2 as synchronous serial gets. If anyone out there has a name for it (real or imagined) please let me know. We’re calling it MouseEye protocol around here.
In other news, we are cooking up some delicious libraries for all of our products which will be released next week! Have a good weekend!
What a blast! We had a great time and it was so nice to meet all of you. Thanks to the volunteers for all your help, Andrea, Katie, Burcum! Rocket Ponies invade my sleep! Let’s do it again next year!
These are strange times. There is a powerful Open Source Hardware movement in the midst of an equally powerful slowly-creeping-clawing copyright expansionism. And now this. The idea that a real estate developer can collect 1% of the price of a home sale for 99 years after the home was initially sold is beyond the pale. In my reading Lewis Hyde’s timely book, this kind of notion is at its core un-american. The revolution was in response to a culmination of events, among the most popularly remembered was the Stamp Act. If you don’t remember, the Stamp Act has been passed down to us by historians as the classic case of “taxation without representation”. The British Parliament passed it as a way to pay for the debts they incurred during the French and Indian wars (uh huh). The developers of new housing tracts say the “capital recovery fee” is a way to pay off the cost of roads, sewer, and other infrastructure costs with one side of their mouths, and with the other as a way to “one day use the trickle of cash from these fees as collateral for a loan, or to get cash up front if pools of the fees are packaged into securities to be bought and sold on Wall Street.” Hoo Boy, I can see where this is going.
Monopoly is not a board game, it is the greatest threat to a free democracy.
I’ve got the hardware prototype up and running with the solar charging circuitry and the battery management circuit and firmware V1.0. It runs great! I’m packing it up to take to the Maker Faire Mixer tonight. Tomorrow I will post pics, video, schemata, explication.
rock.
File this under “There’s gotta be an easy fix for that!”.
Environmental working group has the news here and here. The stuff is essentially synthetic estrogen and there’s probably some in you pocket right now. Some Thermal Paper companies are removing BPA from their recipes, but the study this spring shows that it is still prevalent. Buyer beware.
Just picked up Lewis Hyde’s latest ‘Comman As Air: Revolution, Art, and Ownership”. Published this month. I enjoyed his book ‘The Gift’, and it’s nice to have his voice in my head again. Most interesting chapter title: “Benjamin Franklin, Founding Pirate”.
Add this to your reading list in preparation for the Open Hardware Summit (!). We will be sponsoring and attending and loving every minute of it!
Happy End Of Summer!
