atoms&electrons;

Also check out the Apple //e Twitter Display for another take on this idea.

I’ve partitioned my social networking life into two fairly distinct pieces. Facebook is for friends and family, and Twitter is for my technology hobbies. Facebook is for vacation photos, and Twitter is for the latest news on robotics, CNC, Maker culture, etc. One consequence of this is that I usually only check Facebook once or twice a week to catch up on what people are doing and reject requests to join The Mafia/Vampire Clans/Farmville. However, I find myself checking Twitter multiple times a day, because there’s a constant stream of interesting technology tidbits coming in. Twitter is the cocktail party full of interesting sound-bites to Facebook’s Thanksgiving Dinner at Uncle Ralph’s house.

Back in July I built RoboSketch which to this day still gets more traffic than any other post on my blog. People seem to love it. Somehow the spammers have figured this out because it gets dozens of comments daily hawking Acai Berry diets, Colon Cleansing products and my favorite which is a site that sells the book “How To Get Pregnant.” But the dirty little secret is that aside from the demo video, I was never able to get the RoboSketch to draw anything without failing in one way or another.

We’re not sending anyone to the moon here, so failure is always an option. In fact, failure isn’t feared, it’s desired. The best way to learn is hands-on, doing things and making mistakes. When you make a mistake yourself, that knowledge is ingrained in you in a concrete tangible way and you’re better off for it. So when my Etch A Sketch device was having conniptions, I took note of the failure and followed the advice of that most wise sage Tim Gunn. Make it work, people.

Merry Christmas!

Sparkle Labs published a paper Christmas tree kit (http://kits.sparklelabs.com/2009/12/15/light-up-christmas-tree-project/) that I did on my Craft Robo paper cutter. I lit them up with a pair of ShiftBrite addressable RGB LEDs controlled by an Arduino microcontroller. It’s basically a slightly modified version of the Spookotron Halloween pumpkin lights.

I tried out two new ideas for Halloween this year. One of them was an ill-conceived plan to carve a pumpkin using a Dremel tool. The pumpkin looked OK, but by the end I was covered in microscopic pumpkin shrapnel from head to toe. The other idea was to make an LED pumpkin light, and it turned out great.

I call it the Spookotron and it uses 3 ShiftBrite RGB LEDs to light up the inside of a pumpkin. The LEDs are controlled by an Atmel ATMega 8-bit microcontroller. I chose the Arduino-compatible RBBB from Modern Device because it’s tiny and easy to program.

This is still a work in progress, but I took a couple of the LED matrix panels mentioned in a previous entry and combined them with a small OLED display. They’re driven by software on a PC that pulls updates from Twitter and Facebook and shows them on the display.

Eventually I’ll build a few of these into some nice enclosures and hang them on the wall to make a literal Facebook wall.