atoms&electrons;

The company-for-which-I-work has quite a nice art collection. There is a wide variety of art in all the buildings ranging from paintings, prints, sculpture, mixed media, etc. I just ran across some photos I took about a year ago when I travelled to a remote office. This was a building that had just been finished and they commissioned some very cool artwork for it.

One of my favorite episodes of The Twilight Zone is “It’s a Good Life.” In it, Billy Mumy plays a 6-year old with godlike powers. Anything he can think of he can instantly materialize and transform, whether they be objects, animals or even some unfortunate people. Whether it’s a gopher with two heads, a jack-in-the-box toy made out of one of the neighbors, or an impromptu snow-storm, all Billy has to do is imagine it and it happens.

What a difference a year makes. A year ago I didn’t have a TechShop membership, didn’t know what Atmel AVR or Arduino meant, didn’t own a soldering iron and had never fired a laser outside of a DVD player. That all changed last year when I attended my first Maker Faire and was overwhelmed by the amount of creativity and technology on display. It was almost too much, as I remember walking around a little dazed not sure what to look at. However, when I think back on that day one particular exhibit does stick in my memory.

In the summer of 1980 my family took a trip to the East Coast, and we flew American Airlines. It was my first time on an airplane and I remember being very excited. I had good cause to be excited – I was about to have the entire course of my life impacted, but didn’t know it yet.

I was reading the in-flight magazine and came across something that boggled my young mind. It was a full-page advertisement for a computer – a personal computer that you could buy and use yourself. I must have sat there and stared at that page for 15 minutes studying the picture of this thing called a “personal computer”. I tore the ad out and carried it around with me for the rest of the trip. It took about a year of bugging my parents but they eventually bought me an Apple II with 16K of RAM.

I’ve gotten quite a few questions regarding how to hook up and drive the Sure Electronics LED matrices I use in some of my projects, so here’s a quick brain dump on what you need to do.