atoms&electrons;

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.

When I finally get around to writing my self-help book, it will be entitled Everything I Needed To Know About Life, I Learned From The Apple ][. It was my first computer and to really get the most out of it you needed to understand how it worked at the lowest levels. It was the period of my life when I had no money and nearly infinite time, so spending weeks reverse-engineering games and copy protection schemes to understand how they worked was the norm. I learned persistence, dealing with constraints and a work ethic from those experiences. Like any formative experience, it left an indelible impression on me. If I’m ever called-upon to testify in a court of law, I’d like to be sworn in with one hand on The Red Book.

I’m obsessed with LEDs. If I go to Halted to pick up 30 cents worth of capacitors, I will leave with 10 bucks worth of LEDs. When I first started learning about Arduino a few months back, most of my project ideas centered around LEDs. I imagined building my own Daft Punk helmet or a video wall made of LEDs.

That’s the best part of getting a new hobby – those first few weeks when everything is pure possibility and you have no idea how hard anything is. Maybe you recently decided to get into shape and have started exercising, so you read about Tabata Intervals or 20-rep squats and say to yourself “That sounds fun!” Naiveté like this tends not to last very long – doing anything that’s truly impressive requires hard work and this applies to LEDs just the same as it applies to squats.

I was at a local toy store recently and saw a display of Etch A Sketch toys. They were marketed as “retro” toys – something you would buy to remind you of a bygone era and feel thankful for having the great fortune to live in a more sophisticated period of history. I had an Etch A Sketch when I was a kid and I can assure you that when I played with it I did so without any cool ironic detachment. For me, that thing was bad-ass.

Keep in mind, this was before video games. I realize they’re putting Nintendo NES systems on key chains and giving them away in cereal boxes these days, but even NES was way beyond the first video games that came after my Etch A Sketch days. Atari 2600, Fairchild Channel-F, even Pong had yet to appear. But Etch A Sketch did exist and it’s true full name is the Etch A Sketch Magic Screen. It’s easy to overlook, but it’s designed to look like a TV. TVs used to have knobs on them – one for channel and the other for volume – just like the Etch A Sketch. So basically it was a TV that I could control and put any image I could imagine onto.