deep darc

This past weekend, Mike, Nathan, and myself had a road trip to Los Angeles for the weekend to hang out with Sophia. Lots of pictures after the jump.

By popular demand, I've made a video of the ambient color lamp in action. This version may look a little different than the previous pictures, as I am still experimenting with what works best.

I got the finished printed circuit boards for the mystery device in the mail the other day. After putting all of the parts on the board, this is what I now have:

Keep in mind that this is just a prototype. The next version will be cooler.

You remember the ybox, right? That do-it-yourself networked set-top box in an Altoid's tin?

Oh. Maybe not. Well, it was pretty cool.

There is a special place in my heart for the original ybox, as it is what finally got me into tinkering with microcontrollers. However, the more I've learned, the more things I can find wrong with it's current design:

• It's expensive! The XPort component is $51 in single quantities!
• The XPort shielding isn't properly grounded on the original PCB, so if you have stray VDD wire touch the XPort, you just fried a $51 part! (I speak from experience)
• The PCB seems largely autorouted, with lots of vias and unnecessarily long traces for the video signal.
• Did I mention it was expensive?

So I've set out to make a better and less expensive networked set-top box in an altoids tin. It should be around $40 cheaper to build. This is what the board is looking like:

So ever since I did the ybox workshop at Maker Faire earlier this year, I've been messing around with micro-controllers and electronics in general. For the most part I've been limited to breadboarding and some wire-wrapping, but I want to take it to the next level—making my own PCBs! And after may hours fighting with the (incredibly un-user-friendly) Eagle Layout Editor, I think I finally have something worth sending off to the fab house...

Ain't it beautiful? Anyone care to guess what it does?

What follows is the most amusing paragraph I have ever read on daring fireball:

It’s hard to work the concept of a “software update” into a cow analogy, but here goes: You willingly purchase a cow, which, the purveyor of said cow makes explicitly clear, is intended only to be used to produce milk. You buy it and figure out a way to make cheese. Two months later the purveyor of the cow offers you a pill, free of charge, which, if administered to the cow, will result in slightly better-tasting milk, but which pill comes with a stern and plainly worded warning that, if administered to a cow that had been used to produce cheese (which, recall, was made clear from the outset the cow was not intended for), the pill might kill the cow, and that, even if it doesn’t kill the cow, will prevent all previously known cheese-making hacks from working. Further, let’s stipulate that there is no medical or bovine pharmacological reason the pill could not have instead been engineered in such a way that it would enable the cow to produce the better-tasting milk and still allow the previously discovered cheese-producing hacks to continue unabated — that the reason for this frustrating limitation is, at best, marketing, and at worst, spite — and so that, in some way, the whole situation is, undeniably, at least somewhat shitty.

I had a profound experience at Ikea this morning. Sophia and I went there to go buy a couch. We had already been to Ikea yesterday to pick up the couch, but after getting there we found that apparently the couch was up on one of the racks that they couldn't get to during operating hours—making this our second trip to Ikea in less than 24 hours. Sophia's dad was helping us out with his truck, much like he did the night before (when there wasn't a couch).

This time they had some of the couches we wanted on the self-serve floor and we loaded it onto two of the flat-bed carts. We glided over to one of the checkout lines and proceeded to wait for our turn at the casher.

Eventually it was our turn, and after all the items were scanned I was ready to pay. I reached for my wallet and...no wallet.

My heart sank. Not only another wasted trip for us, but another wasted trip for Sophia's dad! I fumbled around in disbelief for a few distressed moments.

"What's wrong?", I heard a voice ask. It came from the guy behind us in line.

"I forgot my wallet", I replied while fumbling around. I figured he was annoyed that I was taking so long.

"How much do you need?", he asked.

Puzzled, I answered him, "Around $700."

"I'll cover it and you can send me a check," he replied.

I was dumbstruck. There must be some catch, I thought. Or maybe I didn't hear him right. It seemed like something out of a movie, not something that happens to real people. But here I was without a wallet, and here was someone willing to help. And that's exactly what he did—he walked around the couch to the register, pulled out his American Express card and paid for it.

He handed me his drivers license so I could get his address off of it. I also wrote down my address, phone number, and email. I thanked him profusely, and we went our separate ways. His name was Stephen.

As you might imagine, this has been quite a profound experience for me. $700 is no small amount of money, and he had no way of knowing if I was even good for it. Yet he helped me anyway, and for that I am extraordinarily grateful.

The check is in the mail.

UPDATE: By the way, Stephen apparently runs the Boulder Creek Brewery in, um... Boulder Creek. If you are in the area, you should probably drop by and check it out—because it is a known fact that cool people make delicious beer. You heard it here first.

Sorry about not updating my blog at all in the past few months. My excuse is that I've been, ua... busy. And stuff. Yeah.

I've got a lot of things that I want to blog about, but I've just not found the energy/time to start writing them.

I just wanted to let everyone know that I'm still alive. And oh yeah, I'm moving. To Campbell. Like, now.