So I have been pursuing some projects in addition to my Popular Mechanics experiment. Here’s some info, and some links to (hopefully) interesting stuff:
- I’ve been trying to learn electronics. Building circuits, arduino stuff, etc. I bought this kit from sparkfun, and I have to say that I was pretty impressed with the kit. Not long after I got the board, I heard an interview with the engineering team at sparkfun, and I have to admit that now I’m kind of a fanboy.
- Speaking of podcasts, I’ve been listening to The Amp Hour, a podcast that’s all about electronics engineering. The interview with sparkfun was episode #157. Also worth watching: Dave’s EEV Blog, and The Ben Heck Show (this is a youtube channel, so be aware that the videos start playing automatically…).
- I haven’t done a whole lot with my arduino, but I did follow this excellent instructable. Play the can-can on arduino? Most excellent.
- I had a motorola Droid II for quite awhile, and I liked it quite a bit; the phone got bricked, though, when I rode through the rain with it in my front pocket… So I’ve been on a search for the perfect (super cheap) smartphone. At the moment I’m actually using a palm Pixi. What does this have to do with D.I.Y? Well, the phone is old enough that it doesn’t have any of the types of apps that I got used to having on the Droid. So I’m learning how to make those apps myself. The two big things that I’m missing are a good podcast player/retriever, and the google play music app. Some links of interest: webos-internals wiki, a great source for working with webOS, and the palm developer site has some good info, too.
- Oh, I almost forgot. Chris Gammel, from The Amp Hour podcast, has started a program that I would be really interested in joining, if I weren’t working on an engineering degree. It’s called Contextual Electronics, and it’s an online/hands-on electronics course. It sounds pretty interesting, check it out.
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