Category: general

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“WiiChuck” Wii Nunchuck Adapter Available

Want to hook up a Wii Nunchuck to an Arduino but don’t want to cut up the cord on your Nunchuck? Yeah me too. So I made some of these:

wiichuck_adapter1.jpg

wiichuck_adapter2.jpg

It’s a small PCB that adapts the Wii Nunchuck connector to standard 4-pin header. I call it the “wiichuck adapter”. It plugs directly into the Arduino, no wiring necessary. You can get one too for $4.

Available from the following wonderful shops:
– FunGizmos.com. FREE DOMESTIC SHIPPING. International shipping for $1 more.
– Little Bird Electronics (Australia)
– SparkFun. Ships domestic & internationally. Be sure to order header pins too!
– and just about any SparkFun distributor

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WineM, a ThingM technology sketch

At my new company ThingM, Mike and I have completed a technology sketch for WineM, a smart wine rack. Below is a video demonstration and an abstract. A full description can be found on the ThingM site. We periodically create Technology Sketches as a way to explore the ideas we’re thinking about.


(revver link)

Abstract:
WineM is a Technology Sketch of a smart wine rack. It’s designed to locate wines in a wine rack using RFIDs attached to bottles and to display which wines have been located using LED backlights behind the bottles. Collectors (or anyone with a large wine cellar) can use it to search through collections, track the location of specific bottles and manage inventory with a minimum of data entry. Linking bottles to networked databases can provide information that would otherwise be too time consuming or difficult to obtain (for example, the total value of a collection, or all the wine that is ready to drink).

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Speaking at dorkbot-socal, Saturday June 3rd

At the next meeting of the SoCal instantiaton of dorkbot, I’ll be bringing an entourage of Roomba with me and will be demonstrating the hackability of them. Some of the things I’ll be talking about:

– RoombaMidi / Roombas making music
– Roomba Spirographs / Roombas making art
– Roomba as robotics experimentation platform
– What’s needed to hack a Roomba

What: Roomba-a-go-go at dorkbot-socal
Where: Machine Project
When: Saturday June 3rd, 1pm
Why: Know your enemy, the Roombas are ready to revolt

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Word of the day: interfaction

interfaction:
An interface that is interacts with you.
portmanteau of interface and interaction.

For interfaces with a touch response, interfaction == haptic. But there are other kinds of interfaction. The ring of LEDs that surround a rotory encoder to show a parameters value, or keys that beep when you press them are non-haptic interfactions.

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ReadyNAS Rules

I recently obtained a ReadyNAS NV by Infrant, on the recommendation of my friend Ben Franco, who’s done much research on large disk arrays. The ReadyNAS pretty much rules. I think my long-standing storage woes may finally be over.

readynas status screen

It’s a dedicated Network Attached Storage (NAS) box that does RAID-0, RAID-1, RAID-5, or a proprietary combo of the three called “X-RAID”. X-RAID allows you to start with one disk, move to two, then three, then four, all without rebuilding the RAID or changing RAID levels.

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Go-go-globalization!

I just received my quicky non-business business cards. That makes them calling cards, I guess, and when I get more time I’d like to get really nice simple letterpress ones, with some sort of sumptuous paper.

These quicky cards are from some place I found on the Net, clickbusinesscards.com. Use their little web design GUI for 10 minutes, insert 35 bucks via Visa and I had cards being shipped to me. I get them in a matter of days, but when I look at the Fedex tracking info (aka “travel blog” ), I see the cards came all the way from Australia! Across the Pacific! Through customs! Into Tennesee?

bizcard travel blog

We live in a strange wonderful world where it’s cost-effective to have business cards made on the other side of the world.