Reboot

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It's been nearly 2 years since my last post, so I figured I should actually update this again. I've continued to take pottery classes and make awesome stuff, but my bigger current obsession is combining crafting and programming via microcontrollers such as the Arduino.

For my first venture into this realm I wanted to do a small project just to get familiar with Arduino and working with electronics. I haven't done anything with circuits since high school physics (Lego Mindstorms in the robotics class during my masters doesn't count; there was no wire or resistors or anything like that), so I had to relearn pretty much everything to do with electricity. Anyhow last fall I followed a tutorial for an Arduino-powered sound-reactive LED strip. The only tweak I made was changing the threshold for noise; the tutorial assumed a louder environment than the quiet office where I mounted this. We had holiday music playing in the background at work, so this was part of our decorations.

The sound detector I bought had no headers, so I had to solder some on. I think this was the third thing I've soldered in my life. It came out ok, considering; at least it worked! I definitely got things a bit too hot in a few places though. Live and learn...


I also did some creative wire splicing (another new skill) to get everything hooked up. Here's the final Arduino/breadboard setup:


And a short video of the lights in action:



Although this was very simple as such things go, I had a ton of fun putting it together. I'm pretty thoroughly addicted to electronics projects at this point. I've been reading a lot and I'm getting especially interested in the wearables/soft-circuits realm, but I haven't yet attempted any of those projects. I do hope to make a crazy Christmas sweater for next Christmas, but that's still very much in the planning stages. I'm also thinking about a Christmas tree topper of some brightly lit, spinning, insane variety.

As far as projects I've actually started on, I am working on a decoration for Halloween, which I shall detail in a subsequent post.

Oh, and I'm taking a Photoshop class right now in hopes of getting better at web design/graphics stuff. This follows the cryptography class I audited in the fall and the user interfaces class I audited the previous fall. Auditing the hardcore classes is AWESOME: all the learning, none of the group work!!!

And that's what I've been up to for the last 2 years...

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