Matt Cottam of Tellart has been my self appointed mentor/friend for over a year now, but recently I have been working on a project with him that can be seen in the video below. It is a really simple concept, but thinks kept getting the way. The hall sensor is a 5v chip, and the board is 3.3v so I just added a 5v step-up board. However, that required too much power so i had to solder it directly to the battery terminals. Well, then I had a problem where the hall sensor we are using also required it be reset after being powered up. So the power to it turns on then cuts off for a second when booting up. The piezo-electric buzzer was also to quiet at first, but I found that by putting a small magnet on the back of it they became much louder. This all seems to work now, but it was a trip getting everything to work as one.
Job update: I won’t say who they are, but I have interviewed with a few places now, and some things seem like they are going pretty well. Im not sure where I will end up after school as of now, but it will be fun finding out. I have also been contacting other places just incase, but on a few of them, I was just told that they are not hiring this year.
I know a while ago I talked about my wood block project. It didnt die, just put on hold. I have CNC (thanks Zack) two of them so far, and I hope before graduation I will have 6 done. Here is the starting of one of them. (pics and video)
For my recent birthday Mary was nice enough to get me a gift certificate to sparkfun. So what else could I do… I spent it, and then some), and on new Funnel IO Arduinos,Xbee modules and Lithium-polymer batteries for them. The funnel is amazing. It has a LiPo battery charge chip on it (thorough mini USB) and Xbee socket built in.
Because the Xbees are version 2.5, I didn’t know that you couldn’t use some of the same commands on them. Also, the book I have doesn’t even mention some of the things you need to do. It only took me 12 hours to get it all working. Of course I could do it all in 20min now.
My senior show was this last week. This is the time when everyone shows off all their work from the time they entered their major in a gallery setting. The opening had hundreds of people there, so it got very crammed, but the show was great, but it’s sad it’s over now… I remember every year thinking about that day. I did however buy a suit for the occasion, I figured I will need it for interviews at some point anyways.
My senior thesis in in full swing now. I am redesigning mediawiki from the ground up in the fashion described in Alan Coopers book “The Inmates are Running the Asylum”. I have started deconstruction every part of the software, and already I can tell you it is in dire need of some interaction design. I’ll keep this updated as I work on it.
Last but not least. I was playing around with Mootools, and I started to think. Tellart, the place I have been interning at redid their website this summer. It was all done in flash, and I actually did a hefty portion of the original code in AS3. I was looking at some effects I am using for my new portfolio site (more on that later) and thought I could redo the Tellart site in JavaScript just to try it out. I was able to do it in under 2 hours (flash site took a week). A lot of that had to do with knowing what needed to be done, but also the face that html elements dont want to overlap. Either way, it is really cool to see it working on my phone.
For my recent birthday Mary was nice enough to get me a gift certificate to