FYI: RAD (Ruby+Arduino) MIDI bounty

A quickie, I found this very interesting. I want to have happened, already: Ruby Arduino MIDI bounty.

Ain’t it cool? He is enticing you and me with some undefined hardware bounty. And pointing to GitHub as the place where you should upload your RAD-compatible MIDI library.

Note to self: RAD uses some language transformations to get where it is. Learn from them.

SMAPLER v2 kits build report

All in an afternoon’s work. Two Smaplers, built from kits. Our first kits, ever. Pictures. You came for the pictures, right?

A week ago, I bought two kits for an Arduino shield that had audio capabilities and a PS/2 connector. The kit was called SMAPLER. I intended to build the kit together with David, so I bought one extra for him, and then told him about it later. It was the right thing to do. He went out and bought a soldering station (a glorified name for a working soldering pen), and we set off a Saturday to build the kits.

After unboxing the soldering unit, it was a dream to work with. Disclaimer: I have never worked with any soldering station. Ever. All the presets were correct for our usage, and it just worked. (It was a DS50-Pu from Danish company RS.)

DS-50 in all its glory

Being rather nervous to break hardware things that can never be repaired, I was at first a little apprehensive about soldering. But it just came naturally after a while. Really: things you do with your hands are learnt in the muscle memory. I guess.

What we misunderstood: The three pairs of capacitors (blue, square plastic tops, with two long legs) are, well… capacitors. Their names contain the strings “33” and “47” in them. That’s their nano-Farad values. And the one that does not contain any of those strings, is a 100 nF capacitor.

Now that there is a picture online (we googled, and by mere luck found as-yet-unpublished images on Blushingboy.org), it became clear (to us dolts) that those many trios of holes, named PA0-5 and PD0-5 are for optional extra connections. So, we didn’t have to anything about those holes. Cool.

An undocumented update to our printed partlist also confused us: the part CR5 (a 330u capacitor) has been changed to a 100u capacitor. The designer told me. There is no documentation, yet. Welcome to beta hardware. On the upside: it seems like it’s Creative Commons. “(cc) 2008” it says on the board. And I got an enlarged Eagle picture of the board, plus a partlist, and a circuit diagram.

Nugget of wisdom: Electrolytic capacitors have polarity. That is fit for a t-shirt. And: all electronic components’ design are explained belt-and-suspenders-style, and everything is an informational symbol. For instance, the wide stripe on the side of capacitors means “this side is the negative”. On that stripe there are often printed minus signs. Which, I have been unable to understand as minus characters, until I was told of the meaning of the stripe…

Making stuff can be exciting: After having soldered 12 pinheads in a row, I exhaled. Being so concentrated, and feeling successful, was exhausting. Getting better at soldering is hard, rewarding work. OK, not hard, but quite rewarding. (Pinheads. They are long rows of metal sticks, that act like short wires, thus connecting boards that sit on top of each other, like a circuit sandwich.)

By having two kits, we were able to make the first one very slowly, and then when that was done, we could do the other one. Quite a bit faster. Smapplerific!

Mounting opamps: Just be as violent as you’d be when mounting something inside a PC. You know, subtly coercive.

Mounting pinhead sections. Have your Arduino nearby, so you can see if the new board’s connectors fit into the Arduino’s header holes. Also: there are plastic knobs on the bases of the header sections. Pay attention, so you don’t mount these over the descriptive text on the board.

When browsing for information, I came across the page for the Motor Shield. It is a “bare printed circuit board”. That scared me, earlier today. After this session, it’s just… a few components you can slap on. It’s a personal transformation, from wimp to champ. At least, it feels that way.

At the upcoming Scandiland Arduino meetup, there’ll be code. Actual programs for this unit. As of now, I have no way of testing this thing out. I guess it’s part of that beta charm.

SMAPLER v2 for Arduino has PS/2 connectors

I have an Arduino. I have access to a couple of neat PS/2-connected card-readers from ye olde times. The Arduino has no PS/2 connector. Fail? Maybe.

A guy from the Arduino core team (the long-hair to the right) lives in Malmö, my town.

He’s made his own connector-happy little outboarder PCB kit, which has the added bonus of being home to some audio-recording chips.

I had met him during the BarCamp day (we snuck out, to see the electronics folks’ meetup, hehe), and seen what his Smapler could do. Auto-generated beats using voice sounds only. Très organic.

But what really got me was the lowly PS/2 connector.

So, I stalked him online, SMSed him, and he promptly invited me to his house, to pick up a kit. I think I was the first customer. I got to see his oscilloscope (fancy, white plastic).

But, about the board: In the picture above, there are little green plastic pieces, with punky metal spikes. They are so-called headers, where you can connect a wire (like in the PC) to a knob, to control weird audio things. And man, the included the knobs.

The kicker for me is: this is not a pre-built product. It’s a kit. I got the PCB, and all the components I need. Add a solder gun, and some elbow grease, and I have a unit. That part is to-be-done, but I want to be done with it, and ready for the previously mentioned Arduino meetup here in Malmö.

(If this got you excited, they already take email orders at team "alpha-hrrm" blushingboy.org until their funky new web presence is open. My interest in that business is that I want local initiatives to succeed.)

So, in a possible future, I will be able to read magnetic cards into my Arduino’s brain. Wow. Flabbergasting.

Superfish, activated on click

Update: Fixed link to patch. Thank you, helpful commenters! You fix the Web!

Or, onclick, as people say. (This is Google fodder, so I include alternative spellings of clicking – there I go a third time.) I just want you to know that this one person released a great fix, a patch really, for Superfish. Superfish? Oh, it’s like a better Suckerfish. Still gibberish? There’s a website with examples of this fine menu.

Patch to make onClick activation happen. The mysterious jardeeq includes friendly instructions on how to upgrade one of your Superfish files to make this work. (I tracked that person down, and sent fanmail.)

Once, the Swedish monarch, talking about unemployed people, uttered the words: “People should not expect fried sparvar to fly into their mouths.” Sparvar, it turns out, is a Swedish folk word, a non-Linneaus grouping of small birds. Closest thing we get in English is passerine. Hardly as snappy.

Today, that fine Czech Open Source patcher sent some fried sparvar into my mouth.

BarCamp in Copenhagen, again!

OK, it is that time of the year: you get to be in a grand group of interesting people, and doing a micropresentation (on anything!).

BarCamps are everywhere, and this, the third one, on Saturday 22 November, should be excellent. Go to the BarCamp Copenhagen page, and sign up for it. I’ll be there.

A special, from-10-o’clock extra session has been organized by Kim Bach and Mark Wubben, so if you are going to that, please tell them, via Kim’s firstname.lastname@gmail.com. OK, then. See you!