JonM's blog

No flame tube this week. It didn't happen because of problems.

Hey, look! Someone is setting up an independent TED conference for March 2012 in Bozeman. Looks exciting!

The lovely people at F11 Photography have given us a large box of disposable camera shells. It turns out the circuits inside of disposable camera shells are ideal for creating the high-voltage, low-current power required to build awesome Steampunk lights guaranteed to amaze your friends and enrage your enemies.

Found this in my RSS feeds today. Definitely some good info in it, and one of the formats available allows it to be easily printed as a comic book. Given all the excitement around The World's Most Useless Machine last Saturday, it might be worth cranking out a few dozen of these for our next big event.

Pictures! I haven't updated in a while, but have managed to put some time into the pedal.

Really, there's not a lot to say this time. I managed to solder everything in without significant injury. I also mocked up the housing, stuck everything together with alligator clips, and fired it up for a quick test. As expected, it sounds weird (see video.)

Next steps:
- prime and paint the enclosure
- finish the off-board wiring (including power switch & LED)
- stick the whole thing together and hope I haven't broken something in the interim.

While I was assembling all the components required for my new project, I also found a cool new Android app: ElectroDroid . I've really only poked around so far, but it looks exceptionally groovy. The resistor calculator, op amp calculator, and 7400 pinout reference look amazingly useful. Looks much more convenient than flipping through my old electrical engineering textbook, and finally gives some justification for buying an expensive tablet PC.

ANYWAY, on with the projects!

All hail the (still officially unnamed) Bozeman Makerspace!

I'm trying to figure out what to do for my first project. I'd like to build a LunaMod for sure, since it seems pretty low-key. Famous last words I'm sure, since I have about as much natural aptitude with a soldering iron as a fish with a bicycle.