Wed, 31 Oct 2007
Gratuitous Update
In a transparent attempt to not leave the month of October blog entry-free here's a quick and gratuitous update.
One-way wiki
As noted back in July, I've been running a personal "one-way wiki" as an experiment. My primary goal was to get more of my in-progress hacks off my harddrive and onto the public net where they might be of more use to someone. The secondary goal was to try to reduce the number of browser tabs I had open and chewing up memory.
Overall I think the experiment has been a success with a (very) rough count of about ten-thousand words over about thirty pages in the wiki. While many of those words are only links there's a few in-progress projects partially documented also.
I still probably have more tabs open than I'd like but I think I'm making progress on that front.
The wiki has definitely been a plus for documenting in-progress projects and keeping track of details for recovering from context switches. Hopefully the notes—such as they are—are of use to others as well.
I think the only down-side is that my blogging activity has become even more curtailed than it was—mainly because I'm documenting items in the wiki rather than on the blog. It is entirely possible of course that I wouldn't have posted anything more to this blog even if if I hadn't had the wiki. In light of this however (and a couple of requests in this direction) I'm thinking of generating blog entries from the "recent changes" record of the wiki so people who are interested can still keep track of what I'm up to. When or if this idea actually gets implemented remains to be seen. :-)
Recent changes
In the interim here's a few links into the wiki:
- Most of my recent projects have focused on the Arduino hardware platform. I've been working on interfacing an I/O expander and ethernet module with success. You can check out my Arduino interfacing demonstration videos too.
- A growing list of links on various electronics topics including PCB-making, DIY test equipment and tutorials.
- Some notes on using the open source elecrtonic design software package KiCad on Mac OS X.
- I also created a set of electronic breadboard templates in SVG, PNG and PDF formats. That page even got featured on the Makezine blog.
- Finally for now, an in-progress project to reverse engineer the Skannerz Racerz hand-held link-able toy racing game. This project has also made use of the xoscope sound-card oscilloscope software package.
Posted at: 23:20 | category: / | | Comments ()
Thu, 08 Mar 2007
Attending MIT
Today was my first day of attending classes at MIT... Ok, so not really. It is however probably as close as I'll ever get to attending unfortunately—although I did manage to visit the campus a couple of times during my trip to Cambridge last year.
On to the actual story...
While I've been aware of MIT's Open CourseWare initiative for some time I have not looked too deeply into what they have on offer. I can't remember how I ended up there today but while on the site I thought I'd have a look at what courses are available under the banner of Electrical Engineering and Computer Science. There are many papers available on the web site but there does seem to be a wide range in terms of the quality and depth of the materials online. In terms of the papers I was interested in, only 6.002 Circuits and Electronics, Fall 2000 seems to feature lecture videos and comprehensive notes.
For much of my life I have had an interest in electronics but I've also felt I've never had a strong grounding in the basics. None of the material (books, web sites) I've looked at lately have particularly grabbed me so I wondered if watching some lecture videos might help—I know, what kind of geek am I? Oh, wait, one of the geeky kind I guess. :-)
I've just finished watching the first of twenty-five lectures—this one entitled "Introduction and Lumped Circuit Abstraction" presented by Professor Anant Agarwal (direct video and notes links). The lecture video was enjoyable, reasonable quality and the content was laugh-out-loud funny in places—yes, really:
- "I could do this all day, it's so much fun." (While waving a hair-dryer over a thermistor.) ~32m40s
- "If I really believe in my own BS anything's a lumped element—so here's a pickle." (This demo is kinda cute.) ~36m52s
A real live MIT pickle
The text for the course "Foundations of Analog and Digital Electronic Circuits" seems to be available in New Zealand for $135.00.
I'd probably prefer a non-RealVideo video source but overall this first experience has been pretty good—time will tell if I make the time to view the rest of the lectures. When you think about the content MIT has put online even in its current basic form it's really quite impressive—makes me wonder what I'd have done with it in my high school years.
This internet thing may yet amount to something...
Posted at: 04:55 | category: / | | Comments ()