My understanding of what I was doing– what all those parts meant. What you could DO with them– was limited, though. I never tried to make anything with them; I just collected.

All my electronics education at the time revolved around the 555 timer. It’s a fine chip, but it’s just a timer, an oscillator. Since that was the only “active” component I’d ever been exposed to, I looked at all problems through that lens, and eventually shrugged my shoulders and followed the path of software.

15 years later, I decided to try picking it up again. I had a project in mind: Making the stars in a painting I had fade in and out. I decided to make a concerted effort to pick up electronics again. What did I do? I picked up “The Art of Electronics” and a 555 timer again. Ugh. Art of Electronics is not for beginners. It’s a text book and it reads like one. Once again, I got frustrated and set down the iron.

7 years later, and I come across “Intro to the Arrr-duino”, a short video from MAKE Blog. It explains that making that light blink is just a simple matter of loading a microcontroller with a short bit of C code! C! I know this! Suddenly, all that pent-up 9 year old enthusiasm for electronics jumps into gear again, as though I never left it. I got the Arduino, I got some parts. I tore through the Arduino Playground, harvested any random piece of hardware from the trash bins at work and tried to figure out how to interface it. Motors! Memory chips! LCDs! Rotary encoders! So much learning. So much fun.

I guess what this blog entry is, is a big thank you to the Arduino team. By making a toolkit that makes electronics accessible with a minimal investment in time and money, they’ve jumpstarted a generation of makers, me included.

Need I say more?

They’ve just released a new board they call their Boss Board. It has spots for a PS2 connector, Audio/Video jacks, and even an NES controller (where do you get the connectors??).

The more I get into etching my own PCBs, the more I see the value in pushing out a project quickly with a protoboard. It doesn’t look as nice, but it’s just a LOT easier.

8317 Embossed Note Card Template for Photoshop (PSD)

The trick is to use the “last_buffer” property on your video sink. That contains the last frame that was displayed to your screen.

You can use RMagick to convert that into something you can use like this:

#!/usr/bin/ruby

require 'gst'
require 'RMagick'

@pipe = Gst::Pipeline.new
@source = Gst::ElementFactory.make("v4l2src")
@sink    = Gst::ElementFactory.make("xvimagesink")
@pipe.add(@source,@sink)
@source >> @sink

@pipe.play

[ ... Later ... ]
# This is the actual capture.
capture = Image.from_blob(@sink.last_buffer.data).first

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It’s an 8×8 red+green LED Matrix, driven by three shift registers driven by a Bare Bones Board Freeduino by Modern Device Company.

Before the meeting I just had it flashing fun patterns based on odd bit-math equations. During the meeting, I was urged to add some code to make it controllable by the Wii Nunchuk. So, I wrote a simple program that takes the X and Y of accelerometer and plots it on the matrix.

I drove the LED Matrix with three shift registers: One 74HC595 8-bit register gave power to the rows of the display, and one Maxim-IC MAX6969 sank current for the columns to the display. To turn on row 1, column one, you shift “B10000000″ into the row register, and “B10000000″ into the column register:

  1 0 0 0 0 0 0 0  
1 x o o o o o o o
0 o o o o o o o o
0 o o o o o o o o 
0 o o o o o o o o 
0 o o o o o o o o 
0 o o o o o o o o 
0 o o o o o o o o 
0 o o o o o o o o 

Altogether, it was about 30 lines of code to drive the matrix with some fun patterns.

I’m psyched. I have some projects I want to do that these boards will be perfect for.