Taking a page from the Alton Brown School of Kitchen Gadgetry, I decided to try super charging my coffee mill.
I think you can see where this is going.
Grinding coffee Alton Brown style
*duino work station
Inspired by the Sparkfun Arduino and Breadboard holder, I decided to build my own portable work station to use for building projects with my *duinos.
I cut a 27.7cm x 40.5 cm piece of 6mm thick (1/4″) plywood from stuff I had on hand to serve as the base, and started playing around with how I wanted things laid out. I eventually settled on a setup with three breadboards around the *duino board (in this case, a Sparkfun RedBoard) and a little parts bin on the side.
Scrounged up some nylon standoffs and screws to mount the board to the plywood and I ended up with this.
I can switch between the Netduinos and RedBoards pretty easily, and it gives me plenty of breadboard space to work on. The parts bin stays on the board thanks to the magic of Velcro™ and I used the adhesive backing on the breadboards to stick them to the plywood.
Still have plenty of room on the left side to put other things. Now I’ll be able to easily pick up my projects and move them somewhere else to work on.
My Radio Shack closed :(
My Radio Shack on Folly Road fell victim to the store closings announced by Radio Shack earlier this year. The closing was a surprise, because I had stopped in there a few days ago and there was no indication of anything amiss.
Stopped by there yesterday to pick up something I had been thinking about, and saw the sign saying the store had closed, and some bigger signs giving the location of two other Radio Shack locations. There were a number of people in the store scurrying about taking inventory or something like that.
Now instead of being 5 minutes away, the nearest Radio Shack now is significantly less convenient to get to.
The closing makes me very sad.
Ingress Charleston Darsana Anomaly
BarcampCHS 2014
Another BarampCHS is in the bag. I haven’t seen any numbers yet, but attendance seemed lower this year, and there weren’t quite as many sessions. The ones that were presented were pretty good though.
Once again, I was wearing my Star Trek bathrobe 🙂
I pitched my amateur radio session again, and it got put on the schedule in the first time slot. Had a pretty decent turnout of people who didn’t have their licenses yet and were actually interested in getting one. I recycled my amateur radio talk from a couple of Barcamps ago and answered a bunch of questions. Tom/AJ4UQ stopped in towards the end and helped out a bit with the questions too. Then throughout the day, I had a few people stopping me to ask about how and where they could get licensed.
Joe/@joel8x got a picture of me giving my presentation
Joe did another great job wrangling Barcampers for the group photo just before lunch.
Having my talk in the first session of the morning meant I could spend the rest of the day attending sessions, and I was able to make it to some pretty good ones. Clay McCauley gave a nice talk on basic automotive maintenance. There was a short informative talk on the Shellshock vulnerability, and the last one I went to was a packed room talk on genetic programming by Ted Tanner.
Once again, another good BarcampCHS year where I learned a few new things.