DorkbotPDX people doing strange things with electricity

I plan to go camping a lot in the summer and to make the camping more enjoyable I decided to build a Teardrop Trailer. I created a website where I'll log the progress with as many pictures as I can, tools I use and materials. If anyone is interested here it is: https://sites.google.com/site/buildingateardroptrailer/

For the many of you who are wanting a BusPirate, here are the design files. The Schematic, the Board and the Gerbers as a zip. Please review and comment - we don't want any errors in this!

Special thanks to Monty for the DorkbotPDX logo. Who knew what artistic talent he has? ;>)}}

Also thanks to Monty, Scott D. and Greg P. for comments and suggestions while I was editing the board and Gerbering.

Most of all, thanks to Greg for organizing this whole adventure and to Jared for setting us off on it to begin with.

I have a favorite visualization that I apply to conversations. Each participant is represented by a string. Each character of the string is one hour. Activity in that hour creates a blip. Inactivity leaves dots (or comma at midnight). Here are five days of Dorkbot project blabber visualized. I share my methods in the remainder of this post.

I prepared this chart in two steps: first get the data in a file and then plot it. Let's work backwards. Here is the plot routine:

while (<>) { ($d, $t) = split /\t|\n/; $p{$t} = ("." x 23 . ",") x 5 unless $p{$t}; $h = int($d*24); substr($p{$t},$h,1) = "|"; } print map ",$p{$_} $_\n", sort keys %p;

Using Elco Jacob's ShiftPWM Arduino Library. Probably the cheapest possible way to drive lots of RGB LEDs!

After two years of service my outdoor air temperature sensor blinked out last week. Moisture was the culprit as shown here:

Various readouts in my SensorServer system lead me straight to the problem through a half-dozen layers of software. How cool is that?

Honestly, I'm more interested in how we know and trust complex measurements than knowing the temperature outside.

"http://www.dorkbotpdx.org/workshop/arduino/cult_induction_rev8"

RSVP at http://suspectdevices.com/workshops.html

Last night I finished assembling and uploading a sketch over USB to Demiduino. At half the dimensions of an Arduino, Demiduino is a small, portable, and affordable Arduino compatible with the Leonardo bootloader.