MightyOhm

This one page handout by Mitch Altman and Andie Nordgren teaches the basics of soldering in a simple and easy to understand way.

I’m very, very familiar with this comic, for reasons that I hope to reveal soon.

Enjoy!

Soldering is Easy, by Mitch Altman and Andie Nordgren.

Click the image to open a full size version or visit Andie’s site to download a PDF version suitable for printing.

Jan Wante made this gorgeous Wifi Radio with a modern look. It is based on my original Wifi Radio tutorials.

Not content to simply duplicate my work, he added a few creative twists of his own, including a custom handmade case made of alucobond, MDF, and real wood veneer that gives his finished radio a nice, modern look. Inside, a hacked WL-520gU wireless router running OpenWrt runs the show and an ATmega microcontroller programmed with BASCOM interfaces with a rotary encoder and graphical LCD display.

The very impressive result is shown in this video:

Nice work, Jan!

Thanks to John, of the ATX Hackerspace, who loaned me his Arduino for testing, the HV Rescue Shield now works with the Arduino Mega.

I had to create new byte read/write functions for digital lines 0-7 because they are implemented very “differently” (and I don’t mean that in a good way) in the hardware for the Mega.  If you’re interested in how I did this, check out the new version 2.12 Arduino sketch and the new mega_data_read and mega_data_write functions.

To use the HV Rescue Shield with the Arduino, first download the revised sketch here.  Set the MEGA #define to 1 and compile/upload the sketch to your board.  Make sure you have the Arduino Mega selected in the Arduino Board menu, or the sketch won’t compile.

The Mega has more pin headers than the Rescue Shield, so be sure to install the shield all the way to the left, as shown here:

If you experience any problems with the HV Rescue Shield and the Arduino Mega, please report them in the support forum.

Welcome, BBC listeners!  You probably want to start here.

Last Friday, I was interviewed by Gareth Mitchell of BBC’s Digital Planet at the incredibly successful Dorkbot/Ignite SXSW show.

The Digital Planet SXSW episode (and a <short!> clip from my interview) is now online.

You can also subscribe to a podcast of the show, available for most media players.

I also uploaded some pictures of the Dorkbot/Ignite event. They only capture a small fraction of the exhibits, there just wasn’t enough time for me to see them all!

This Friday, March 11th, Austin’s Dorkbot chapter is holding a science fair in conjunction with Ignite Austin for SXSW Interactive.

I’ll be demoing my Wifi Radio project and showing off various other projects.  There is a list of presenters here.

General Admission is $10 ($0 for SXSW badge holders), but if you RSVP right now on Dorkbot Austin’s Facebook page there might be some free passes left.