drewp

I went to SHDH 25, and because I brought blinking lights, a lot of people stopped to talk to me.

My mission was to make python/arduino drivers for the shiftbrite. I brought parts for making cables and assembled four of those. Then I adapted Garrett's fine arduino code into a version that listens on the serial port. There, or maybe later at home, I got a python program sending color commands to the shiftbrites.

Finally, I got my image scanning program talking to shiftbrites. It works like a player piano: any image serves as the paper roll; each light reads a certain row of the image. If you give it some photograph, you'll get a changing set of colors with palettes from the photo. Images like this make the usual color-chase effects.

At the end of the night at SHDH, Eric from Sun had a few more Sun SPOT dev kits to give away, so I took one off his hands. In exchange I have to blog about it, but this paragraph is the only news I have so far. I tried their CD and its installer .jar file, which claimed success except it wrote nothing but a log file of errors. Then I got another version via java web start, and while that one claims to have found the ID of one of my sunspots, it can't actually talk to it due to some port issue. I've only spent two evenings on this so far.

Not that I've been able to program one yet, but the sunspot seems ridiculously overpowered for all the usual things I do with microcontrollers. Hopefully if things work out, I'll be able to try some more ambitious projects, like a drink-fetching robot. Or at least a wireless data logger for my car.

What is with the low numbers of flickr photos from recent SHDH events? Here's a biased sharpshooter's sampling:

Anyway, I'm in these:

http://www.flickr.com/photos/davidreid/2508366565/

http://www.flickr.com/photos/davidreid/2509195374/