This postI don’t often touch on the sciences here (and even Outside the Box is mostly programming), which is a pity. So today I ran across Jeff Han’s work on LED matrix display multi-touch sensing and was quite impressed. See, in high school I studied electronics for a year and a half, and throughout my teenage years I did various electronics/computer hardware projects, but since then I’ve done nothing. And now I’m missing it in a bad way.
I suppose I get it from my mom’s father, who was an aerospace engineer (he worked on the Saturn V rocket, the X-33, and a number of aircraft). And being an English Language major, I often let the engineer in me lie dormant, hibernating most of the months of the year. Actually, that’s not quite true — programming is a form of engineering — but most engineeringish stuff (math, physics, electronics, etc.) is rarely part of my daily schedule. And yet I love it all.
So, I’m thinking I’m going to find some electronics parts (resistors, capacitors, wire, etc.) and start teaching myself everything I’ve forgotten. I even have a potential idea for a little project:
At work it’s hard to tell whether one is clocked in or not (you either swipe your card outside the lab or you punch in/out online). This is often a cause of slight frustration, because people forget to clock in (or out). To fix that, I’d mount two LEDs (green and red) on a small board that would sit on my desk, then hook them up to a serial port which I’d plug into my computer. I would then write a program that pings the Kronos server and ask if I’m clocked in or not. If I am, it would light the green LED; if not, it would turn the red one on. It’d be there in my peripheral vision, reminding me at a glance.
It’d be really nice to take some kind of manufacturing or metalshop class so I could make a nice casing for it. Someday… :)
