Arduino: The Documentary

 

Just finished watching Arduino The Documentary (press play above to check it out) - a great backgrounder for anyone getting into Arduino and Open Source Hardware. Also great fun to see Phil Torrone that I met in both San Fransisco and London for the first FlashForward conferences. He’s now working at Adafruit - my favorite place to shop anything Arduino. Adafruit almost always ship the same day I order anything and offer very good service if anything is missing/wrong with your order. Stuff I order from them will often arrive before things ordered in my home country of Norway, so that’s pretty solid!

I spent lots of time yesterday modifying my workspace to suit working with hardware and soldering. It takes a lot more space and it also requires entirely different lighting than I had. I actually ended up going to the store of The Norwegian Association of the Blind to buy a really powerful lamp that has a magnifying glass built into it! It’s powerful (150 watt equivalent), super flexible and usually used by professionals like dentists and such. Another thought that comes to mind with such a lamp is the elderly woman across the street where I grew up that could hardly see anything, but used a similar lamp when sowing… Didn’t ever think I’d buy something like that, but it’s REALLY useful when working with tiny hardware.

Also soldered and played with a couple shields that I got from Sparkfun last week. The MP3 player shield was really easy to get up and running, but I need to learn how to build a small amp for the output as I have some cool ideas for this shield.