Summertime

I really love those squeezed-in weeks of work in between family holidays. It’s a rare time to catch up on thing like blogging, reading & updating a few personal projects. I just finished reading The Martian by Andy Weir that I got recommended from @hpeikemo. It’s a really thrilling book that I’m sure we’ll see as a hollywood movie soon. The story is kind of a “Robinson Crusoe meets McGyver on Mars”. After reading it, I gave it to my son who completed it in just two and a half day. Great summer read!

I finally got around to update my Arduino Companion app. It’s ratings have suffered quite a bit since Android 4.4 is now pretty common and it took Adobe a LOT of time to fix the bugs. When the fix finally was available, I was stuck with client work and didn’t manage to set aside the two days required to fix it. I can only apologise that it took this long.

It sucks to loose the 4.6+ rating on Android, especially since it’s mainly due to ppl like Nicholas Castle that wrote the 1-star review to the right. I don’t mind a 1-star review that says that the app does not work (when it does not), but this is kind of harsh from someone that hasn’t even seen the app? It’s not like he paid anything (it’s a free app) or that I have a 100 person customer service department. I make the app on my spare time, I give it away and my email is listed below the app. Oh well. I guess I’ll rather thank users such as John, Daniël, Luiz, Thomas, Tim, Bryce, Samantha and many others for nice and polite feedback with reminders to fix the problems. As soon as Apple approves the app, the more than 105.000 iOS users of the app can download the update to version 1.2. The more than 102.000 Android users can get it today. More than 200K happy users… Crazy isn’t it? 😊

The months since December is sort of a blur as I’ve done more client work than I usually do. The most fun commercial projects this autumn was building a series of custom wifi-enabled LED signs as well as working with UNO. After summer I’m really looking forward to teaching another half-year of Embedded Systems at NITH here in Oslo. There is something really special about seeing computer science students actually understanding the core operations that enable the computers they use every day. It’s all just one’s and zero’s, but you don’t really get it until you have to create the bits yourself by turning power on/off at the right intervals… The students were really happy with the course last year and I have plans to make it even more fun this year!

Since I’ve worked long days, I haven’t had that much time for my hobbies but I’ve gotten quite far on building a X/Y robot that I have plans to complete before going to the Maker Faire in Trondheim in August. It’ll be able to draw, print and probably also do some light CNC’ing when I’m finished.

Just before the summer holidays I managed to squeeze in two weeks to build a brand new 3D printer from scratch using Makeblock! This new printer will have a bigger build envelope, but it will also be able to use flexible plastics, nylon, wood and bronze materials thanks to it’s construction. Read more about all the advantages here. With that you would think that this fills my appetite for 3D printers, right? Not quite. I spent my tax return on signing up for the Titan 1 SLA printer as well. It’ll give me extremely high resolution models as well as solve my problem of printing parts over night without disturbing the family. That said - the Makeblock-based printer is much more silent than my Ultimaker. Looking forward to November & meeting the Titan!