Q. Am I dragging my feet with the whole IOIO code cleanup deal? A. Take a look at this little pictorial dealio regarding soldering headers to my IOIO Exhb 1: Exhb 2: Exhb 3: I’ll get on that; you have my word. I am toying around with the idea of tossing the open drain app on both github and the Android Market, in order to throw some chum out to the crew of IOIO owners. We’ll see.

Black Sox, for the win… 2011 Gallatin Valley Men’s Adult Baseball League champions. You can’t tell due to the backlighting, but there are four games worth or infield on that uni. Red Bull, ibuprofen, celebratory OMLs, Skoal, and infield. And grass from a couple of cans of corn put-outs. Happy and tired.

I had three great years at Zoot Enterprises. Time for a change, however. Thanks for it all.

It was worth the wait…I now control 120V via my Android. I had a mostly sleepless night, again. I managed to figure out what I had been botching while trying to provide enough juice to my PowerSwitch Tail. Transistors and alligator clamps are out; extra pins are in. Take a look at the (awful quality) video…on the main page, as the picture quality won’t grind loading to a halt. I still need to toss some headers on the IOIO, and take some clips out of the picture for a better picture of what I did here. Look for that shortly, along with a snippet. Pretty straight forward, but we’ll have to see where this one ends up.

I was horsing around with the Google+ Hangout function last week. In installing the required Google / Flash plugins via Ubuntu Update Manager, I managed to cripple my system. I wiped Flash off of my machine, did a fresh install…the whole works. To no avail. The bug (and fix) were strange enough to warrant a write-up. First, the symptoms were strange. Any Flash video would run super fast…triple speed. While watching Cubs replays in fast forward was sort of amusing, I couldn’t get audio to work either. All media was wonky, including streaming audio. I tried to play an MP3 from my hard drive…playback was nonfunctional. That sort of led me to the solution: I disabled the HDMI audio function, restarted Firefox, and that was that. Why audio settings would spawn that sort of malfunction is beyond me. I am going to submit a bug report on this guy…too strange to let slip.

So, good news and bad news. Yin and Yang. I managed to get my open drain setup working with the IOIO. Ytai was right…just needed to dump more current through the sucker and pull 5V from the board. See below: On to the bad. I wasn’t pushing enough current to trigger my 120V relay…but before I could do some current calculations, my piece of shit Radio Shack multimeter finally gave out. How timely? Not to worry…a quick trip to Lowes, and we have a new (much higher quality) Ideal DMM: Your eyes aren’t fooling you…that is a thermocouple. Thermocouple and stand…pretty official. I’ll get some calculations done and figure out where we are with this guy…pretty close!

Some career-oriented things have kept me largely out of the Bad Lab. I finally decided to dust of the soldering station and get a permanent power connector surface mounted to my IOIO board. I tackled this project before I headed to work…I think the pre-coffee pre-jitter scenario worked out well. Anyhow, this is the component from SparkFun: It is a simple two pin surface mount compact connector. Nice current rating, so I am hoping it will give me enough juice to pull 5V in my pull-up project. The issue to overcome in the actual soldering was keeping this little sucker in place and stable to get the first joint in place. My solution, once again, ended up involving my adjustable clamps. These things are great, especially compared to the ‘helper hands’ alligator clip stand. Wonky hands would be more apt. For a little connector, it seems to be fairly secure. I also picked up a barrel jack to two pin connector from SparkFun. Hooked up to a wall wart…survey says: We have power. I will test it against some loads, and get back on the pull-up project. Here goes nothing…

It was either this… …or an embedded Van Halen music video. You are welcome. Cheers to new things.

Hi. This project never ends. I have been cutting my teeth on some electrical engineering 101, in an effort to push 5V through my IOIO. At this point, I am still not able to report a success. I do have the ‘open drain’ setup working, at a lower voltage than I am intending. My configuration is as follows: The Java snippet that is doing the pin defining is this guy:

DigitalOutput out = ioio.openDigitalOutput(25, DigitalOutput.Spec.Mode.OPEN_DRAIN, true);

The only issue is with my setup…for some reason, my circuit isn’t able to pull to 5V. See the DMM readout v So, back to the drawing board. When the switch is open via my app, the pull up resister should settle Vout to 5V. The other half of the scenario is fully functional, as a closed switch grounds as intended. My next plan of attack involves a more permanent power source, and I have placed my order with SparkFun for a surface mount / wall wart combo that will do the trick. I am hoping that my issue is with the power, but time will (shortly) tell if this is the case. Stay tuned. Getting close on this one…

Google’s Project Glass…very cool. The prototype units are sort of reminiscent of Star Trek, but they serve a unique function. Merging computing and vision is not an easy thing, once the whole ‘rest of the world aside from the text written to screen’ comes in to play. Where will this end up? I have a strong suspicion that the goofy looking units will end up being swept under the rug. The future, my friends, is in the contact lens. The small, not very obtrusive, disposable, can still wear sunglasses, little contact lens. The kicker is the link between contact lenses and high tech stuff that already exists. If vision correction isn’t enough to float your boat, how about Microsoft’s past work to implement a glucose tester into contact lenses. You don’t have to be diabetic to appreciate that. You don’t have to be a Microsoft fanboy to give them credit for a cool project. Swap Microsoft out for Google, who is arguably way more bleeding edge. Add in the fact that the Google Glass project has been declared an early success, and that the contact lens makes more sense down the road. I’m guessing we see Star Trek Glasses, and then shortly behind Star Trek Contacts for sale before too long.