While the wort was boiling I put together a couple more Boarduino kits that I had hanging around, and tonight I messed around with them a bit more. I already had the breadboard set up with the shift registers and LEDs — not that you can see them, of course (thanks YouTube!).
Tonight I made a pinwheel, then hooked it up to a DC motor and used the combination as a more expensive, less accurate, potentially chip-destroying rotary encoder. It’s pretty janky, in other words. But I had this motor on hand (scrounged it from a CDROM), and Radioshack doesn’t stock rotary encoders. Besides, some safety checking with the multimeter implies that it’d have to be a very strong wind to fry the chip.
Anyway, all of this was in service of Summer Camp, a series of talks and events at Transformer that launched this Saturday and which will be going on through the first week of March. Marissa was kind enough to invite me to talk about the Arduino, and Alberto is generously sharing a stage with me, which I find pretty exciting. Anyway, mark your calendars: Saturday, February 28! You should check out the rest of the Summer Camp schedule (PDF), too, of course — there’s a lot of cool stuff going on.