100K Views!

The PPAC "Inflation" YouTube video had its 100,000th view today-- wow! Thanks, viewers!! The big spike happened on December 14 when it started showing up on my favorite blogs, and it has been getting >1000 views a day since then.

• Make: Online: "Inflation alarm clock pretty much rules out snoozing "
• Gizmodo: "'Princess and the Pea' Alarm Clock Makes It Impossible to Stay in Bed"
• Hackaday: "Clocks that only a geek could love"
• Neatorama: "Inflating Alarm Clock Pushes You Out Of Bed When It's Time To Get Up"
• The Daily What: "Alarm Clock of the Day"

Here it is again:

Also, the first "ejection" video:

Minimal*duino

I reworked the one-layer board to got everything routed nicely in two layers, and etched it last night with the layers very well aligned! Now to get flux-- without it, the vias need their own little lead, which is quite a pain. I'll build it out today and test it, then look at board house prices for making a minimal order, seeing how many I'd have to order to get the price down to $10/kit (with no extras). I wonder about rebuilding it in KiCad though-- I've about had it with EAGLE's inefficient UI.

Mute-tater lives!

I've been working on the mutetater program and board, and have it mostly sorted out, including the bulk of the mounting details. I etched a small 1-sided board to hold my old Arduino Mini, with transistors rigged like the TV-B-Gone v1.2, and headers for four LEDs, a button, ftdi programming cable, and 5V power. I'm using a Bodhilabs "VPack" with a single cr2032 to get 5V, and its header works nicely for mounting a power switch. It all fits in the foam potato, so now to figure out the button and LED mounting.