New Workshop!

We moved recently, and one of the features that drew us to our new home was a sun room in the back, about 9'x15', full of light and perfect for a workshop!

One corner is ideal for the laser, with a dryer vent for routing its (filtered) fumes outside. With two rolling racks for storage and two desks, I hope we'll have room for a small heavy bench and drill press stand. Good thing the Printrbot is (er, will be) small, we have big plans for this (not so) little room.

Funny to look at my "Workshop!" post from two years ago, most of those projects haven't advanced much, but the grinder timer has gone through a few versions and the flight suit ended up being by far my most complicated project so far.

Paperduino, Hifiduino

Love the *duino naming scheme people are putting on their projects! Fun+easy to create a buzzword that conveys the function of an Arduino-based project. Two projects that have popped up on the internets in the last week that I thought were very cool:

Hifiduino: project blog by The Lazy Engineer chronicling his work to build a very slick Arduino-based hi-fi remote control. I especially like the casing work-- nicely assembled wooden box with its top made from an aluminum hard drive housing; one of the best uses of scrounged hardware I've seen. He has also chosen a lot of technologies I've been exploring in terms of (1) making an elegant interface with a single rotary encoder and display, and (2) using I2C chips for easy interfacing. The blog "extras" on the right are an excellent example of sharing, too, with links to code, examples, references, etc.

Paperduino: an Arduino circuit design by Guilherme Martins for introducing Arduino to neophytes in a workshop setting by having them build one from raw components on a 2-sided color printout. Beyond looking cool, it helps to get over the "soldering is hard" issue (pssst-- it's easy and fun!) and to understand the minimal necessary components to make a working Arduino circuit. Flickr set from the workshop, Paperduino PDF patterns.