For his Ph.D. work, Jean-Baptiste Labrune has captured some cool line-ups of a trio of tinkerers microcontrollers for young and old.

Title An API for Durable Affinity: Engineering Interfaces That Matter

Emotionally Durable Design: Objects, Experiences and Empathy by Jonathan Chapman

I picked up a nice electric skillet from Target to do some surface-mount technology work. It was on sale — $19 after the mark down! The suggestion for using an electric skillet for a low-cost, perfectly serviceable SMT reflow rig came from the Spark Fun folks.

So, I’m at the point with the Flavonoid project that I need to start getting printed circuit boards made. (The printed circuit board includes an accelerometer, a real-time clock, touch sensor, and a bit of EEPROM memory, if you want to know.) A fair bit of the break was spent schooling up on Eagle, doing layouts, ma…

I’ve been waiting for someone else to do this. I got one over a month ago, but haven’t taken the time to hammer it open. I’m glad more adept reverse engineer types went ahead and did it.

103, .01uF, light contact trigger

I have been using the Arduino and Atmel microcontroller’s generally using the SPI (serial-peripheral interface), but decided to look at the two-wire (a.k.a. I2C) interface as well. I’m doing this partially because it would be good to know how it works, but also because it’s electrically more compact. It only uses tw…

Nicolas sent me information about this DS-compatible pedometer toy called Tekuteku Angel Pocket Pedometer, which looks very cool.