If you want to make a clock with an Arduino/Boarduino/AVR, there is a way to hook up a precision 32khz watch crystal

mtbf0 shows you how! pictured above is his LCD clockduino!

Trialex followed up with a really-big-7-segment clock (in the same thread)

I had a bug that caused serial port support to suddenly stop working and there was a corrupt .dmg file so here is a new set of packages with some updates!

• Port delay is definable. SpokePOV used to ‘guess’ what the correct delay is but I think it might be wiser to have the user tweak it as necessary
• Support for up to 32 banks of memory. What you need so much for I have no idea but hey, its there now!
• Windows version now comes with a spiffy installer. Just like Real Software!

Amazon’s S3 (Simple Storage Service) isn’t new, but its certainly gaining traction. Its a wonderful product for people who have a lot of content on their site (images, video, downloads, pdfs) but not a lot of money. Data storage costs $0.15 per GB-Month (prorated), and $0.20 per GB. No minimums, rounded up to the nearest cent.

There are a lot of great providers out there (I use Laughing Squid and highly recommend it) but even LS’s ‘largest’ package is too small for ladyada.net… What to do? Easy: Host all that bulky content at S3, then use mod_rewrite to reroute it over to S3. (You could also do it with php, asp or similar for higher ’security’ but mod_rewrite is lighter and good enough for me)

For example, this image has the url reference “http://www.ladyada.net/images/mintyboost/assemblyv12/inductorusbplace_t.jpg” but if you access that url in your browser, it is automatically rewritten by apache to http://s3.amazonaws.com/ladyadanet_mintyboost/assemblyv12/inductorusbplace_t.jpg

(same with my research pdf, a big pdf that easily accounted for 500M a day of traffic at its peak! http://www.ladyada.net/media/common/thesis.pdf -> http://s3.amazonaws.com/ladyadanet_common/thesis.pdf , S3 doesn’t care what the data is or how its encoded)

Of course mod_rewrite is not necessary, you can always just directly reference s3.amazonaws.com but that makes it harder to move the content around if you decide to eventually go with another service (or if s3 goes away one day!)

OK so, what’s the point and what does this have to do with electronics, eh? Well one of the killer apps of open source and public domain electronics is documentation. That means media. And media storage, backup and transfer is extremely expensive for the everyday person. It becomes increasingly difficult to host a project when one digg-storm or slashdotting makes that ‘free’ webpage account go down.

Edit: I use the Firefox S3 plugin to upload and set the access control on my files.

Are you using S3 or something similar for your projects, kits or documentation? Leave a comment or email! Its always interesting to see what other people are doing in this space.

I finally got around to rewriting the flickrnotes code i wrote to support IE6/7 as well as overlib. Ironically, as a side effect, I had to do this funky opacity thing because in IE you cant have onMouseOver() on an ‘empty’ DIV or SPAN tag unless it has a background color. However, background colors with opacity work just fine.
Hence:

One could always just keep the Opacity 0% and mess with outlines but i kinda got to liking this look.

Download it here (and rename it to a .php) you will need overlib.js (4.21 is what i use) installed too. An example page is here, read the source for an example.

I fixed some icky problems (in wxMIDI!) and now the MIDIsense software is crosscompiling nicely between Mac and Windows, therefore there is now fast and updated software for both platforms. Rad! Download it now!

If you wanted to try out the MIDIsense hardware but didn’t have a Mac, well I finally finished porting the wxpython code to C++ and its all much faster and more reliable. I also improved the interface and robustness. Try it out and let me know how it goes, available for download from sourceforge

This weekend I stayed indoors because it was insanely cold, and hacked javascript/php to create a php script that allows one to embed flickr photos into webpages and have the notes show up. Like in midisense sensor soldering instructions (mouseover in the assembly pictures). If you want to grab it, its available for download: flickrnotes.txt (rename it php of course) you’ll need php installed, as well as commandline curl (usually /usr/bin/curl) although im sure it could be modifed to use something else. some work has to be done, i intend to one day integrate it with overLIB which makes nice popups. regardless, hooray for notes!