Evilsoft.org

Some time ago I built an ambient orb to watch over the build process for the code at my office. Recently I used upgrading it to RGB leds as an excuse to get my first board cut by Advanced Circuits in Colorado (Why buy from China when you can buy from the U.S. at a lower cost?), and it’s turned out pretty well.

My first board, ain’t it pretty?

The new orb is substantially brighter, with colors that are visible (and even border on vivid) even in direct sunlight. I’m really quite happy with the results.

Here’s the board diagram and schematic:

You can grab the source and eagle files (All under the GPLv2 & CC Attribution/Share Alike licenses respectively). It’s got 3 sample apps now. The build warden for cruise control, a biff for email, and for tonight it’s got a electoral college meter that goes blue or red based on live results.

(Warning, everything is only tested under linux. The applications are written in python and ruby, and should work under windows and mac os, but I haven’t tested them)

A few months ago I built my own take on Ryan Straughan’s Third Hand ++. Well, about a month ago I was hanging at NYC Resistor, and Skiff did a video about my set up that just got posted to NYC Resistor’s blog.

Well, after this hit make I realized I needed to get my photos up post-haste. Instructions for each piece of this will be added as the comments on this project’s flickr photostream.

I’ve been spending a lot of time lately working on various electronics projects, but for some reason I haven’t been posting the results. Well, I’ve decided to end that with my latest project. A bit over a month ago, I was reading Jonathan Guberman’s call for other people to join his project to make an RGB 40h monome clone. It looked like a lot of fun, so I decided to get in on his board order and join the project.

So after a few weekends of soldering, and lots of waiting for numerous part orders from digikey and sparkfun, I have gotten my Tinct (since dubbed Tinct 1) up and running about 7 days after Tinct 0 first bathed Jonathan in it’s cool LED glow. So, here it is, along with some other photos in my new flickr photo stream

Now I need to get crackin on making some useful command line utils for Tinct, as I’m on a linux box, and the vast majority of the software for monome appears to be for the proprietary Max/MSP environment, which does not run on linux. Besides, I think that this has a lot of potential as a visual feedback device for a unix box.

Some time ago a co-worker passed me an article about “Extreme Feedback” devices that could be attached to your autobuild system with the express intent of making it very visible that the build is broken, and potentially being irritating enough to help motivate people towards fixing the broken build. Since reading this article I have been somewhat consumed with the concept of creating one of these devices for my team. Keeping builds clean is hard, and without a constant reminder, it can be very easy for people to let the build stay broken for long periods of time. This essentially defeats the purpose of doing autobuilds, and potentially even unit testing.

I Looked into the Ambient Orb, but I have to admit, I wasn’t particularly thrilled with the fact that it has a monthly subscription, and you can’t talk directly to it with your computer. So I started to teach myself electronics in the hope that I would be able to build one of these devices on my own. After a month or so, I ran into the Arduino platform, which struck me as the perfect platform for building an orb from scratch. This is the end result of my project is this, The Arduino Orb Build Warden:

This Device has the following features:

• USB
• Simplistic API for scripts that monitor a build system
• 3 modes
• Single color mode: You can send colors in web format (e.g. #RRGGBB)
• Alert mode: The orb will flash a color passed in from full intensity to %20 intensity (Format is similar to web format: %RRGGBB)
• Roam mode: The orb will morph from one random color to another for as long as you leave it. (Format is the string ‘roam’)

Here is the device in action: