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Happy Halloween to all the ghosts, ghouls, monsters et al. running around tonight in search of (or distributing) sugary snacks. I’ll be looking forward to all the awesome costumes floating around the internet in the next few days…not that I haven’t seen any sweet ones already.

Sadly, I haven’t made a costume for this year but I have rigged up a plastic jack-o-lantern that I bought last year. It’s amazing how much the price drops on these things when they’re “broken.” All I had to do was bust out the soldering iron and reattach the battery lead. Using an arduino, the Cap Sense Library, tin foil and some LEDs, I made a touch sensitive jack-o-lantern that I call the “Cyber Punkin.”
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I’ve been tied up with a whole bunch of things in the past week. I will be posting next week so be sure to check back!

In the meantime, check out BBC’s “Fun to Imagine” with Richard Feynman.

Every now and then, I like to play around in the Signal Processing world – more so in the audio realm than anything else. The thought that sound can be represented by an array containing a whole bunch of (seemingly arbitrary) numbers ready for manipulation is just awesome!. Yes, I had a lot of fun in my signal processing labs at school and I still love messing around with GNU Octave post-college.

Waveform of the Track I Used.

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Wow, what a crazy two weeks!
I have been off travelling from one end of the country to the other touring around and visiting hackerspaces in Vancouver, MIT and Toronto and met some incredible people during my visit to these spaces.

While in Boston, I had to opportunity to attend the Design East Conference and take part in a bunch of free classes offered by a whole bunch of different companies like Microchip, NXP, ST and a lot more! Oh, and I got some ARM based development boards from ST and NXP! I guess I’ll be busy tinkering around with those for a while.

aaaaawwwwwwww yeah!

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For the next two weeks, I will be kicking around Vancouver, Toronto and Boston visiting hackerspaces and doing the good ol’ touristy stuff. If you are nearby and want to say hi, send me a tweet (@superkittens) or an email at contact@meoworkshop.org!


This, is Toshio Iwai, an interactive media artist. He is probably best known for his work in non-traditional musical interfaces. He is also responsible for the Tenori-On which was his attempt at creating a new musical instrument which, from what I can see, is used pretty widely by many artists like Little Boots. Over the course of his career (which continues on today), he has made some really neat things from a computer game (Otocky) to media art installations. Iwai also was an artist in residence at the Exploratorium in San Francisco.

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A few weeks ago, my sister and I took a trip to the Wapiti Music Festival in Fernie, BC (which, by the way was lots of fun). On the drive back to Edmonton, we found an antique shop in a quaint little town about 50 km South of Calgary called Nanton.

Knowing that inside most antique stores is an elderly lady in a rocking chair preciously guarding vintage silverware with a double axe by her side, we had some Werthers Originals on hand to give as an offering in exchange for exploring through her piles of LIFE Magazines from the 1940s and Simon and Garfunkel Records. HOWEVER, little did I know that I would soon be finding a treasure.

I’ll cut to the chase. Here’s what I found…



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As many would probably know, Hans Camenzind, best known for his invention of the 555 Timer has passed away recently. I must admit that I didn’t know much about his accomplishments (such as inventing the first Class D amplifier), nor did I know that he wrote a number of books.

That’s when I stumbled across his book, “Designing Analog Chips.” The book is downloadable for free. I haven’t had a chance to sit down to read it fully yet, but after skimming a few sections, it looks very interesting. In addition to the technical bits on analog IC design, Hans adds in a bit of history as well which greatly intrigues me. I am definitely looking forward to reading this book. I’m also hoping that the book will sharpen up my knowledge in some of the circuits that I learned during my college years such as current mirrors.

I won’t talk much about 555 Timers because so many people out there in the internet give fantastic walk throughs on them already. Also, if you’re reading this, chances are, you probably have a good idea of what they are anyway. IF you don’t however, check out the According to Pete Tutorial. There’s also a contest on who can make awesome things out of them too!

555 Timer Picture Credit to jjbeard found on Wikipedia. The picture shows the 555 Timer in Astable configuration which is used for oscillating outputs