bookshelves…
so we've been working on this project (well not actively "working" but at least thinking about it) for a few weeks now. we wanted a new lamp for the dining room, and while we found some cool ones in shops, the best ones are pretty expensive. so we figured this would be a good project for us to play around with.
we decided to build some wooden cubes that could be stacked around in different configurations. some of the cubes will end up being covered in fabric and we'll stick a light in there. so we'll have a lamp and a bookshelf. drew up my idea in google sketchup:
so we got some plywood from home depot a few weeks ago, and had them cut some 15" squares. not the most accurate cuts, but i guess it's the best we can do until we get a garage and some power tools.
here's one box after gluing and clamping him down:
and bruno wishing he could be out there chewing and destroying all our hard work...
we ended up just gluing and screwing together three boxes yesterday...
so we'll get the rest together, do some more sanding and staining, and we should be getting closer to at least something interesting... 
valentine’s weekend!
well, we had a pretty great valentine's weekend.
started off on friday, getting some flowers from my lovely sister, lauren. for some reason they didn't put the card in the box, so i had no idea who they were from, but it was a pretty easy guess.
so on saturday, we packed the car and headed out for asheville, NC. it's a really cute town in western north carolina in the smokey mountains. we'd been there before with laura's parents (and i suppose drove through on our way down from AK), but this time we decided to bring bruno along for the trip. he loved the car ride down, but didn't care much for the motel (the downtown inn, which was cheap and in a great location). i suppose there were too many strange smells and noises for his liking. he did pretty good walking around downtown, though. asheville's a really dog-friendly town, and we were able to take him into a few shops even. we stopped in the three dog bakery, which specializes in baked goods for dogs. he had a sample of their carrot cake, and we ended up getting him his own slice of carrot cake, a brownie, and chocolate doughnut (all good for dogs, of course). we also got a new leash, which i'll have to devote a separate post to, it's that cool...
we ended up locking the dog in his kennel and taking off for dinner at zambra, a great tapas restaurant. we had some butternut & shrimp croquettes, pomegranate braised pork spring rolls, a homemade pork sausage chimichanga, and some fresh bread with garlic olive oil. we had to skip out on dessert, although we found a chocolate place where we grabbed some caramels, and toffees. so i guess that was our valentine's dinner, even though it was the night before.
the next morning, we ended up running out to the over easy cafe, which had a 20 minute wait but was completely worth it. we had a breakfast sandwich and the whole wheat french toast, which was drizzled with a strawberry-banana glaze. unbelievably good.
so that was the asheville trip. we had a blast. i brought the camera around, but didn't take a single picture. guess you just had to be there... 
arduino + nxt sensors
so i figured a decent project would be hooking up some of my lego mindstorms NXT sensors to my arduino microcontroller. the local dorkbot group is spinning off an arduino group, which has definitely renewed my interest in the platform.
the nxt sensors all use an i2c two-wire interface to communicate with the main microprocessing brick. there's a wire.h library for the arduino that simplifies most of the i2c communication with devices such as eeproms and other modules. so, it's definitely possible to get the two communicating -- just a matter of figuring out the proper sequence of calls to make. i've seen some pages online getting the arduino to talk to the main NXT brick, so this should be hopefully somewhat similar.
first step is hacking a NXT cable (i asked for some spare ones a couple of christmases ago). the wires are stranded, so i soldered them to some solid-core hookup wire and insulated them. so i'm able to plug it in to the arduino, at least...
so you can see the arduino sitting on my breadboard, along with another project -- a group of RGB LEDs with a 5941 PWM controller. the connected part is one of the NXT motors, which also has a built-in rotation sensor. so one idea is to use three of these to fade the red, green, and blue levels of the LEDs, for a little color mixing. the NXT also comes with an ultrasonic sensor, a touch sensor (button), a color sensor, and i also picked up a third party 3-axis accelerometer. so there's lots of interesting possibilities here...
new look!
thought i'd try out wordpress, so i'm moving stuff over to a new design.
hopefully this means i'll be updating things a bit more often. i'll probably be adding more projects in the future and photos, so stay tuned.
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- Stef on job offer!
- dave on meet bruno :)
- Angela on meet bruno :)
- Stef on boxes underway
- antonio1 on arduino + nxt sensors