Often when working on an electronics project I experience a problem that takes me way too long to debug. I don’t mind iterative debugging, it’s where I’m partially hanging my hat these days professionally, but it’s painful how often my lack of experience leads me up a dead end. The last time I got so angry I felt the need to write a post about it was an hour lost to software debugging when I had just crossed a couple of wires.
A few months ago I posted about a project I was working on whose primary goal was to drive single-pixel drawing on a 16×2 character display. Of course the real goal of the project was just to move forward with electronics, trying new things in both software and hardware.
I began developing the tool that would become “swaks” on December 19, 2001. The initial version was mostly just an adapted version of the sendpage my coworker Jamie Hill had written for simple SNPP transactions. At that time the tool was called “vmail”, which meant something like visual- or visualize-mail.
On November 11, 2003, I posted a link to vmail on the exim-users mailing list. I received lots of constructive responses, including one note that the name vmail was very generic, and also in use by another project (I wish I could remember who noted that, but I can’t find it in the mailing list archives).
One of my goals for the 2011/2012 Christmas break was having fun stuff to do with my daughters to cut down on the boredom and minimize slack-jawed TV watching. While planning this out I stumbled across the Wayne and Layne kits, and the Blinky POV kit looked really nice. It looked like a great kit to use to teach my daughter Mary (5) how to solder – it didn’t have too many components, it looked like it would be fun to play with when it’s finished, and I’m really, really intrigued by the “hold it up to the screen” programming method.
Right before I ordered the kit my Mom contacted me and asked for gift ideas for the girls. I immediately suggested this kit for Mary and sent my Mom the link to the project. She said it looked like a great gift for Mary (which I expected) and she also said she really liked the idea of the Tactile Metronome kit (which I did not expect). I couldn’t pass that up, so I bought both kits.
Last March I followed a link to the “Trebuchette” project on Kickstarter – “the snap-together, desktop trebuchet”. I hadn’t used Kickstarter before but the Trebuchette project comtained more than enough awesomeness potential and I backed the project. I had a slight disconnect after the project closed funding because I hadn’t really grasped that there would be a non-trivial delay between funding and shipping. However, the frequent, informative posts from the project owners actual gave me a great deal of pleasure to read as they worked through the realities of building a physical-goods business.
The Trebuchette kits arrived right after Thanksgiving. Since Christmas break was right around the corner I decided to put the kits on a shelf and wait until the second week of break when my daughters would be bored out of their skulls. This plan sort of worked – they did ultimately enjoy them, but I made the mistake of telling them what the kit was when I got it and I had to fend off requests to put them together early every couple of days for a month.