New home!

So you may have heard the recent news that Blogger will stop supporting FTP publishing in March. This makes me rather distraught because I use that publishing method for this site, so it can peacefully co-exist along side my photo gallery and other such things while remaining simple. Unfortunately none of their proposed solutions will allow me to operate the site how I want.

Also, I've been meaning to make many large changes to the site, such as:

• Dedicated Project Page - so that readers can see project specific posts and details without hunting through the archives.
• Dedicated Resume/About Me page - so that prospective employers can easily access all the information they'd like about me and my work.
• Better Photo Gallery Setup - I love sharing photos, but right now my current Photo Gallery is not working well....
• A more professional name/appearance - as much as I love The Matt Cave, given my foray in to the working world this May when I graduate, I need a more professional web presence that will be easy to read/navigate for those employers. This means a nicer color scheme as well!

Because of these desires as well as dissatisfaction with my current hosting, I've gone ahead and registered http://www.mattkrass.com/ and imported this whole blog in to a WordPress installation at that location. It will take me a while to migrate all the links and such, and likely many of them will not work once this site goes offline. Unfortunately it just isn't worth the effort of the undertaking, because of the difficulty in converting from Blogger's static file layout to the PHP/SQL indexing WordPress uses. Once the migrating is as done as can reasonably be, I will be taking this site offline, but I will retain ownership of the address which will redirect to my new site. Thanks to my loyal readers, and please see the new blog to update any RSS feeds and bookmarks!

New site is here!

LED Madness, Audio Mixer and more!

Received my SparkFun order today, amongst the contents were the things I was seeking most, several 10k breadboard compatible potentiometers, three dual op-amps (LM358), three super bright 10mm LEDs (One red, green and blue) as well as a few other toys. The two biggest deals are the opamps and the potentiometers, while not strictly the right equipment, they're close enough that I can test my mixer I showed earlier and see if the design works for 2 and hopefully 4 channels. If it does I do intend to order a PCB as well as the OPA2134 and audio taper slide pots in place of my linear taper rotary pots. Also, I am going to see about controlling the brightness of the Red, Green and Blue Super LEDs of Doom to make some kind of USB powered controllable lighting array for.... fun?

Mark McCurry stopped by to collect his part of the order and we soldered up our audio breakout boards, and put one of the pots to work as a brightness control while we played with the super bright LEDs. They were listed with a forward drop of 3.4V for the Green and Blue and 2.3V for the Red. I carefully connected the LEDs inline with a multimeter (visible in the attached photos and video) and made sure the voltage being delivered only corresponded to the sum of the drop voltages as I tried the LEDs in series, even so I probably should have had more resistance in place than the pot to limit current, but I was having too much fun to care :P. Don't be like me, protect your LEDs.

As usual (ok not really the usual since I never did this much before but I'm trying to now) you can find the photos in my Photo Gallery, links to the direct albums provided below!

Til next time,
Matt

LED Photo Link
Mixer Photo Link

I really dislike Perfboard

I was building a project using Perfboard today. I hate using perfboard, mostly because I'm bad at it and it always comes out looking like crap. So I'm using it specifically to get better at it because it's much cheaper than a PCB, and easier to fix, and generally faster (though not currently because I'm so bad at I keep having to stop, back up and re-plan, so it's taking a while.). Anyways, I thought everyone might like to look at my board and tell me if they think it's actually not horrendously ugly. When its done I'll post more photos and a description of what it is and what it does!

The photos are here: http://www.themattcave.org/photos/index.php?dir=Perfboard