I worked for Staples for a while back when the “That was easy” campaign started, and the Easy Button ads started airing. People started showing up in the store wanting an Easy Button, and finally Staples started selling them. (Staples is a great company to work for, and I had an awesome boss, and they are giving at least part of the proceeds for the Easy Button to the Boys and Girls Clubs of America. Yay!)

Needless to say, if something has batteries and a button and does something, it will be hacked by geeks. Here’s a quick roundup of interesting Easy Button hacks found on the web. Buy one and hack yours!

• Change playback speed of pre-recorded message (and a custom message mod)
• Replace circuit with custom recording module
• Easy Button Escape Key (this guy also made a giant (non-functional) SD card)
• Another custom recording circuit on Instructables

I’d like to make something like an office WTF? counter with an Easy Button, actually. What other interesting things can be done with a giant red button?

AppleInsider tries to make the case for Apple moving its party to CES, now that they’ve bailed on Macworld–something that might be fun but I don’t see happening. In the process, we got this little gem:

[At CES], Microsoft has announced a string of products that either never materialized, were grossly impractical, or have sold poorly and received bad reviews, from Spot watches to Mira terminals to Windows Vista to Windows Home Server to the Surface to Zune. The remainder of CES tends to be little more than electronics firms showing off slightly larger TVs.

I guess this is explains why I have never gotten excited about CES in the past.

After getting my Automator Workflow running as described in the last post, I was ready to go and do some programming on my PICkit™. I wanted to get my LED cross fader going, and was thinking that pulse-width modulation (PWM) was the way to go. But how do I do that? I searched far and wide on the net, but only found high-level language routines, or references to PWM modules built into other PIC microcontrollers — not the 12F675 that’s part of the PICkit.

I stumbled upon Jal, created by Wouter van Ooijen, but now a GPLed project on Sourceforge. I initially skipped over it, because the info on Sourceforge indicates only a very limited number of processors supported, but the author’s page has some Jal source code specifically for the 12F675 — surprise, a simple LED flasher!

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Otto the Automator.
Is this icon appropriate or what?

Since I’ve gotten back into robotics, I’ve been getting ready to do some projects for the R2 unit. After accidentally loading the wrong program on to my PICKit with Andrew Rahn’s nifty little GUI interface to usb_pickit, I decided to try something completely different. What better time experiment with Tiger’s Automator tool?

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Update: Okay, I may be getting obsessed with this idea. I’ve set up a blog to chart my progress as I try my hand at building an astromech, and maybe help other new builders. Visit Astromech Builder with this link, or select it from the SciSpot Network menu under the banner. (Yep, I got three blogs, so I figure that qualifies me for network status!)

Want to build your very own astromech? Join!

I’ve got the R2 builder’s fever.

For the past couple of evenings, I’ve been scouring the R2 Builders Club official site, and I’m afraid I’m hooked. I desperately want to build my very own R-Series astromech.

What the heck am I talking about? Um, have you ever heard of Star Wars? Remember the little robot with the domed head? The one that communicated with beeps and whistles? Yeah, that one.

After two days of perusing the site and visiting lots of links to other builders, I decided to put in my request to join their Yahoo! Group. I hope I hear back soon, but I think that after the Wired News article I mentioned in ParaSci the other day that they are probably swamped. The group page shows that they’ve added 106 new members in the last 7 days. Holy cow! So, I’ll be patient. (I hear patience is a requirement if you intend to build your own R2-D2.)

But I’m not sure if I want to build an R2-D2. I’m kinda leaning towards an R5 series droid, because the ring under the truncated-conical head would be a great place to hide sonar emitters and stuff. That way I could add systems to make a semi-autonomous droid that wouldn’t be too far from ‘screen accurate.’

I’ve spent the last couple of evenings also deciding about what I would like my astromech to do. Here are a few of my ideas, somewhat in order of difficulty:

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If you build cool stuff with a Basic Stamp rather than a PICmicro, here’s a development environment for you: MacBS2 from Murat Konar. It works with several Basic Stamp chips, and works with serial and USB programmers. To use a serial programmer, you’ll need a serial-to-USB adapter. MacBS2 has been tested with Keyspan’s products (USA-19 and USA-28). You can also use Parallax’s USB Board of Education.

I love my PICkit, but MacBS2 makes Basic Stamp awfully appealing. I like the idea of having all my microcontroller development in one place, something I don’t have right now with my PICkit stuff. I don’t have a Basic Stamp programmer, but I fired up MacBS2 and it is absolutely gorgeous. I have a Keyspan USA-19QI that seems to work perfectly, aside from fact that there is no programmer connected to it.

This is truly a Mac program. The user interface is very well done, and on first launch MacBS2 will automatically download and install the the PBasic tokenizer from Parallax for you, then present you with an editing window.

I pasted in some sample code I found on the web, then clicked the Check Syntax button in MacBS2’s toolbar. It chimed and displayed a smiley in the status line to let me know that all was well. I clicked the Run button, and it attempted to download the program to the Basic Stamp. Of course, since I don’t have a programmer, it complained that it couldn’t detect a Basic Stamp.

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I’ve been lagging approving comments, and found two new ones on my most popular post — my PIC Tutorial. Seems that first a reader requested help with usb_pickit not working with the new PICKit firmware breaking the utility. Then, just a couple of days later, another kind reader posted a solution: he reworked the utility to work with the new firmware. So, for all of you seeking help with this problem, here’s the answer!

Wow, I love blogs.