Cork Board as Protoboard

I'm prepping to do a 1024 LED sculpture, and the suggestion came up of scaling it from 2' x 2' to 4' x 4'. I was concerned that this new size without an equivalent increase in LEDs (which I really am not prepared to do) so I built a sample square foot panel to try the spacing. Of course, I don't have a square foot protoboard (does anyone?) so instead I built it on a piece of cork board. What I really liked about this method was that it allowed me to prototype it as a 2 layer board.





The larger scale actually works a lot better than I anticipated.

Moving to Portland

I'm moving to Portland (the one in Oregon) tomorrow. But TV and Internet won't be set up at my place until a week from Monday.

I'll see you then. To keep yourself entertained watch The Middle Man while I'm gone. It's a good show.

I originally had some commentary, but it was superfluous.

End radio silence.

No, I'm not dead. I've just been away from internet.

I've spent the last 2 weeks galavanting around the country. Well, a few key spots around the country any way. I spent a week in New York, checking out museums and lounging in the park (As hot and humid as it was, park lounging was a daily activity.) and then a week driving between California and Oregon taking care of things and catching up with friends.

This is hardly a report. Merely a heart beat.

New Design

So, I just rebuilt my website ( as you can probably tell, assuming you're reading this blog at http://www.andrewparnell.com ) but unfortunately, where I currently am, I have no practical way of doing more cross browser/platform testing than just Safari and Firefox 3. It seems to work perfectly in both of those, but if you're on something else, or something just seems wrong for that matter, please let me know. Thanks!

Opto-Isolator

I came across this piece shortly after I made my eye, and I absolutely love it. I really wish I could figure out how to do eye tracking, there are so many great possibilities.

Also: opto-isolators happen to be my favorite electronic part. Just saying.

I Am Clean

Came across another cool piece of device art today:

iamclean.org lets you know every time the proprietor has put on deodorant since December 2007.

Personally I think it should be hooked up to a twitter feed.

(Side note, since I'm having a slow day at work: if you look at their code for going from the device to xml, their use of MySQL is totally extraneous. You can actually use PHP to directly write/maintain XML databases. Just use the DOM structures. DOM for php 5+ DOM XML for php 4.)