If you search on Google for the word "inertia" you get what I think is one of the best descriptions of my efforts on this blog that I could have hoped for.
I was going to use the second definition as a nice science-y segue, but that first one is just too perfect. It's clearly been some months since I wrote anything here and I'd be surprised if anyone is looking closely enough to notice a new entry, but oh well, you don't know until you try and I think this is a good opportunity to practice what you preach. As I tell my kids, you've got to keep trying.
A few days ago I signed up for a table at
The Champlain Mini-Maker Faire in Shelburne, Vermont. I'm going out on a limb a bit on this one, because I've never really done this sort of thing on my own. I've followed along with
RANV, one of the local amateur radio groups, and we've never missed one since they started having them, but I've never really tried to contribute. I've always had ideas about what the event needs, but never really gave them a try. This year, I decided to give it a go. If accepted (I haven't heard back yet), I intend to have a Maker Fails table. When you go to these events, you end up seeing some amazing things. There's lots of beautiful art, and finished projects. Some items for sale, some just for display, but generally polished and presentable work. What you don't see is the time, hard work, frustration, late nights, and sometimes foul language that goes into making that piece. I thought it'd be good to change that a bit. I've got plenty of unfinished and non-functional stuff laying around. Some of it could be resurrected or completed, but generally it's a mess in my shop. I've started asking around to local groups too and intend to do more of that. I hope that I can get across the message that persistence is as important a skill as soldering, welding, woodworking, or any other of the many things we practice to pursue the crafts we love.
This morning my wife wanted to go back to the
South End Art Hop. We'd gone on Friday night but the weather was terrible. We got soaked. Today was a lovely day so the we took the two harmonics (ham-speak for kids) back down to Pine St. to wander around. We found the local cardboard pinball purveyors and decided to pop in for some light corrugated fun.We ended up talking to Pete Talbot, one of the creators of the
PinBox 3000 and I pitched him the idea of the Maker Fail table. He thought it was a great idea and even showed me one of the original PinBox designs! I took some pictures but I'm saving that for Maker Faire! He's a great guy, and it was a great chat. They'll be down in NYC for the
World Maker Faire this year, so if you're down there, stop by and say hi.
So that's what I'm working on for Maker Faire. The semi-autonomous steam octopod will have to wait for next year.
Oh yeah, I finally got a Bitx40 on the air. I'm
listening to the Hurricane Watch Net talk about Hurricane Irma down in Florida. Keep safe if you're down in the path of the storm!
73 de KB1VNA
Eric
Well, I'll be at the Champlain Valley Mini-Maker Faire! They've accepted my idea and I'm trying to put together a table. I have two days to sort it all out due to circumstances beyond my control. Figures. Worst case scenario, it'll be an excellent example of a failure!
We had another STEM club meeting last week and this time we had media presence! There's a brief shot of my sweater helping kid1 with the project but most of the footage is, rightfully, of Ralph and the kids (Kid2, seen below in his yogurt bedecked shirt was disappointed that he didn't make the news.). This weeks project was hoop gliders. They're simple little things, made up of a straw and some some strips of paper, but they fly surprisingly well. The concept Ralph was trying to get across was actually iteration and documentation. He tried to communicate the idea of controlled experimentation by having them change one piece at a time and seeing how the resulting glider performed. Of course it devolved into a mass of straws and paper wings, but that's to be expected. I only had to retrieve one glider from the stacks this time around.
Days of internet research returned no results for the error I was seeing (at least, no results that my novice experience could parse). The key was Yves' comment that the only issue with open source software like Arduino code is that the same iteration and documentation process Ralph was trying to communicate to the kids is mostly non-existent. The code gets changed for whatever reason, sometimes good ones, but that the changes don't tend to propagate across the larger community very well. That spurred me on to dig a bit deeper into the files included with the newest sketch. Finally, I found and dug into the wall of text that is the README file for the VFO sketch and sure enough, listed in there is a description of changes that were made to the libraries which require some minor tweaking of the code to compile properly. Now, of course, that README file was available to me the whole time, but it took me embarrassingly long to find it. So there are two morals to this story: first read the README files! All of them! Second, document your modifications. Do it one at a time, and write them out clearly so that you or some other poor soul who comes after you, can see the changes you made and make the appropriate modifications. If the original author hadn't documented properly I would have had very little hope of coming up with working code. Of course I had to look in the right place to find the answers I was looking for, but knowing where to look is often the hardest part of problem solving.
