The Shuttle inspired our nation and motivated us to reach toward the stars. I personally thank the Shuttle program for motivating me to become an engineer.

That about sums up this month on the markets.

In 2009 I put together a project called RFiDJ that used media tiles to queue media that I wanted to play from my HTPC (Home Theater PC). We had a lot of fun with the project but felt that the tether to the reader surface was too much of a limitation. In 2010 we decided to break the tether and make the reader surface wireless and portable. Since then we have found this project to much more interactive & entertaining. Of course we added a few features along the way. This is the RFiDJ Refresh.

My 555 contest submission is an Earthquake Controlled Oscillator (ECO).

---------- UPDATE ----------
In my haste to get this project submitted I neglected to include its purpose. Terremoto is an art project to allow participants to experience earthquakes around the world. It is an engineers attempt to demonstrate how connected we really are.

This project has recently been incorrectly reported as an alert system. I apologize for this error as it is apparent to me that one might easily come to that conclusion after reading my post. This concept or its implementation is not and should not be used as a safety system.
---------- UPDATE ----------

The USGS maintains a server online that consolidates all the seismic data received from sensors all around the world. Terremoto uses an LPCXpresso board and an XPORT AR Ethernet module to query the USGS server for a list of earthquake activity. When a new earthquake is received by Terremoto, tones are generated that correlate with the magnitude of the earthquake.

Our new "lab" intern (Moose) destroys a trusty LaunchPad to get a free (- $4.30) LPCXpresso Cortex-M0 development board. I see a good future ahead for this intern.

I recently received a few TI LaunchPads that were in immediate need of a project. I have decided to dedicate one LauncPad for use in a scoreboard project I am calling the bacBoard. I'll document my progress here for those interested in exploring different applications based on the $4.30 TI LaunchPad.

I need a game plan for how the score board is going to look.

Snow rocks Hampton Roads (DEC 2010) and extends my vacation by a day. Looks like the one snow plow they bought for Hampton Roads will be busy today. :)

I recently received a few TI LaunchPad boards and they appear to be very well designed, especially considering the price! I have plans for these boards on some future projects I'll post on the website. Until then I hope you enjoy the Blinky.

A quick test movie I took on my new Flip MinoHD. I'll give you one guess to figure out what that object is above the clouds. :)

I am working on a project that uses the VLC media player. My project calls VLC via the command line in Windows XP. Using the following command I am able to discover all the new podcats and place them in a playlist:

vlc -S podcast --podcast-urls http://feeds.twis.org/twis/science/

What do I have to add to the command to get VLC to play the newest podcast? Suggestions?