It’s 2012 and we Texans are finally enjoying some relief from the hottest and driest year ever recorded. The rain and cool took their time coming. When storms blow through now we huddle at our office windows like clusters of excited honeybees. It’s hard to fight the impulse to wander shirtless in the streets. Quest Poetry Two [...]
January 18, 2011
I. Seattle Some pretty exciting news came my way last September. My friends at Groundspeak, the international geocaching organization, wrote that their Reverse Geocache™ Puzzle Box had recently facilitated a young coworker’s wedding engagement! (You’ve encountered this very box in an earlier post. I built it to celebrate geocaching’s tenth anniversary—the first commission I ever did.) So how [...]
January 14, 2011
Welcome, MAKE readers! I’m very pleased that you dropped by and hope you enjoyed my article on the Reverse Geocache™ Puzzle Box (p. 144 of the January issue). We have a wonderful community of puzzle box owners, builders, and enthusiasts here, centered around the notion of location-based microcontroller projects, and we’d love for you to join [...]
January 5, 2011
The new year brings another version of the NewSoftSerial library, a beta version 11. Changes since version 10 include: Inheritance from the new Arduino Stream class and commensurate interface adjustments (added peek(), changed signature for available()) write() member is now public, following the lead of Print base class support for Arduino Mega and Mega 2560 — thanks Brett [...]
October 27, 2010
[Author's note: This post is the last in a real-life story that ultimately took a full year and four chapters (1, 2, 3, 4) to tell. Read them all, then browse through the other surprising puzzle box stories that have popped up along the way.] The Box Opens The big news we’ve been waiting so long for [...]
August 29, 2010
As you may have read, the nice people at Groundspeak dropped by to interview me about the Reverse Geocache™ Puzzle. These were the folks who discovered afterwards that I had hidden their dinner — actually a gift certificate to a local Mexican restaurant — in one of my “elegant black” puzzle boxes. We had a nice chat, [...]
July 22, 2010
There is so much to report that I hardly know where to begin. The biggest news is that I have begun actively delivering commissions! If you want to finally get your hands on a second-generation programmable Reverse Geocache™ puzzle, keep reading. PCBs This winter I began developing a new specialized PCB (“printed circuit board”) that greatly improves [...]
February 21, 2010
Hurrah! I’m very pleased to announce the first ever successful opening of a Reverse Geocache™ Puzzle Box. (If you don’t know what a Reverse Geocache is, you should read this first.) The event occurred Saturday night, January 30th, in Austin, Texas, USA. Alas, it wasn’t the famous box that opened – that one is still sitting sadly [...]
January 7, 2010
NewSoftSerial 10 is available for testing. There are a number of fun new features to play with, including support for 20MHz processors and Arduino siblings like the Teensy and Teensy++. I’ve also added a destructor (and an end()) so that you can employ temporary NewSoftSerial objects, for example: if (need_to_check_GPS) { NewSoftSerial gpsconn(6, 3); ... } [...]
November 9, 2009
[Author's note: This is the third post in a real-life story that ultimately took a full year and four chapters (1, 2, 3, 4) to tell. Read them all, then browse through the other surprising puzzle box stories that have popped up along the way.] The puzzle box continues to generate lots of interest. This [...]
January 6, 2012
0