XBee Shield!

I just finished up my homemade XBee shield. It’s made of a ProtoShield from Adafruit, some resistors, two LED’s, an XBee module (of course!), a mini-breadboard, and an XBee Breakout board from SparkFun Electronics. Cost me ~$30 to build, instead of paying $80 to buy one.

Githubby

I just started using Github, which is sort of like Sourceforge, but better! I created a fork of the Liquidware guys’ branch of the Arduino IDE, just to add some updates they missed. My github profile is here: http://github.com/ziplock

Bespin Madness (And Arduino, too!)

I just learned about the Bespin online IDE.

http://vimeo.com/3195079

Here’s a link to the beta:

http://bespin.mozilla.com

It’s really cool, and the guys over at the Arduino project are working on a way to get full Arduino capability into it. Speaking of the Arduino, I came up with a few new ideas for it. In fact, I just finished my Nuovo, which comes complete with an XBee socket and is all through-hole components. This version uses an FTDI cable instead of an FTDI chip, so there are NO surface-mount parts.

I also had a few project ideas. One of them was to attach a GPS Shield from Ladyada and an Accelerometer shield that I came up with. This project would be put in an Otterbox-style container and used as a flight recorder. Too bad I can’t take a GPS on an airplane.

My accelerometer shield is  just a PCB with a punch of female headers for attaching popular accelerometers.