Happy 2012. We each have roughly 5,000 waking hours ahead of us in 2012. Let’s use ‘em – slowly and wisely.

As my contribution to slowing down, I’d like to encourage everyone interested in Computing Stuff tied to the Physical World to deepen your understanding and broaden your experience. So allow me to introduce a little tinkering kit, for those of you who are into ATmega’s and wireless stuff – the JeeNode Block:

This is a recent experiment to fool around with the JeeNode form factor, as a way to create a little self-contained unit which needs no wires to operate. I’m using these blocks to try things out on my desktop (you know, the real physical one), without turning it into a huge spaghetti bowl of power supply wires, USB cables, and test hookups.

It’s basically just a JeeNode, but with a different layout (and RFM12B’s “INT” pin reallocated from PD2 to PB0):

It’s exactly the right size to support simple low-cost 5×7 cm prototyping boards (lets not call ‘em “shields”, ok?):

The three headers at the bottom are: 8 digital I/O pins, 4 power pins, and 6 analog I/O pins. The two headers at the top are JeeNode ports 1 and 2. There’s a reset button, an LED, and an FTDI header for uploading new code. The 3x AA battery pack will power the whole thing at 3.6 .. 4.5 V, depending on the type of batteries used. There’s a regulator on board to run at 3.3V, as with all the other JeeNode variants.

Note that this is not a product in the shop. It’s just an exploration by yours truly. And it’s also a one-time offer:

As special encouragement to “start 2012 by tinkering”, I’ll add a JeeNode Block PCB and a prototype board for free to the first three dozen or so people who order a JeeNode from the shop and ask for it. You can then simply re-use all the JeeNode parts for this board (except for the JeeNode’s PCB), since everything is more or less the same. A few missing components will also be included: extra headers, an LED, and the reset button. To take advantage of this offer, select “JeeNode w/ extra Block” from the pop-up list on the order page. Note: this offer is limited to at most one Block per person.

If you come up with a neat project for the JeeNode Block, I encourage you to share your invention on the forum.

Happy 2012. With 5000 hours to discover your passion, extend your knowledge, and unleash your creativity.

The JeeLabs shop has always been based on the Shopify service (which I won’t recommend for European shops, because they haven’t got a clue about VAT). It looks nice, and I guess I fell for it before understanding all the implications. So Shopify it is, as far as JeeLabs is concerned. I’ve worked my way around VAT by simply refunding and issuing a VAT-exempt invoice where needed.

Anyway, it turns out that there is now a “customer login” option, which I activated a few days ago. What that means is that whenever you shop at JeeLabs, you now get a choice when checking out your order:

What that really means, is that you won’t have to re-enter your shipping details over and over again if you decide to come back for more. And judging from the info in Shopify, that’s about a third of all JeeLabs customers. I am very proud of that fact BTW, because in my view a return customer is someone who is genuinely satisfied with what he/she got the first time around. It feels good to be able to follow up.

If you don’t want to leave this sort of info on the Shopify servers, please keep in mind that the only difference is that you get to pick a password for re-using what you’ll need to enter anyway.

In case you’re worried that this information is going to be used (by me or anyone else), for anything but order fulfillment: don’t be. I’m probably far more extreme in my position than you on privacy. I do not track personal details. The internet is a nightmare in that respect as it is. I Really Do Not Track, nor keep logs, nor “forget” to remove logs. I don’t do Google Analytics. I don’t have the Shopify “stats” option. I don’t “visualize” web accesses. All I keep are recent activity logs of my own servers, to be able to figure out problems when needed.

Life’s too short for lots of things – and that includes feeding ego’s and spying on people, IMO :)

But that doesn’t mean you have to suffer and re-enter the same info over and over in the JeeLabs shop, eh?

Looks like I’ll be participating in this year’s Elektro:Camp (updated link) coming November 4th and 5th. Not sure what it’s all about and how it’s set up – I’ve never been to a “barcamp-style” meeting – but it seems like a good place to be for anyone in the area and interested in hacking on their energy consumption and automation systems at home:

If you’re into this sort of thing, consider joining. It’s bound to be fun, and it’ll be great to meet up in person :)

(Groningen brings up lots of memories, I grew up there – most of my primary school time anyway)

Soooo… see you there?

Ok, here we go again…

1. The JeeLabs online shop will be closed from July 16 to August 15, 2011.

2. The JeeLabs daily weblog will be on hold from July 1st to August 31st.

3. Sale!

Each order will be checked, if I can’t figure it out I’ll contact you by email (this may add to the delay).

Update – Similar conditions now also apply for JeeLabs products in the Modern Device – same discount code!

If you’ve been following this weblog, then you may have noticed that things have been quiet around here…

There are a couple of reasons for this. The first one which triggered it all, was an unfortunate – but ordinary – flu, which swept me off my feet for a couple of days, and then sapped all my energy for a few more. I’m sorry about that, and I’m happy that this is all behind me now.

But there’s more to it than that.

In the beginning, I often had a queue of over a week of weblog posts pending and ready to go out on a daily basis. At that time, the weblog was working out exactly as planned: as a way to report on my adventures in the fascinating land of Physical Computing…

However, over 730 posts later, that buffer has been steadily decreasing, and I’ve often been forced to write a weblog post on the day before its publication. Sometimes this was ready only minutes before the deadline. No fun, and in the past month or two, this ended up happening more and more often. The reporting task became a recurring “what shall I write about today?” challenge. Somewhere along the way, the adventure got lost.

And finally, there’s the web shop, which has taken off much faster than I expected and anticipated. In a way, that’s good: a well-running shop means it provides funding for everything else – from keeping that shop going to being able to start new projects and work on fun stuff. Which is the point of JeeLabs after all.

Except… I’ve been swamped. It’s been a while since I’ve actually been able to “start new projects and work on fun stuff”. And some products added to the shop haven’t gotten the attention they need and deserve, such as writing more software examples and documentation to make things interesting, useful, and practical for everyone. Not to mention some stock problems (there are still a few right now).

One solution would be to “scale up”, i.e. to invest in larger amounts of stock and bring in more people to help with production, packaging, and sales. That’s probably what most people would do when presented with such an incredible “business opportunity”, right?

Ah, but there’s the rub… you see, my goal is not to create a large business and become the boss of something “big”.

Let me tell you a story I heard many years ago…

There’s this guy somewhere on a island, sitting under a tree. He takes a little branch, and patiently carves it into a magnificent little flute. He loves making his flutes, and does it all day long, day in day out. His family and friends enjoy what he’s doing, and everyone’s happy. Then, one day, a visitor comes along and sees him sitting there under his tree, amidst his branches and flutes. He walks over and says: “Wow, that’s amazing what you do. You ought to make lots of flutes, I think you could sell tons of them!”

The guy shrugs, and continues with his flute.

The visitor goes on: “Imagine how much money you could make, and how rich and famous you could become. Man, you could teach others to make these flutes, set up a factory, hire a workforce, and rake in the money! You’d be free to do anything you like. Wouldn’t that be incredible? Now tell me, if you were rich, what would you really like to do most of all?”

The guy looks up and says: “Me? Oh, nothing, just sit under a tree and make flutes.”

I’m not saying I’m exactly like that guy. But close. I want to spend my days exploring new things. And for a while, it’s been happening less and less.

Don’t get me wrong. I do want to share. I do want to encourage others to explore and learn more about all sorts of new and fun technologies. And I do want to continue with Open Source Hardware and Software. The mix of software, hardware, and electronics is absolutely fascinating and oh so worth sharing, and I love to be able to encourage people in those directions. But I don’t want to let the weblog or the shop run my life. My life is not about business, revenues, power, or even success. Heck, it probably wouldn’t be, even if I tried ;)

Just for the record: JeeLabs is not going away. On the contrary, I intend to find a way which makes sure that it will last and stay around for many years to come. I want to keep the weblog, as a source of unique posts with 100% original content. I want to keep the web shop going with kits and products which help anyone interested in Physical Computing to try things out, experiment, explore, and learn about it all.

But I need to take care of the inner fire and energy source which drives me. And that requires time to concentrate and the liberty to run off in lots of directions. I’m back into a bit of that right now, and it’s doing wonders for me.

There will be only a few more posts on the weblog this month. I’ll respond to emails and forum posts as before, and I’m committed to keep the shop running in a responsible way, with proper support and doing my best to maintain sufficient stock levels to keep everything listed available for people who want it. In fact, I expect this activity to increase, as more and more larger projects are starting up and several workshops are currently under way. But my focus will be on streamlining things, so I can recover that precious time I need for the longer term health of everything at JeeLabs, including myself.

Take care, and please don’t let the radio silence on this weblog affect your plans and activities. There are lots of old posts to go through which might interest you, just use the search box or go through any of the archived months at the bottom of this page.

When I figure out how to best take this all forward, you’ll be the first to know.

PS. Thanks for all kind emails and encouragements. It makes a very real difference.

I’ve started adding some more info to the new “JeeLabs Café” wiki at http://jeelabs.net/.

First change is that all products (boards, plugs, etc) now include at least these four files:

• jlpcb-<NNN>.pdf – the schematic as a PDF page
• jlpcb-<NNN>.sch – the schematic as EAGLE schematic (binary data)
• jlpcb-<NNN>.png – the board traces as a PNG image
• jlpcb-<NNN>.brd – the board design as EAGLE board (binary data)

The files are listed at the bottom of each page mentioned on the Hardware list (a read-only sub-area of the Café).

I’ve also started adding pointers to relevant weblog posts on these product pages. For example, the end of the JeeNode page now looks like this:

The other addition, is that I’m going to start adding pages focused around specific topics, acting as quick indexes into the weblog. The “stream of conscience” timeline that makes up the daily weblog is probably fine if you’ve been following along for some time and tend to read or skim most new pages fairly regularly. But for anyone stumbling upon this jeelabs.org site out of the blue, I suspect that this site is really nearly impenetrable by now.

I don’t intend to the change the style and approach of the daily weblog, because it really is sort of a diary of my adventures through Physical Computing, finding my way around as a maker, and getting to grips with atoms. With all the ups, downs, exciting advances, and dead ends that I happen to bump into at JeeLabs.

But for task-specific and topic-specific access, it makes more sense to have an index to locate specific posts and perhaps annotate them a bit if the weblog entry is incomplete or obsolete by now.

Here’s the new Easy Electrons page on the Café to kick this off:

This new Easy Electrons index page is mentioned on the main Projects page.

The main page of the Café is still a bit crude, but there are a couple of automatically-generated pages worth visiting to find your way around in the Café, eh, I mean wiki:

• the main wiki site map – a.k.a. “Index by title” in the sidebar
• the main wiki recent changes – a.k.a. “Index by date” in the sidebar
• the hardware area site map – a.k.a. “Index by title” in the sidebar
• the hardware area recent changes – a.k.a. “Index by date” in the sidebar

Note also that the short URLs printed on all the pcb’s and on the package labels have been adjusted to point to pages in the Café. So when you type jeelabs.org/jn4 into your web browser, you’ll see a page which tells you that it’s a JeeNode v4, provides some info about it, and mentions that there is now a newer version.

I haven’t filled in all the older versions with full details yet, but for all current products, that two-letter-plus-a-digit code will always get you to the latest information in the Café.

Is everything perfect today? No… not by a long shot. But I hope this’ll let us move in that direction.

Two small changes here at JeeLabs. Well, small for you, if I did my homework properly…

First, the http://jeelabs.org/ domain has been migrated to the new server, now that the new internet link appears to be stable.

This change should be mostly transparent. Same content, same format, same “content provider” as before, everything has been transferred as is.

The server and the internet link are quite a bit faster than before. Both are currently under 10% utilized, and should be able to handle growth as needed. The extra speed is particularly noticeable in the search box at the bottom right of this weblog:

The second small change is that “Jee Labs” will be called “JeeLabs” from now on. It’s official. No more white space. Eight bits closer to world domination :)

I’ve been wanting to get away from the two separate words for some time now, one reason being that a single InterCapped name is more googleable – and this server migration seemed like a good time to make the switch.

So better get used to it, this is the name of the new-yet-unchanged home:

This was a fairly elaborate site migration for me, and now both jeelabs.net and jeelabs.org are done. I’ve got a few other changes ahead of me before the rented server (located in Nürnberg, Germany) can be taken offline. But that will have less impact and should be easy to finish in the months ahead.

Onwards!

This is a weblog post I never wanted to write…

If you’ve been waiting for stuff you’ve ordered from the JeeLabs shop in the past weeks, and it hasn’t arrived yet, then I have some really bad news for you: don’t expect anything the rest of this year…

I’m hitting the emergency stop button:

The two big issues in the past two weeks were mentioned in a recent post, and they are both of the kind I can (learn to) deal with: fluctuations in demand and fluctuations in supply, along with occasional shipping anomalies. It’s frustrating for everyone involved when this doesn’t work out well, but hey – been there done that, from both sides of the table now.

Trouble is, I’m now running afoul on a third hurdle: a couple of days ago, I strained my lower back. The trip to Braunschweig may have made it worse, unfortunately, although I had hoped these few days off would cure it. It’s most probably stress related, even though I consider myself an expert in stress avoidance. You see, normally I’m the guy who overcomes any type of setback, no matter what happens and no matter what the stress levels are. And having run a marathon 4 years ago, I have not the slightest inclination in the world to keep some mundane injury from letting me do what I love doing so much these days, i.e. taking JeeLabs further.

Except that now, I’m forced to pull all the stops on the shop. Continuing as is at this stage would be sheer folly.

There are currently some 70 back-orders. I will continue to send out packages as soon as new components come in. But given the delays of several of my orders, one of them pending for almost two months now, it’s no longer realistic to expect anything soon. The busiest delivery season of the year, a totally snowed-in infrastructure across all of Europe and beyond … it all doesn’t make the situation any better.

If you’ve been waiting for some time, please email me if you wish to cancel / get a refund and I’ll take care of it.

I’m not going to attempt to make a prediction for the next few weeks. My guess would be as good as yours. I can only wait, try and find out more about the actual status, and prepare to get things going again as quickly and smoothly as possible once everything returns back to normal.

Meanwhile, I’ve got some silly muscles to tend to… but that’s actually the easy and most predictable part!

Cheers,
- Jean-Claude

With over 2,500 units produced to date, it’s safe to call the JeeNode (Kit + USB + JeeLink) a success. A runaway success in fact, in my opinion.

Great, but…

This isn’t purely good news, alas. The demand for JeeLabs products has been increasing so much lately, that I’ve run into serious supply problems in the shop these past few weeks. I can assure you that I’m extremely unhappy with that state of affairs – and the pain isn’t over yet, with some parts taking weeks longer than expected to reach me. This shortage might last into January 2011 for items such as the Ether Card.

So it’s a bit awkward to talk about “success” at a time when there are still 50 back-orders in the shop (down from 90…), with probably quite a few people frustrated by the slow delivery times. A postal strike next week in the Netherlands and the extra delays due to the busy Christmas season are clearly not going to help one bit.

Summary: the JeeNode design has been working out very nicely, but my ability to make it properly available is lagging far behind. My only way out is to “get larger quantities – sooner”. Which is exactly what I’ve been doing lately, in collaboration with Modern Device, who have started carrying more and more JeeLabs products for the US and nearby regions. We’re both scaling up, while trying not to drive ourselves off the cliff…

The current “crunch” is with headers, with 10,000 of them waiting in customs (again) and holding up just about everything, and with Ether Cards, RTC Plugs, and 2×16 LCD displays. That last one is holding up the Wireless Starter Packs as well.

In principle, all packages are sent out when complete, or nearly so in some cases. I cannot speed up things, although I keep looking for alternative suppliers. If you would prefer to get two partial shipments (no extra cost), please get in touch. I will of course also honor any cancellation, if you decide that you’ve had enough of this.

Please bear with me as I try to get over these growing pains. I apologize for all the delays and inconvenience this is causing. As new deliveries are coming in, I am continuously going through my backlog to fullfill as many pending requests as possible.

JeeLabs is leaving the dark ages behind… into the light!

Yesterday, the fiber-optic cable was finally delivered. It’s that long box in the middle with the wiggly split:

Roll-out by Glashart, modem installed bij NKM, support bij Lijbrandt. It took three months between bringing that orange fiber-optic cable into the house to getting hooked up to internet with it!

This is offered as a Triple play service, of which I’ll only be using the internet connection and a telephone line (yeah, voice-over-wire still exists!).

The internet connection is not too shabby – here’s the “low-end” version I ended up with:

To be honest, I couldn’t care less about the download speed. Been happy ever since ADSL passed the 4 Mbit/sec mark (the rest is marketing, same as the CPU GHz “game”, and the top speed of a car, if you ask me).

The key reason to do this was to increase the upload bandwidth, which was 1 Mbit/sec – until now.

So finally I can announce the new web server for the JeeLabs Café:

Say hello to… jeelabs.net

I’ve been maintaining the docs in both places for a couple of months now. But as of today, cafe.jeelabs.net will be deprecated. I’ll gradually adjust all the bits there to redirect to the new server. The old URLs will continue to work for at least another 6 months, but no guarantees after that.

So what’s the deal with the new Café site, eh?

Well, it’s powered by Redmine and has a lot more features than the old site, which is just some static pages:

• A wiki – with all the info from the old site, organized in a similar way, but now more people can join and participate. There’s already a nice section of contributed pages – see the interesting projects page. The wiki supports Markdown format, and attachments (which can be used as inline images).

• An issue tracker, to better keep track of bugs, feature requests, and source code changes.

• A forums section, which may replace the current Talk forums. I haven’t decided, the feature set is quite different. Main issue holding me back for now, is the lack of a simple spam filtering mechanism.

• A respository browser for all the source code maintained at JeeLabs. This is a very nice and powerful interface to subversion, with full access to change logs, older versions, and source code differences. This replaces the code.jeelabs.org hack I had set up a while back.

Redmine has a number of other features which I haven’t enabled at this point. One of the things to note, is that it manages several different projects, including some private ones which aren’t even listed until you log in with the proper access rights.

Speaking of logins: all the info in the Café is public and browsable by anyone visitng the site. To submit bug reports or feature requests, however, you will need to register and log in. The process is simple an automated, with a quick check via email. To contribute on the wiki, I need to raise your access level to “Editor” – this is not automatic (to avoid spamming), so please contact me if you would like to add your own pages to the wiki or help maintain and extend pages already on there.

The main page of the new Café is at http://jeelabs.net/projects/cafe/wiki and here’s what it looks like:

There’s a separate Hardware sub-project in the Café with all the “official” documentation about hardware from JeeLabs. This is where you will find descriptions, detailed specs, connection diagrams, schematics, CAD files, and pointers to relevant posts on this daily weblog. An example:

Ok, enough screen shots. Back to work!

I’ve got two announcements to make:

1. Jee Labs will be closed from July 14th through August 14th

No new posts will be published on the weblog, and no orders in the shop will be processed or sent out during one month, starting on Wednesday “Bastille Day”.

2. Special discount during the entire month of June

Just got back from a couple of very relaxing days in Paris.

Here’s a quick impression of the 1680′s Comédie-Française (on the right):

We went there to see a nice French theater piece. And although I’m not even remotely as culturally enlightened as such a remark might suggest, I did have a great time.

Normal transmissions to resume tomorrow…

Here’s my little thank you for everyone who has supported Jee Labs in 2009 – in one way or another …

No need to hurry, January has 31 days. I’m away now, will reply and send out discount codes on Monday.

This year has been a very exciting year for me. Hardware, software, hacking, coding… I’ve been having an absolutely fantastic time – and I hope you enjoyed reading about some of these adventures.

Before the year ends, I want to apologize for the mess highlight the delightful variety of pages this has led to.

Below are quick snapshots of the headers of different areas reached through this main navigation bar:

First, there is the daily weblog, with over 350 posts in WordPress and new posts added with MarsEdit:

Next the documentation area, which looks the same, but is managed by an app called VoodooPad:

The open source code is maintained in a subversion repository, and can be browsed online using ViewVC:

The discussion forums are managed by WordPress’ little bulletin-board cousin, bbPress:

The project-oriented wiki is handled by a product I’ve had some involvement in, called ProjectForum:

And lastly, the Jee Labs web shop is hosted at Shopify (a bit weak on int’l features and progress, alas):

Six areas, and almost as many very different presentation styles! Most stuff runs on remote servers, the rest is a copy of what’s on my machine. A substantial portion relies on open source, but some bits use strictly commercial software.

I wish I had the time (and the skills) to turn all of these into a single consistent presentation, but I don’t…

To me, the current state of Jee Labs is a pretty good illustration of where we stand with computing at the end of this first decade of the 21st century: amazing things are possible with incredibly modest means, but it’s essentially one huge mish-mash of completely different trends, strung together with this duct-tape we’ve called the web.

Anyway – so much for technology.

See you in 2010! May it bring you lots of friendship, wisdom, and creativity to make this world a better place.

Update 2010-04-05 : this particular wiki setup is no longer being used.

I recently ran out of the silvery electrostatic bags I’ve been using to package JeeNode kits and other stuff. So for the next batch, I decided to use bags which are biodegradable. They have a funny soft feeling to them and are actually much more flexible:

These bags come with a “Farnell” ad printed on them (the supplier of these bags) – so be it…

If you order stuff from the Jee Labs shop, you may also receive stuff packaged in small clear plastic zip-lock bags. That’s because I have them lying around anyway – they are re-used from the extension cables, which I received in packages of 1-per-bag, whereas they are sent out as 5-per-bag. Since the harm of having “consumed” these plastic bags has already been done, might as well re-use them a second time…

FWIW, I feel pretty bad about adding so much packaging to a world full of junk already. And being involved in quite a bit of transportation of all this stuff, both by getting it here and by getting it out as packages to lots of people. Atoms ain’t bits – that’s for sure!

All I can say is that I save up and batch my orders as much as possible, and use as little and as light packaging as I think I can get away with.

Looks like the days of innocence are over for this weblog:

Not to worry (it’s all filtered out automatically), but I still have to scan that stuff once in a while to make sure there are no false positives.

Oh well, I s’pose it comes with the territory…

It’s September 2009, ten months after I started on my “Computing stuff tied to the physical world” adventure. Arduino, RepRap, modding, trying to fit stuff together, software in a chip – my, my, I never thought it’d be that much fun!

Here’s a part that came out of an old CD-ROM drive:

What does (did) it do? Is it human? Hmmm.

Whatever it is, this thing pretty much sums up all the geek stuff I’ve stumbled upon in these past months. Weird. Designed. Fun. Mass produced. Functional. Useless on its own. And still mostly a male thing ;)

But this isn’t just about what happened so far. The fun really is the excitement of entering a new future, best described by the motto “If you can’t open it, you don’t own it” – see the Maker’s Bill of Rights.

I’ve only started to scratch the surface of all this. It’s fascinating how many people are latching on in the same way – across all ages and all continents. With websites such as instructables springing up to collect and share the huge variety of “DIY” projects and hacks. Boundless creativity, for and by everyone.

Today is also the day I’d like to declare the Jee Labs Shop officially “open”. There are only a few “items for sale” to use marketing-speak. My main reason for doing this is that I want to create real stuff – and a shop with products is in a sense as real as it gets. You can buy things there if you want to get going quickly with stuff I’ve been working on, or you can make it all yourself using the information on my weblog. Everything is 100% open source, meaning that all the documentation is available for you to use / adapt / refine / extend in any way you like.

I owe my inspiration to the countless people who share and discuss their work and ideas openly on the web. The daily Jee Labs weblog is my attempt to give something back in return. It’s a drop in the ocean, but hey it appears to be appreciated :)

And I owe much my motivation to your comments on the weblog + forum and in particular to those of you who have bought stuff from the new shop. You know who you are, and you’ve made my day each and every time. Thank you for your vote of confidence!

As a token of my appreciation, everyone who has posted on the weblog or forum and everyone who has ordered from Jee Labs in the past can get a 20% discount on new orders. I don’t want to send around unsolicited emails to everyone, so please send an email to jcw <at> equi4.com to get a discount code which can be used in the web shop until September 30th.

Ok. Back to designing, soldering, hacking, coding, sharing, and posting. Enjoy!

This is to announce that I’m suspending this weblog for a month to take some time off. No new posts in the coming weeks, but you are of course welcome to browse around in everything that’s been posted so far.

This is my 217th post, i.e. over 7 months of daily posting about all sorts of embedded and wireless fun stuff since this weblog was started. A lot of different topics have been covered, from getting the wireless radio to work, via a couple of excursions into robotics, to the latest reflow developments here. I hope you’ve enjoyed all this as much as I’ve enjoyed diving in and writing about it all. I’m sure there’s a lot more fun waiting down the road, and am looking forward to get back to this after the summer.

Here’s my very latest progress on the new JeeLink. I don’t have all the parts yet, so this isn’t a complete unit, but you can see where it’s all going:

As you can see, there are a couple of solder bridges, i.e. too much paste. But the “big” chips both do appear to have lined up quite nicely and the simple parts are all fine. All I need to do is get the solder paste amounts down next time. Man, this stuff sure is tiny.

Enjoy, and watch out for those soldering fumes! ;)

There have been some changes to this weblog since it was moved to another server a few days ago. The navigation links at the top of each page now work better, for one.

Another change is that I’ve started setting up some more documentation pages, and am integrating them into this website. Here’s what you get when you click on the “DOCS” link now:

I would have loved to get some really nifty sidebar navigation in there, but for now there are simply two mechanisms to help you out: first of all there are quite a few links between pages – this is automatic, and hence very convenient for me: wherever text appears which matches a page in the documentation, that text will be linked. The other navigation feature is the “page index” link at the bottom of each page. It’s not very sophisticated, but hopefully workable for now.

Keep in mind that searching in the weblog will not find anything in the documentation pages – these are internally two completely different systems.

Needless to say perhaps, but these documentation pages are still at an early stage. They will be filled-in, extended, and updated for some time to come.

For your information: I’ll be off-line from July 15th through August 15th. It’s that time of year for me to let go and re-charge again, far away from gadgets, internets, and computer screens. Because everything has its place, including the real world.

The intention is to have the new JeeNode v3 kits and boards available before then, but it really depends on whether the latest design works properly. I hope to find out in roughly a week.

The shop will stay on-line, but please be aware that if you order anything there will be no packages sent out during that period. Right now, the shop is still in basic start-up mode. No more, no less. With a bit of luck, I can still send out some new kits before my leave.

Ok, back to some fun stuff. Here’s a mystery JeeNode …

See if you can guess what the different pieces are and what all this is for. Two hints: the chip on the right is transparent (it hasn’t been hooked up yet), and there’s a solar cell still waiting to be connected to the top and bottom leftmost two JeePlug pins.

The mystery will be solved in tomorrow’s post.

Right on the heels of yesterday’s shop announcement, I’ve now also set up a site for discussion about everything related to the Jee Labs:

talk.jeelabs.net

Again, a very basic design with with only a limited set of features in the form of a new bulletin board called bbPress – from the makers of WordPress:

If this turns out to be a convenient and effective setting for discussions, I will remove the jeelabs mailing list at Google Groups again. With apologies to everyone who already signed up there.

To summarize, there are now three different sites for the Jee Labs, using the new domain names:

• news.jeelabs.org – the daily news weblog – aliases www.jeelabs.org and jeelabs.org
• shop.jeelabs.com – to get kits, boards, etc – aliases www.jeelabs.com and jeelabs.com
• talk.jeelabs.net – forums for discussion – aliases www.jeelabs.net and jeelabs.net

So much for the world domination side of things – now I can put on my lab coat again and get on with it.

I’ve decided to switch to a real top-level internet domain name for this weblog, and am moving this entire site over to its new location:

www.jeelabs.org

Did you notice the extra “s”? Did ya? Did ya?

Actually, the weblog home is at http://news.jeelabs.org/ to be pedantically precise – but you can pick whichever URL you prefer, since you’ll automatically be redirected to the right place. Both names have been permanently tied together – inasmuch as permanent means anything on internet, that is.

The “jeelab.equi4.com” URL (no “s”, see?) will continue to work as a redirect to the new location, at least for a while so everyone can gradually adjust all bookmarks.

This change will be instant because it’s entirely virtual. This is merely a naming issue.

I’ve also adjusted the name of this blog. The “Jee Labs” plural form feels right for various reasons. Several people were in fact referring to this weblog in that way already.

Had a wonderful time in Barecelona, admiring Gaudi’s fantastic architecture such as the roof of “La Pedrera”:

You might not have noticed my absence since the daily Jee Labs weblog updates went on as usual, based on posts which were prepared in advance.

Anyway, it’s good to be back …

Today is my birthday. Regular broadcasts resuming tomorrow.

That’s me, a couple of decades back, around the time when the PDP-8 came out. No chips, no personal computers, no Internet, no Google, no mobile technology.

All prerequisites for the JeeNode :)

This blog has reached its one hundredth post – whee!

If you follow this weblog regularly, you may have noticed that there is now one post per day, day-in-day-out and always at 0:01 CET. This is not because my working days and hours are so regular – far from it – or necessarily always late, but because this self-imposed daily schedule helps me stay focused.

It’s all supported by a bit of automation in WordPress – I simply try to keep a handful of posts scheduled “in the pipeline”, so that these writings aren’t driven by some sort of daily deadline panic. On some days I have nothing to say – and I don’t – while on others I’m pleased to find that I can touch on a couple of topics, some of which are hopefully of interest to you, dear reader.

Speaking of whom… it’s always nice to hear from you. I’d love to read about what interests you in this “Computing Stuff Tied to the Physical World” as the title of this weblog says, as well as your suggestions on how to further improve this weblog.

So much for the intermezzo on this first day of spring (for the northern hemisphere that is). Tomorrow’s post will resume with a photo, graphic, or sketch – as always.

Enjoy your reading!

PS. FYI, I recently added a bit more background info about me on the About page.

I’ve “moved” this blog to http://jeelab.equi4.com/ – but it’s all smoke and mirrors really: underneath, it still redirects to the http://jeelab.wordpress.com/ site which continues to host these pages just as before.

Update – I’ve also changed the blog title to match the domain name. Less confusion. See the about page for further details.

This weblog was moved from RapidWeaver (which doesn’t scale, sigh) to a hosted one using WordPress. Right now, I’m now using MarsEdit to manage this blog.

All older entries have been moved over, but not all links and source code listings have properly made it across the transition. The original blog is still archived here.