It’s a bit radical and unexpected, but there is no way around it. This weblog is “driven by passion”, as you will probably know, and the crazy bit is that there’s just too much going on here to keep things going smoothly. I’ve been running behind on shop fulfillment again, and I’ve been running behind even more on answering emails and with helping out on the forum. First thing I hope this will do, is to let me catch up and regain my footing.

In sharp contrast to last year’s emergency stop, this time it’s not so much lack of ideas or lack of energy, but lack of clear focus and direction. The stories I would love to tell need more time – diving into various aspects of physical computing in considerably more depth and detail than what’s been happening on the weblog lately. And it’s not happening because the daily bite-sized cycle is chopping up my attention (even at times when I have enough weblog posts queued up for many days on end – go figure!). And maybe it’s also a hill climbing issue.

For an interesting insight about attention, see Paul Graham’s essay titled Maker’s Schedule, Manager’s Schedule.

I’ve updated the alphabetical and chronological indexes to all the posts on this weblog, to give you something to go through for the coming weeks. It’s a stopgap measure, but it’ll just have to do – and there should be enough to keep you interested and hopefully also pique your interest and keep you excited in the month ahead.

The difference with last year, is that I’m putting a precise cap on the duration of this “outage”: 30 days from now. That’s when this weblog will resume, probably with some announcements and adjustments to its style and format.

Talk to you one month from now!

PS. If you want to learn about electricity, then there are numerous resources on the web. Let me single out one: a 50-minute video by Walter Lewin at MIT about batteries and power (lecture 10 on this page). You can get a deep understanding of what a battery is, why its internal resistance matters, what power is, how heat comes out, what shorting a battery does, and even sparks. It’s a fantastic presentation, and the video was just picked at random!

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.

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?

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?

One of the major changes is to move all JeeLabs open source software to GitHub:

The main reason for doing this, is that it makes it much easier for anyone to make changes to the code, regardless of whether these are changes for personal use or changes which you’d like to see applied to the JeeLabs codebase.

For the upcoming Arduino IDE 1.0 release (which appears to break lots of 0022 projects), I’ve moved and converted a couple of JeeLabs libraries so far:

• Ports and RF12 have been merged into a single new library called JeeLib
• the EtherCard and GLCDlib libraries have been moved without name change
• all *.pde files have been renamed to *.ino, the new 1.0 IDE filename extension
• references to WProgram.h have been changed to Arduino.h
• the return type of the write() virtual function has been adjusted
• some (char) casts were needed for byte to fix unintended hex conversion

If you run into any other issues while using this code with the new Arduino IDE 1.0beta2, let me know.

So what does all this mean for you, working with the Arduino IDE and these JeeLabs libraries?

Well, first of all: if you’re using IDE 0022, there’s no need to change anything. The new code on GitHub is only for the next IDE release. The subversion repositories and ZIP archives on the libraries page in the Café will remain as is until at least the end of this year.

New development by yours truly will take place on GitHub, however. This applies to all embedded software as well as the JeeMon/JeeRev stuff.

The new JeeLib should make it easier to use Ports and RF12 stuff – just use #include <JeeLib.h>.

Note that you don’t need to sign up with GitHub to view or download any of the JeeLabs software. The code stored there is public, and can be used by anyone. Just follow the zip or tar links in the README section at the bottom of the project pages, or use git to “clone” a repository.

To follow all my changes on GitHub, you can use this RSS feed. To follow just the changes to JeeLib in slightly more detail, this feed should do the trick.

One of the features provided by GitHub is “Issue Tracking”, i.e. the ability to file bugs, comment on them, and see what has been reported and which ones are still open. This too is open to anyone, but you have to be signed up and logged in to GitHub to submit issues or discuss them.

For questions and support, please continue to use the JeeLabs forum as before. But if you’re really pretty sure there’s a bug in there, you’re welcome to use the issue trackers (as you know, Mr Murphy and me tend to sprinkle bugs around from time to time, just to keep y’all sharp and busy ;)

And if you’d like to suggest a change, consider forking the code on GitHub and submitting a “pull request”. This is GitHub-speak for submitting patches. Small changes (even multiple ones) are more likely to go in than one big sweeping request to change everything. I’m open for suggestions (in fact, I’ve got a couple of patches from people still waiting to be applied), but please do keep in mind that code changes often imply doc changes, as well as making sure nothing breaks under various scenarios.

All in all, I hope that GitHub will help us all keep better track of all the latest changes to the software, work together more actively to fix bugs and add more functionality. I haven’t heard of GitHub ever going offline, but if it ever does, I’ll make sure that the latest code is also available from the JeeLabs servers as backup.

Update – Here’s an excellent article on how to collaborate via Git and GitHub.

But it’s only fitting that today is also a great time to celebrate. Because this weblog has reached…

That’s right. Eight hundred articles on this weblog, published on a daily basis – at midnight Central European Time. About all the fun in physical computing and the electronics, hardware, software, and mechanics surrounding it – collected as a stream of notes describing my adventures in this geeky world of techno-babble.

The posts on this daily JeeLabs Weblog are – by definition – organized as a timeline. Some of it will inevitably be wildly obsolete by now, other parts are timeless and still useful, but if you didn’t tag along from the beginning in 2008, then it might all be somewhat overwhelming – or ridiculously frustrating, depending on your expectations.

There are a few ways to find your way around here. First of all, there are six categories (some of them quite large by now): AVR, Hardware, Musings, News, Software, and the catch-all Uncategorized. A somewhat more fine-grained structure is available through 28 “tags”, shown at the top of each post. There’s an updated listing of them on the intro page.

Another approach to finding your way around here, is to use the Search box at the bottom right of each page. It works quite well, but don’t search too broadly or you’ll get a result with hundreds of posts.

The third place to look for interesting posts is on the “Café“, and especially the pages in the hardware wiki, many of which have a Related Weblog Posts section at the end. I’ve tried to add links to new pages there whenever I could, although there’s still lots of room for improvement.

And last but not least, there’s the forum area, which is getting more and more traffic these days, so it could be a good place to search and ask questions. I tend to participate at least once a day (although quite a bit less in the two months ahead).

If shopping for JeeNodes and other JeeStuff is your kind of thing, don’t forget that the shop will close for one month, starting two weeks from now, and that there’s a discount / sale right now for current customers and contributors. See this page for all the details.

I’d like to thank everyone who in some form or other voiced their appreciation and encouraged me to push further. Techie as it all may be, this weblog is still about people, creativity, and shared passions. Because without all that, there is no point.

Scattered over the coming two months, Liesbeth and I will break away and travel in Europe for a while, and I’ll fill in the rest of this long summer by relaxing, learning, tinkering, experimenting, working on top-secret stuff, and cooking up all sorts of crazy hardware and software for future JeeLabs projects and products.

These daily weblog posts will resume on September 1st.

Until then, for your entertainment, a tale of two worlds: Splitscreen.

Enjoy!
-jcw

Update – Full alphabetical and chronological index.

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!

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.

Here’s what one of those boxes looks like:

Many of the pending LCD (+ LCD Plug) back-orders have now been sent out. Yippie!

That still leaves 3 more major items which are holding up a couple of packages: Carrier Board PCB’s, Relay Plugs and RBBB’s. The Carrier Boards are currently in Leipzig and will be here either on Friday, or else right after the weekend. The second item which is really hard to get these days, is the relay used on the Relay Plug – they are expected in about a week. The third item is the RBBB, which has been postponed a bit due to a temporary ATmega328 DIP shortage. This has now been resolved, so I expect to have them in by early February.

Phew.

It’s strange how these supply issues can make such a difference… looks like I can’t seem to focus on anything substantial when there is a large back-log. Pretty silly, really. Oh well.

Sorry for the interruption, I just had to post about this. Tomorrow will be the third Easy Electrons post about transistors, as promised.

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.