Update Two
An appropriate amount of time has passed that I have enough new news to share. It's all fairly large and in my opinion exciting as well so here we go.
"Controlling LEDs with Arduino" video series for Apress
I worked on an introductory video series with Apress all about controlling LEDs with Arduino. Right now it's open but eventually it will be behind a paywall as they launch their new video content. This was really fun to work on and was a unique challenge since it was a different style of video than I normally do being a purely educational format. Also I'm pretty pumped that I was able to go thru blinking an LED all the way to Charlieplexing. Explaining Charlieplexing was also one of the hardest things I've ever done. Check it out while you can right here: https://rd.springer.com/video/10.1007/978-1-4842-4883-6
Adafruit Learn Guide for the Twin Peaks PyPortal Project
I published a new Learn guide with Adafruit about my Twin Peaks PyPortal project. It goes thru how to write the code, hook-up the circuit and modify the picture frame with power tools all with Twin Peaks references sprinkled throughout. Check it out here: https://learn.adafruit.com/twin-peaks-light-reactive-pyportal-picture-frame/overview
Guest Video on David Watts' Channel
David Watts, a fellow electronics video maker, invited me to create a guest video on his channel while he's away on vacation. I continued with my MSGEQ7 and CircuitPython experiments, this time with an LED matrix. This was a really fun project to work on and I'll be doing some more work with it hopefully in the form of a little artsy PCB. You can see the video on David's channel here: https://youtu.be/tnD3ly5tqhQ
Speaking at Bay Area Maker Faire
And finally, the biggest news in a large vat of big news, I'm going to be giving a talk at Bay Area Maker Faire on the Tinker Board; specifically how to build electronics projects using it. I don't know the timing yet but it will be on the Electronics stage and I'll update on the various social medias when I know what's up. This will be the first time I've ever given a presentation, so that's exciting. I have tentative plans to blink an LED live for demo purposes and to possibly present from the Tinker Board using LibreOffice but we'll see if that pans out. I'll be testing that whole thing out before and will also have multiple back-up plans. In fact I already have my slides ready in PowerPoint on my Windows laptop.
In my day job I actually provide AV support, so that means I have a very good idea of what can go wrong in a presentation. That's actually why I'm considering using LibreOffice for my presentation- that way when I go into the live demo portion I can continue projecting from the Tinker Board rather than switching sources. These are the things I worry about, never mind the content. Part of me also wants to say some of the ridiculous things that speakers have said to me while I'm setting them up the day of ("Do you have my slides? Well I sent them to SOMEONE."; "I don't need a mic, I'm loud"; etc, etc) but I won't. However it will be super tempting…
Here's a link to my presentation overview: https://makerfaire.com/maker/entry/69687/
That's quite a lot of stuff. I've also been doing my normal projects too and I'm starting to plan some bigger ones to start tackling over the summer. Overall I'm just really excited about everything I've been able to work on recently.