The Aftermath

It is the morning after Robot House Party 3, people are sleeping on the floor and things are a total mess - but it was a blast. I exaggerate slightly, only three people that don’t live at the Robot House slept over and they slept on couches and such not the floor.

Turnout was fairly nice. We had a good average of 20 people here until about 12:30AM-1:00AM. After that time, it dropped down to about six or so and we moved outside. We have the entire party (well, most of it) recorded on ustream and it just needs to be finalized and displayed somewhere. I have no idea if we will ever watch any of it, but it was a rather fun concept and we had a good half dozen people watching us have fun online. I’d stream out future parties without a doubt. This is the Robot House after all and it must maintain a certain level of technology about it.

I was inspired by one of our guests whose name I don’t remember. He wasn’t really “into” electrical engineering or anything like that, but he wanted to build a replica Iron Man arc reactor. So he did it. He even etched his own boards and learned what he needed to learn to be able to make his device; it looks fantastic. He is on his second or third version of it and I have to say that I was impressed. He basically started with a standard arduino, got the software working, and then built himself a board for it and dropped the micro-controller from the arduino into his board.

That made me wonder why I don’t get off my butt and etch my own boards. It should be fairly straight forward to do. The only thing I really have to work on is getting a little more proficient with EagleCAD but that really is a nonissue since there are so many tutorials and guides on how to use it. The question now is, what to build? I suppose I could start with making an arc reactor. Although, instead of using through-hole LEDs I would go SMD just to challenge my soldering skills. I’ll have to check the price of RGB ones because that would be just awesome.

I am definitely enjoying Chyrp and I think that I will transfer my primary domains (ryanfaerman.com, faerman.net) over to it.

Recent Overview

Wow, what a day. Darius and I now have all the cameras for Robot House Party 3 all setup. We’ll be broadcasting our party on saturday night, live over the internets.

My robot is starting to take form and I am already on prototype 3. I am naming it raglayim (it means “legs” in hebrew) because it is essentially just a pair of legs.

So far, I am liking this Chyrp thing. The only thing that I don’t like about it so much is that since it is relatively new, there are not very many themes out there for it. Looks like I am going to have to design my own which is fortunate since I’ve had a design in my mind for a little while now that is almost entirely typography which fits in with Chyrp quite well.

It’s late; I am tired; My grammar is starting to fail because of it. Time to put on my new retainers and go to sleep.