Ravenna Ultra Low Altitude Vehicle

This is pretty sweet.  A treehouse rocketship.  One of the most interesting bits here is the use of a matrix of seven-segment LED displays to create a larger display...

Lucas continues to ask for a treehouse, which of course our townhouse does not afford.  But there are some great ideas here that could be applied to other projects.  Very cool.

Lucas, Bob, Logo, EK-LM3S1968

Lucas told me last week that he wanted to make a Bob game.  He's referring to a game that Steve Hales created for the Sidekick many moons back, and that both kids still love playing.  Lucas has some ideas about new levels, and he demanded that I should show him what to do to make this game.

I love his interest, I just wish it was that easy.

After a few days of thinking about how exactly I was going to help bring my 7 year old's dream to life, I decided that he would probably be happy learning how to "walk" first, and I need not get all stressed out about helping him "run"... at least not yet.

This past weekend, I set him up on my computer with ACSLogo.  Of course he was thrilled, and had lots of fun making the turtle move around the screen, and say funny things.  He has repeatedly asked to play some more, which is awesome.

This got me thinking about options for Lucas' game... I have a bag of old Sidekicks, so I looked into downloading the hiptop SDK, but that didn't go so well.  I have an iPad, but don't yet have the right version of Mac OS X to develop for it.  I have a Windows Phone, but that's a development device for work.  I have various other electronic gadgets, but nothing that could really pass as a game platform...

Then I remembered I have an EK-LM3S1968 evaluation kit from Luminary Micro (now TI).  It has a 128x96 OLED screen on it, a few buttons (including 4 in the shape of a d-pad!), and a speaker.  And it comes with a built-in maze game in the quickstart application, so there is example code to work from.

Now I'm working on a dinky little vertical scroller/shooter.  Lucas hasn't mentioned his Bob game since I sat him in front of ACSLogo, but now my interest is piqued. :-)

Sidekick

Lol... Found out from Wikipedia yesterday that the Sidekick is now being (re)sold in Canada as the mobiflip through Mobilicity.  It of course has none of the service benefits that made it awesome, but still fun to see it eek out a little more life.

The other thing I found out yesterday was that the Danger Developer Zone is offline, and has been for months.  This is not wholly unexpected with the Microsoft acquisition, but was sad because I was hoping to use the hiptop SDK to help my son write a game that he could take with him and show his friends.  I guess I'll have to use a more modern development environment...

eZ430-Chronos... Again.

I took a small detour and briefly considered working on an application for the iPad, but have come back to the consensus that active RFID is something I really should put some time into.

The first order of business is to get these two eZ430 kits to talk to each other.

When I got distracted the other day I was attempting to compile the MSP-GCC tools for my Mac... this time I'm just going to do it the easy way and install the Code Composer tools that come with the kit.

Came across this write-up the other day.  Similar goal to mine actually, so I'm curious to see how my results at 433MHz compare to his at 2.4GHz.  He led me to OpenBeacon as well, which I hadn't seen previously.

Decisions

As my recent entries show I've been dreaming about active RFID and the scenarios I could chase down in that arena.  This would build my hardware/firmware skills, which are in need of some development.

But then yesterday and today I've been thinking about working on an iPad application that my daughter inspired.  I've never ventured into Apple development, let alone iOS, and that's something I feel I would benefit from.

This isn't the first time I've been down this road.  I'm almost certain I suffer from some form of attention deficit.  What I'm interested in doing during the off-hours changes so often that I find it difficult to make much forward progress on anything...