Disclaimer: This post has lots of links to the Adafruit website.  There are no referral links, I received no consideration, I just buy parts from there and do cool things with them.

A couple of weeks months ago I did a writeup of a prototype environment monitoring device for my office built out of a Raspberry Pi Zero W and some off the shelf components.  In the time since I've found time here and there to work on the embedded version, which doesn't use a full computer system but a microcontroller with just enough functionality to drive a couple of …

I've spent my free time over the past couple of days hacking away on my current project-slash-obsession and thus I've been doing a lot of reading up on microcontrollers, or at least the basics of them.  Knowing nothing about them as a technology or about sound synthesis for that matter, I find myself having to start from first principles, which are never as easy as they seem to grasp no matter how much experience you have under your belt.  I'm trying to design a synthesizer coming at it as a code jockey as well as a musician (or one-time musician …

The weekend of the RepRap build-a-thon at HacDC started off simply: Lyssa and I went to dinner at Konami. We haven't been out for sushi for a number of months, due to my getting sick there in 2007. However, the food is still good and we enjoyed ourselves. I was unusually popular that night; my cellphone kept ringing every few minutes for various and sundry reasons. After dinner I dropped Lyssa off at home, loaded my gear into the trunk of my car, and headed to Hasufin's to pick him up because we were off to HacDC to help set …