As it turns out, there’s one right in my back yard in Altamonte Springs: the Greater Orlando Hackerspace. My first attempts to contact them a few months back were in vain, but I hit them up again today after seeing some activity on their blog, and learned that they are still going strong just with a little restructuring taking place. They still have “Microcontroller Mondays” every Monday at 7 PM so I hope to go out there in a week or two to show my Arduinome, and maybe help some other people build one while learning some stuff myself.

If you are interested in getting engaged, check out their membership page and drop them an email. If you don’t want to join but want to do a little good for the community, please send them a donation for their laser cutter. Any amount is welcomed, but only $10 gets you a keychain!

How to Build an Arduinome (Part 3): Diodes and LEDs from Maxim Porges on Vimeo.

In this part of the series, we take a look at the diodes and LEDs, and I solder them on to the SparkFun PCBs.

How to Build an Arduinome (Part 2): Components from Maxim Porges on Vimeo.

Unless I decide to spend $60 a year on a Vimeo pro account, it might be slow-going with the uploads, but please bear with me! The whole entire process will be documented, and you’ll be able to see the whole collection of videos on my Arduinome page once they are all done.

This is my first time messing with mlrv, so please excuse the fact that I suck. Your ears should bleed slightly less during the second half as I start to get the hang of it.

I offered the project up to the people on the Loom forums, but there were no takers… until now! Roland Zwaga has been emailing me on and off for a few weeks asking questions about the library, which he’s been digging in to in order to add functionality to as3-commons and Spring Actionscript. They needed a way to extract the private and protected class data (amongst other things) during reflection, and the only way to do that in AS3 at the moment is to parse the bytecode. Rather than starting from scratch, Roland used Loom as a basis for understanding the AVM2 spec, and built from there.

After asking me if I minded (which of course I didn’t), Roland’s decided to publish the guts of Loom with his additional work as as3commons-bytecode. He sent out a message to the as3-commons dev list today as follows.

Good day gentlemen,

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ByteCodeType.fromLoader(FlexGlobals.topLevelApplication.loaderInfo);

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for (var info:* in systemManager.preloadedRSLs) {
	ByteCodeType.fromLoader(info);
}

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ByteCodeType.forInstance();
ByteCodeType.forClass();
ByteCodeType.forName();

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var typeCache:TypeCache =
ByteCodeType.getTypeProvider().getTypeCache();
for each (var key:String in keys) {
	var type:ByteCodeType = typeCache.get(key) as ByteCodeType;
	/* ... do something... */
}

Roland

Although I didn’t have any interest in finishing Loom, I didn’t want all of the work I put in to it to be completely in vain. One of the things I really like about the open source community is that you can take somebody else’s work and put it to use for whatever you have in mind for it. In this way, people can learn so much from each other and push the envelope forward in to new areas the original authors never thought of. Loom certainly wouldn’t have been possible if I hadn’t been able to look deep in to the source of the Mozilla Tamarin and hurlant eval projects.

In closing, I’m really glad to see my work on Loom contributing value to the community now as part of ascommons-bytecode, and I look forward to seeing where things go under Roland’s leadership.

I’ll be documenting my journey in to Arduinome construction as the parts come in, so stay tuned! I’m also going to be maintaining a page on my site with all my Arduinome reference materials for others to follow in the future.

In the interim, here’s the guy from Pretty Lights jamming out on his monome (the thing that inspired the Arduinome). He’s using a sample manipulation app for the *nome devices called mlr, which is a Max/MSP patch. You can run pre-compiled patches in the runtime without having to buy Max/MSP.

Before you start, note that any changes made to the Apache configuration files require a restart of the Apache server. This can be done by either checking and unchecking the Web Sharing checkbox under Sharing in System Preferences, or running the following command:

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sudo apachectl graceful

These instructions help you to set up a WebDAV server on your machine which exposes the directory /Library/WebServer/WebDAV as your document root. If you want to set up a different directory, then change that path accordingly in all the remaining instructions. Note that the Apache user seems to need to own the path that you expose over WebDAV, so keep that in mind as you are setting things up.

1) Start Apache via System Preferences
Open System Preferences => Sharing and click the checkbox for Web Sharing.

2) Modify /etc/apache2/extra/httpd-dav.conf
Open this file and remove any existing WebDAV entries. Modify accordingly to end up with something like this. You should only have one DavLockDB entry anywhere in the file; in my case, one was already there so I left it alone.

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...
DavLockDB "/usr/var/DavLock"
 
# Locks down all directory access by default. You can then override
# this with additional <Directory/> entries
<Directory />
    Order Deny,Allow
    Deny from all
</Directory>
 
# Exposes the contents of /Library/WebServer/WebDAV on the
# URL http://hostname/webdav/
Alias /webdav "/Library/WebServer/WebDAV"
 
# Sets up WebDAV with access controls. Uses digest auth so you
# don't need SSL for your credentials (although note that none
# of your file transfers will be encrypted, so don't pull anything
# sensitive over the wire without SSL). Specifies a file with
# usernames/passwords, and dictates the realm applicable
# to this configuration
<Directory "/Library/WebServer/WebDAV">
   Dav On
   Order Deny,Allow
   Allow from all
 
   AuthType Digest
   AuthName WebDAV-Realm
   AuthUserFile "/usr/var/webdav.passwd"
   Require valid-user
</Directory>
...

If you want to get fancy, there is some additional information on these directives for mod_auth_digest and mod_dav at the Apache web site.

3) Open /etc/apache2/httpd.conf and make sure these lines are uncommented
This enables the appropriate Apache modules that will make use of the configuration you just created.

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LoadModule dav_module libexec/apache2/mod_dav.so
...
LoadModule auth_digest_module libexec/apache2/mod_auth_digest.so
...
Include /private/etc/apache2/extra/httpd-dav.conf

4) Create directories with appropriate permissions

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sudo mkdir -p /usr/var
sudo mkdir -p /Library/WebServer/WebDAV
sudo chown -R www:www /Library/WebServer/WebDAV
sudo chown -R www:www /usr/var

5) Create the password file and set appropriate permissions

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maxbookpro:usr mporges$ sudo htdigest -c /usr/var/webdav.passwd WebDAV-Realm "mporges"
Adding password for mporges in realm WebDAV-Realm.
New password: 
Re-type new password:
 
maxbookpro:usr mporges$ sudo chgrp www /usr/var/webdav.passwd

6) Restart Apache

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sudo apachectl graceful

7) Test
As the original article suggests, the easiest way to test is to mount your WebDAV server via Finder.

To do this, open Finder and select Go > Connect to Server (⌘K). Type your WebDAV URL, or http://localhost/webdav/ if you are on the server locally. Note that the trailing slash (“/”) is important, and you will not be able to connect without it.

Upon success, you will have mounted your WebDAV folder within Finder, and you should be able to copy a file to the folder.

I found that the trailing slash was not required when mounting the WebDAV drive in Snow Leopard, but it doesn’t hurt. You’ll be able to both read and write files to the WebDAV share.

Troubleshooting
If you have any issues, check Console for logs from Apache. It will yell at you if your config is bad.

The problem I have had is a one-bar signal when furthest away from the router. This is not a problem on my laptop, so I knew it had to be something with the iPad reception. The low reception can be a pain on the iPad when watching videos and other high-bandwidth activities. Just for giggles, I switched my base station over to 802.11n-only from 802.11g/n-compatible, staying in the 2.4 Ghz spectrum. I’m getting much better connection speeds all over the house now, with five bars in every room.

To make sure it wasn’t an issue with the headphones, I tested reconnecting them to my Mac after turning them off and on again. This worked flawlessly in the usual fashion – turn them on, put the devices near each other, and the Mac connects to the headphones automatically.

In staring at the Bluetooth menu on my iPad, it suddenly occurred to me that the name of my headphones in the list of devices might have been a button. Sure enough, I turned the headphones on again and clicked the name of the device in the list, a spinner showed up, and then they reconnected.

Checking the iPhone manual, there’s nothing in there that describes this process. I suppose it’s one of those things that should be intuitive, but in this case it was not intuitive for me since I’m used to my Macs greedily reconnecting to any devices they have been connected to before without being asked. I actually prefer this process with the iPad, since I have several devices that I share Bluetooth accessories with, and once the accessory is connected it won’t make itself available to be connected to anything else until it is disconnected. I’ve had issues with this a few times when I’ve turned my work laptop and personal laptop on at the same time in my home office. They’re both paired with my Bluetooth keyboard so whichever one binds to the keyboard first wins, regardless of which one I actually want to use the keyboard with. The only way around this is to turn off Bluetooth on one of the devices until the one I want to use the keyboard with has claimed it, which is kind of a pain.