Facebook has been doing some fantastic work with the Open Compute Project. They were at the Faire to show-off Yosemite - the second revision of their micro-server system.

OCP - The Open Compute Project

Engineering any data-center gear such as networking switches and routers, servers and data storage clusters involves a set of standard procedures. In essence, you design

• The mechanicals: the external housing and mounts, the sockets into which the circuit boards are inserted, determine the optimum airflow pattern for cooling, through simulations
• The electronics: the power supply, custom chips, printed circuit board and all its the peripherals
• The firmware: for device booting, management and low-level drivers
• The certifications: the device has to certified by appropriate agencies depending on the country you plan on selling the product in

This process, not surprisingly, is...

def I()
    for i_am in infinite_dreams:
        print '... I make my own Reality ...'

Programmers with reasonable experience have one thing in common. The meek, shy, introverts and the bold, out-spoken, extroverts alike have a fairly strong opinion about coding styles - and this, as in my case, can sometimes be a lesson in humility.

Since not all languages have something like the PEP8 you sometimes have to suck-up and accept the most popular/prevalent coding style as the right one, no matter how strong you feel about your own style. For instance, I was fairly stubborn that the for loop has to be minimalistic with no unnecessary spaces -

for(int i=0; i<10; i++)

But, as this lovely article called The Great White Space Debate elaborates, I couldn’t have been more wrong. In essence, the most prevalent style is -

for (int i = 0; i < 10; i++)

The Beauty of Code

$ python -c 'import

“There is a unique, underground venture capital economy happening right now in America that is, in many ways, off the radar screens of economists. When we tally up the economic indicators, the conventional wisdom seems to be that economic growth in this country has stalled. Yet, that same conventional wisdom ignores the economic activity on DIY sites like Kickstarter.”

-Dominic Basulto, The Washington Post

Discovering the World of Makers, this past year, has profoundly changed the way I think, the things that keep me occupied day-to-day, what I read about, what I talk about, and even my attitude towards my day job.

6 years of education in Electrical Engineering and 5 years of work experience with complex Hardware projects didn’t seem sufficient to think of myself as an ‘Engineer’. My skills and knowledge were largely limited to the problem domain we were addressing at work. But in a...

I actually wanted to be a drummer, but I didn’t have any drums.
-Stevie Ray Vaughan

The 16" Bass Drum

While putting together an acoustic Drum Set with the choicest parts, I bought a set of used Toms consisting of 10" and 14" rack toms, and a 16" floor tom. In order to save some money and space, I decided to convert the floor tom into a 16" bass drum and label the setup - My Jungle Kit. This way the entire kit would fit comfortably in my car and I wouldn’t have to lug around an unwieldy 22" Bass Drum.

So I set out scanning the forums to figure out how to convert a Floor Tom into a Bass Drum. The seemingly best way to do this was to use a Pearl Jungle Kit Adapter. It wasn’t cheap, but it worked out pretty well.

Bill of Materials to Convert a Floor Tom into a Bass Drum

• Pearl JG-16 Jungle Gig Adapter - $30
• Pearl IS1216SL/C - Make sure your hoop size fits this mount. My Mapex ProM...

Looking to make yourself a Tall-FatFree-TemperatureDisplay? I believe you’ve come to the right place.

This is a walk-through of what was involved in creating a Temperature Display using the TMP36 temperature sensor and the Sparkfun Seven Segment Bubble Display. We first perfect our recipe by flushing out the circuit and code with an Arduino Uno, and then make it fat-free by moving that sketch to a $2.50 ATtiny84 microcontroller. This is a great experiment if you’re relatively new to the world of Arduino or trying out the ATtiny for the first time.

Here is the menu and some pictures of what we’ll be serving today.

Part 1 - Breadboarding: Temperature Display with an Arduino

Part 2 - Perfboard Prototype: of Temperature Display with an ATtiny84 [Coming Soon!]

Part 3 - PCB Design: Making it all Permanent with a PCB [Coming Soon!]

Bill of Materials

Part 1 of tutorial

• Bubble...