I was just watching the PBS FrontLine documentary on the Digital Nation and it completely irritated me. Here were professors from MIT, one of the best technical institutions in the US, complaining about the students’ use of technology. I can’t even say that this is ironic, as much as it is just plain stupid.

The crux of the argument is that students these days are completely distracted because of the internet. They’re in the classroom, but rather than listening to the lecture, they’re googling things, reading articles, or probably chatting with their significant other. The professor is frustrated because he gave a simple exam that just tested on whether the students were paying attention in class and the students score poorly. The immediate thought that came into my head was why was the professor blaming the students rather than his teaching methods.

I teach classes at the Tokyo Hackerspace. My first class was a basic electronics class that was done with a lecture format and I took three hours to deliver everything I thought participants needed to know about electronics. It was enough information to give them a firm foundation and understand the basics of voltage, current, resistance, capacitance, and simple design patterns. That was a mistake, and the problem wasn’t the participants, it was with my assumption that they wanted to know the basics of electronics.

I finally realized that the problem was that I was telling them the basics so they could build on top of it. But without experiencing it for themselves, they would never understand why you need to limit the current of an LED or why you need to have bulk capacitors on a power supply. One of the reasons why the new MAKE: Electronics book is so great is because they encourage readers to break things as well as make them.

Anyways, I finally grasped the concept that people want to discover things for themselves. They want to understand why certain things are the way they are, rather than just be told it. They want to build things and customize them to make it their own and put their stamp on it. This is the proper way to teach people and has been for centuries, where the old master/apprentice relationships still existed.

This post is a slight departure from my normal posts which are usually about wireless. But since I'm technically part of the wireless sensor networking world, I figured a fun, little post about sensing might be appropriate.

I actually put this together about six months ago to show to the Tokyo Hackerspace back when we didn't have a space. We were meeting in restaurants and would show off our latest weird designs over there. It was really a horrible place with a lot of loud drunks and people shouting at each other. And that was just inside our booth :)

Anyways, I showed them that if you used capacitive touch sensors, you would actually be able to draw your own buttons and be able to sense touch events on them. Incidentally, if you tweak the sensitivity high enough, you can also sense touch events through insulators like wood and plastic which I always thought was kind of cool. Perhaps I'm going to play with that some other time.

First of all, I just want to apologize for the amount of time it took me to set up a Chibi project page. Those that know me know that things are really hectic right now so I'm not moving as fast as I really want to. However I put up a simple project page for now so that there can be a centralized place where files are stored. It's pretty bare bones but I'll be fleshing it out more and adding tutorials, more schematics, and links to stable software releases. For the software repository, I'll be checking it into the Chibi GitHub repository where people can also download the latest version of the software. I just need to figure out how to use Github. 

So temporarily, I'm putting the software on the project page until I can move it into the main repository. This release is pretty important. I think there was only one public release of Chibi, but since then, it's gotten a lot of testing and I've received a lot of feedback from people in the Tokyo Hackerspace, as well as early users of the software. The feedback was awesome because it spanned a large range of users, from beginners in my microcontroller classes to professional hardware and software engineers. They've discovered bugs, told me ways to organize things better, and also enhance the usability. So this release has a lot of critical bug fixes, some re-organization, and support for a new driver...the AT86RF212. Did I mention that this chip is quite sexy? I think it's going to be a popular one and I think Atmel seems to have done a great job with it.

As for the bug fixes, you can get a detailed list on the Project page.

Link

I'm being a little bit quiet on the blog recently too, due to the volume of activity going on right now. However keep an eye out because there's going to be a lot more schematics posted, tutorials added, and some interesting stuff in store.

In the meantime, gotta finish my Michael Jackson costume lighting...*sigh*...

I just posted the Chibi v1.1 schematics. Apologies for the lag on everything. Things are so busy right now that I'm just struggling to keep up. I also need to create a project page for Chibi to house all the source code, schematics, and everything else thats going on with the project. It seems Chibi is getting more popular than the Zigbee stuff I'm doing. Guess I can understand since its much simpler and still accomplishes what most people want, ie: wireless comms. I'm finding it extremely useful for all the testing I'm doing. Here's some pics of the schematics and the pdf is at the link below:

Chibi v1.1 PDF Link

I decided to blow off some steam today because it's been so busy trying to get the webshop up and decided to hang out in Akihabara. After I arrived, I realized I didn't have anything I really needed to do, but just so happened to have my digital camera with me. I often get asked to show people around Akihabara and why I like the place so much. Since I had some time on my hands, I decided to do a graphical tour of Akihabara so people might be able to see a small piece of it through my eyes. These are the really hardcore shops, most of which you won't see from the tourist pics most people post. Hope you enjoy them :)