That’s how I made it…

This is the Lilypad board. The alligator clips are connected to a temperature sensor and a three color LED, the red adaptor links the board via USB to the computer to upload the code [Get it here]. Coding is done in C++ in a processing-like environment.
You only need to specify what should happen in the setup and in the loop phase, the arduino magic takes care of the rest. This let’s you start really fast without knowing anything about hardware programming!

The LED (having three inputs for red, blue and green) glows blue if it’s cold…

… like in this box of frozen peas. Testing hardware is much more fun than testing software!

When it’s hot, the LED turns red. In between there’s a gradient from blue to cyan and from yellow to deep red.

The sewn on board (middle), sensor (left) and LED (right). At the bottom of the board there’s a hole to hide the ugly battery on the back of the shirt. On the top of the picture you can see the layout of the circuit. It’s important to have a design where the cables (or, for Lilypad, the silver threads) don’t cross too often, because it makes sewing easier – you have to isolate each crossing.

The first few stitches with the silver thread, leading away from the positive pole. This was surprisingly easy, because the thread is really soft and not at all like wire.

The first circuit is finished, connecting the board with the sensor. Using alligator clips to check if it’s still working… and it is! The LED shines yellow.

The reverse side of my shirt after sewing everything together. I used band-aids to isolate the threads. Note the long stitches – those are connections running mainly on the back side and covered with tiny silver pearls when coming to the front. Having all stitches on the front side would have made it impossible to make the shirt look like three flowers growing next to each other, it would have just looked like a circuit. I also added some petals (using normal thread in purple and turquoise) to make it look prettier.

And yes, I really do wear it! Only feels a little bit nerdy… and there’s a switch on the board to turn it off.

That makes a total of “Generic Attribute Registration Protocol Virtual Local Area Network Registration Protocol”. Wow.

Me and its godparents from conject proudly introduce the little sibling of our first baby. Parents always love to show around the achievements of their little geniuses and make big plans for their future – so do we. Wassily (named after his famous Bauhaus role model) is really good with colors. For now his drawings decorate my fridge only and conjects Munic office, but thats where all artists start their carrier, right? Soon after he has learned some basic rules of composition, we will start preparing the portfolio for his college of art application. Some time you’ll wish you had snatched some of his early work.

All talks were awesome (and I totally want an arduino for Christmas), but the one that kept me researching and having new ideas was the one of Moritz Stefaner about visualizing information. He has some really inspiring websites (here and here). I especially liked his contribution to the book “Dynamic Taxonomies and Faceted Search” – it’s about search, visualization and it even has formulas. What more could one want?

The organizor of the conference promised to upload videos of the talks, I’ll post an update once they are available (most are in german, though)

My favorite is this weird error message we encountered while trying to do something with grails:

I still do remember the error message and that we finally found out why it occured (some Spring issue…) and that we solved it somehow – but I don’t remember any details (still hope that Helga does or that I wrote a mail to myself explaining the issue). It’s like finding some strange note from last year in the pocket of your winter jacket… vaguely reminding you of something, but you can’t figure out what.

However, just saying

in all of your stylesheets will introduce some new problems like empty divs having heights, so use it wisely. If you are bored and really want to know the details, read the incredibly long article on layout here.

Never thought I would ever file an article under Fun and tag it Internet Explorer at the same time.

Or, to cite this month’s ThinkGeek newsletter, “Hearing the news was just like being in high school and getting a pass out of P.E.” (that was about Google stopping IE6 support for Mail and Docs)