I just got back from San Diego. The flight was wonderful (I love Virgin Airlines!), and I spent most of the trip back playing with a free Rubik’s Cube I got from Disney. They also gave me a USB 2.0 hub, which I don’t have a use for yet.

While there, I picked up an Ardunio board, courtesy of Adafruit Industries. I haven’t decided what I’m going to do with it yet, but I think i’m going to start by building a very basic Ambient Orb type application. To do this I’ll have to solder in an Xport so I get ethernet access, and work out how TCP/IP works on the tiny device. I’ll also pick up an RGB LED or two so I can experiment with PWM color mixing.

It should be a fun learning experience – I haven’t done much work with micro-controllers, and the Ardunio is a C programmable platform with software for OS X, Linux, and Windows. Also, I’m lazy — I could have purchased the bare-bones board for $19, but I went with the prebuilt and tested kit for $30 because I don’t want to debug hardware while trying to learn how to code in a new environment. I’ll do it the hard way on the next time around.

The other hack I managed to pull off after getting home was repairing the crappy beeper-speaker on the hackintosh. It caught fire during the leopard upgrade, and I soldered new leads and a connector to the existing speaker, which survived the fire and still worked! Heh.