For lunch, I met up with some coworkers and some friends to head across the river for lunch at Old Town Pizza. I had a small sausage and mushroom pizza, and washed that down with a pale ale.

After the Arduino tutorial, having sat down for much of the day, I grew restless. I really wanted to take a walk. More importantly, I really wanted to make my way over to Rogue Ales Public House for some beer. So I called Jonathan and we made our way over there. We each started with a four beer sampler.

I started with the Chatoe Oregasmic, finding it to be a pleasant, light pale ale with moderate hoppiness. Upon tasting it, one of my coworkers commented that it was what he expected the pale ale, which he had ordered to be.

Second in line was the Double Mocha Porter. It had a faint mocha aroma, but very little of this made its way to my pallette. I could detect a hint of smokiness, if I concentrated on it.  For something advertised as a double mocha, I was disappointed.

Having enjoyed Rogue’s Dead Guy Ale in the past, I chose for my third beer the Double Dead Guy Ale.  I don’t think I was fair to this beer. The name made me think of Stone’s Double Bastard and the Double Dead Guy Ale is nothing like that. Even so, I found it smooth with a pleasant maltiness and light hop flavors.

Saving what I expected to be the best for last, I finished with the Brutal IPA While nicely hopped, I was left disappointed after building my expectations on what I consider to be its undeserved moniker. Once I got over that, I still found it to be a perfectly enjoyabl beer. It had mild malty notes and, like the other Rogue ales I sampled, it too was smooth.  I found it to be an all around decent IPA.  Since Juan wasn’t able to join us for dinner, I bought a bottle of the Brutal IPA to share with him later.

After I had finished my samples, it was the decision of those in my party that I was criminally without beer and that, to pay penance, I was to order the Issaquah Menage A Frog.  When the bartender told me it was only available in a 12 ounce glass, I suspected that an imperial style ale.  The aroma and taste soon confirmed this.  Coming in at 9% ABV, it was not as strong as some of the ales I occasionally drink back home in San Diego, but it went very well with the beer and cheese stew I had for dinner.

And now it’s late, just a few minutes until two o’clock in the morning. I should have closed my computer and gone to bed hours ago, but I refused to do so knowing that my first day of OSCON blog entries were unfinished. Hopefully, I will have more food and beer to write about tomorrow.

In the beginning, I was shamed.  While I tried and failed to follow the Linux installation instructions, my coworker, Debbie, was able to plug my Arduino board into her Microsoft Windows notebook and get the first example running.  When the udev tip didn’t work, things were looking bleak for my attempt to control open hardware with an open operating system.  Finally, a trip to Google landed me right back on the Arduno wiki at the installation instructions for Fedora.  Finally, I could upload code to my Arduino board.  After getting the initial example to work, I modified it to change the pattern of the blinking on-board LED bulb:

int ledPin = 13;

void setup() {
    pinMode(ledPin, OUTPUT);
}

void loop() {
    digitalWrite(ledPin, HIGH); delay(300);
    digitalWrite(ledPin, LOW);  delay(300);
    digitalWrite(ledPin, HIGH); delay(300);
    digitalWrite(ledPin, LOW);  delay(300);
    digitalWrite(ledPin, HIGH); delay(1000);
    digitalWrite(ledPin, LOW);  delay(1000);
}

While we were playing with our new toys, we were treated to the history of the Arduino project, some other open hardware projects, and some of the things people have done with them.  Unfortunately, I was too busy playing with my new toy to take notes on these things, so the history lesson, by way of Wikipedia, is left as an exercise for the reader.

The editor embedded in the Arduino IDE leaves a lot to be desired.  It’s like Microsoft Notepad with syntax coloring.  My coworker found a setting that forces the IDE to use an external editor.  Basically, all it does is to make the editing window read-only.  Files edited outside of the IDE are re-read when the code is compiled.  In short order, I was able to find a Vim syntax file for Arduino code files.

After the break, we were introduced to using the Arduino board in combination with a breadboard, which allows for the creation of more complex circuits.  I’m excited, because I still have the breadboard, components, and multi-meter I bought in college for a computer engineering class.  I’ve been waiting all these years to finally have an excuse to dig them out of the closet and put them to use.  The Arduino will be a fun learning tool when my daughter is older, too.

To commence our unstructured time, which would last until the end of the tutorial (and the day), we were shown a simple circuit to wire up between the Arduino board and the breadboard.  Using a copy of the first blinking code, we could acheive the same effect of blinking the external LED simply by modifying which pin was referenced.  I took this a step further and made my LED bulb pulse like the light on a suspended MacBook.

I’m glad I decided to attend the Arduino tutorial this year. I’ve just picked up yet another hobby I don’t have time for.

The version of Blender available in the Fedora 13 package repository is 2.49b, but the tutorial focused on the beta version of 2.5, which has a redesigned user interface and new and improved features.  A Linux version was available on the internal cache website offered by OSCON, but it was 32 bit.  I ended up downloading a copy from the Blender website (the conference wifi doesn’t start to get really bad until Wednesday).  Unfortunately, Blender proved unstable and would frequently crash with a segmentation fault.  Matthew had provided files to serve as starting points for each section of the tutorial, so it was relatively easy to follow along, even if I didn’t complete the previous section.

Matthew walked us through generating a simple animation of a flying saucer approaching a planet and hitting it with a beam of light.  We started with simple shapes, two spheres, one flattened, for the saucer, a cone for the beam of light, and another sphere for the planet.  From there we learned how to apply surfaces and textures, manipulate light sources, and perform a simple animation.

All in all, I think the tutorial was worthwhile.  If I had launched Blender without it, I would be lost.  I’m still lost, but at least I have some semblance of an idea about how it works.