It’s really hard to be a 19 year old and be active in the development community.

It’s not because it’s hard to learn – on the contrary, I’ve found more educational opportunities in development than any hobby I’ve had. There are so many developers keen to train a young, green dev in the methodology that they’ve experienced to be the best. However, it’s that eagerness to teach and correct that can make it difficult. As I read through a subreddit on development, I find articles that hail Node.js as the second coming right next to articles that break down every single way that it is the worst possible piece of horror to ever be run.

I’ve got finals for the next two weeks, and magnet implant plans are on hold until I’m at home… stay tuned!

One of my previous Arduino projects was an Engineering 1 final project where we had to receive a small foam ball into a box 24″x12″x12″, then launch it into the next box that is immediately next to ours. Our plan began with a spring loaded catapult system that quickly proved to be unwieldy. Due to other finals going on at the time, it was only days before the competition (the result of which, by the way, determined 50% of our class grade) that we scrapped our old plan, and came up with a new one.

I busted out the shapelock and made the first of a number of prototypes for the socket that will be my magnet implant computer interface. the general design I’m planning for is a full finger socket, most likely to the metacarpophalangeal joint. It will have a small amount wiggle room for the tip of my finger bu otherwise be a snug fit. The inductor coil will be embedded in a groove in the plastic, and the magnetometer will fit in a dent in the bottom. I’m considering a fabric sleeve to hide the wires and keep things from getting snagged.

I attempted magnet insertion myself and went at it with a friend all scrubbed up to assist. Unfortunately, my scalpel wasn’t shaped correctly (#10) to make a deep enough pocket without making a massively oversized incision, and the lidocaine was wearing off by the time I tried using the tip of my surgical scissors to open a pocket, which created a triangular shaped opening that didn’t fit the magnet well anyway. I had it big enough for the magnet to fit but it barely peeked through the wound, and there was no way to stitch it so I called it off.

These two are the guts of my interface plans:

Arduino Leonardo

The Arduino Leonardo is an awesome board. It’s quite similar to the Arduino Uno, which I’m quite experienced with, but the biggest difference (and reason I’m getting it) is that it can emulate HID’s in Windows, meaning it can trigger mouse movement/click events, as well as keyboard input. I plan to either directly map it to a mouse, or have different measurements trigger innocuous keystrokes that can be picked up in the background by something like vJoy and mapped to joystick inputs.

Prepping for magnet implant surgery tonight!!

Today I took my first stab at coding some general magnetic detection code that will work with a magnetometer to detect finger presence, finder flexion, and finger extension, all based on magnet proximity to make a magnet HID. I haven’t even received my magnetometer or Leonardo yet (the Uno doesn’t support HID emulation), so I’m sure this code won’t work in practice, but it compiles and I’ll use it as a v. 0.01 for future enhancements. My only two concerns are finding a sweet spot for the finger to rest (perhaps foam above the magnetometer?), and saturation of the Hall effect chip the magnetometer runs on, but I’ll jump off that cliff when I come to it.

Well Trucrypt just went nuts. This could be bad.

I love you, version control.

I love all the time we spend together – merge conflicts, rebasing repos, accidentally committing vendor folders on my Composer projects…

You really have saved my butt so many times – it truly appreciate you.

But right now just isn’t working for us. I’m off at college! I mean the last time I saw you was during my gap year – and we did see each other every day. But now distance has quelled the fire. I’m working on smaller personal projects to stay sharp, and I’m just looking for something casual. I don’t want to commit on every change! It’s not like I break the codebase that often, anyway…