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On the night of March, 22, we had the first official activity of our hackerspace, and a big one: SJC Lightning Talks, which brought more than 150 people to check 9 quick presentations.

When speakers have to shrink their usual 45-minute presentations to fit in time limits as small as 5 ou 10 minutes,they usually start to mess up with other speakers slots. To keep all presentations, plus registration and meals, inside our 3h limit, we had to find a way to force speakers to keep the defined time limits.

This is a Processing project that helps speakers to keep track of their presentation time

Given the presentation time, this program will display an animation that emulates an old elevator indicator, going from "ground" to the last floor. As the pointer traverses from right to left, the speaker can watch it and adjust his/her presentation time according to the time left.

And then comes my Leonardo board. After 3 months since I press the "buy" button on eBay, it finally arrived here from China. And then I could, also finally, figure out what was going wrong with the Leonardo programming and fix it. So, if you have a Leonardo, go to SourceForge get MariaMole version 0.5. There are other minor bug fixes, too.

If you want to understand what was keeping MariaMole to support Leonard, you can read it here:

If you have learnt to program using Arduino, congratulations! You're probably very excited with this new world of controlling and monitoring objects.

But, chances are that you are writing bad code. Don't be sad or mad with me by saying that. The Arduino environment brought several non-programmers to this coding world, and it droped of some software quality aspects in order to make things easier for begginers.

For example, you may haven't noticed that, but you never defined any of your functions before using that. Check this example:

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

void loop() {
  blink_led();
}

void blink_led()
{
  digitalWrite(led, HIGH); 
  delay(200);              
  digitalWrite(led, LOW);  
  delay(200);              
}

You may recognized that this is a slightly changed version of the example Blink. The only difference is that the "blinking" code was put on a separate function. If you paste this code to Arduino IDE, you'll be able to compile it and upload to your board without any problems. But you'll wont be able to use this code in virtually any other development tool.

Well, at least not without a single change:

Hello, Arduino programmers!

Thanks a lot for the comments, suggestions, complaints and bug reports you've sent me about MariaMole. Thanks to your messages the version 0.4 is already available and very stable. For many people, MariaMole is already the first option when they start a new Arduino project. Nothing could make me happier. I started it trying to create the IDE I wanted to use, and now I see a lot of positive comments from people all around the world, telling me they don't want to go back to the original Arduino anymore. That's really great!

MariaMole is an open-source project being developed by me, on my spare time. But it's already fully functional. Check some of its features:

• Runs over Arduino install: MariaMole uses the Arduino software that you have installed, so all your Arduino configurations are kept. You can still use the original Arduino side-by-side to MariaMole, if you want,.
• Workspace support multiple projects at the same time. Workspaces are special folders where you can group any number of projects. This helps you keep the projects organized, and allows working with several projects at the same time. If you have used Visual Studio, CodeLite, Code::Blocks, Eclipse or any other modern IDE, you know that this makes a difference. Specially if you're designing a system with multiple Arduino boards talking each other, you're gonna love the workspace feature!
• Multiple serial port consoles at the same time: And more: Once you open a serial console, it's always available. You don't have to close or re-open it again to upload your project to Arduino
• Files use open-formats: All project informatio and configuration are stored on a single XML file (Except for code!)
• Building process configurable: The Arduino IDE does a great job behind the scenes, but, sometimes, you're gonna need to fine-tune the building sequence, add or replace libraries or change the compiler options. Of cource, unless you ask for it, MariaMole works the same way as Arduino, building the whole project for you.
• Imports Arduino examples and sketches: You won't have any problems to reuse your old sketches.
• Easily import Arduino libraries: A Wizard windows helps you with that. And also with adding new files to projects, importing other files, configuring the projects, etc.
• Color-themes: Do you prefer a dark color-scheme for code editing? No problem. This is the default for MariaMole. Or do you prefer writing your code against a white background? No problem yet! MariaMole comes with a light theme too. And you cand design your own theme!

You can find more about it or download it from here

@robo_agente1 é um robô para twitter cuja única ação é corrigir a gramática de quem troca a expressão "a gente" pelo substantivo "agente".

Assim como toda criação humana, ele não é perfeito. Mas se esforça.

Quer testar? Escreva qualquer frase no twitter usando "agente" no lugar de "a gente" e veja se ele te responde. 

Purpurina ("Glitter" in Portuguese) is an open-source device for light-painting photography. It can be used to create beautiful and surreal images, using the light as a paintbrush over the photographed scenario.

These are the first images for project Purpurina, a low-cost light-painting device: