After a recent hard drive failure, I realized I need to start doing some proper backups (Duh, right?)  Anyway, while shopping for hard drives to build a backup NAS (for which I need some internal drives, not external USB drives) I discovered a trend where a lot of external hard drives are cheaper than internal drives at the same capacity. How does this make sense?

I ended up purchasing these 3TB hard drives for about $140 each at Office Depot.  It’s a crap shoot on which hard drive will be inside, but it will normally be made by the same manufacturer, and be of that capacity. (You would be surprised to find out this isn’t _always_ the case).

Being a 3TB Seagate, a quick search over at Newegg shows this drive which sells for $229.  That’s a $90 dollar difference.  WOW!  So doing this instead of buying internal drives is a bargain so far.

Just playing around with the iPad app Animoog, which I believe is still available for $0.99 at the iTunes app store. This is a huge bargain on a really really cool app.  I won’t get into the specifics of the app, but if you want to know more about what Animoog is or how to use it, I recommend this YouTube video.

So, while playing around with the Animoog app, if you go into the setup menu there is a selection under ‘Refresh MIDI input(s)’ where  you can select ‘Off’ or ‘Network Session 1′.  This intrigued me!  Apparently you can use MIDI over the ‘Network’.  After some Googling I was still unclear on how to get this setup, so I thought I’d just tell everyone how I did it so you can get to making some cool tunes yourself.

Netduino

Over the last few weeks Harford Hackerspace has had the pleasure of beta testing the Netduino. The Netduino is a development board with a form factor similar to the Arduino. Care was taken when designing the Netduino to ensure compatibility with most of the existing Arduino shields. That’s about where the similarities of the two devices ends.

The Netduino uses Microsoft’s Open Source .net Micro Framework SDK along with Visual Studio C# (or VS C# Express) as the primary development environment. C# application developers will be able to quickly adapt to the .net Micro Framework and start programming microcontrollers in a matter of minutes. However, this does not let them off the hook for learning the basics of electronics.

PicKit2 Debug Express

Around the space, we have been using the PICkit 2 Debug Express quite a bit lately.  This has allowed us to get pretty cozy with the functions of this handy little programmer and I thought I would share some of these features with you.

I’m sure you’ve read the previous tutorial ‘Programming PIC Microcontrollers in C‘, if you haven’t, you should go familiarize yourself with it now.  Continuing on from there, after we have a successful build of a led blinking we can use the PICkit 2 to program our chip via the ICSP header.

Learning to program microcontrollers seems like an impossible task but with the help and support of a Hackerspace you’ll find that it’s actually simple to get started. The members of Harford Hackerspace set out to learn by starting at the basics and gradually taking on more difficult applications. The key to our quick success was group participation. Most of us had at least attempted PIC programming, but it took a group effort to get the whole picture.

In this tutorial we will teach you what we learned. You can then take this new knowledge to your local hackerspace and put it to good use. Let’s get started!