October 28, 2019

Maker and inventor Allie hosts a “Hack-a-Pumpkin” challenge on Twitter each year, and I decided to participate to support a fellow maker as well as get some good content (and it’s fun!). I wanted to integrate a tiny fog machine into my project, and rather than use it to create fake smoke, I decided to do something a little silly: make it look like the pumpkin was farting. I figured this would amuse local Trick-Or-Treaters.

I used an Adafruit Feather M0 Express running CircuitPython to run everything. A PIR sensor would detect the presence of people and trigger the flatulence sequence. The microcontroller would play a sound clip through a speaker, and it would run current through the e-cigarette to heat the fog juice as well as enable a pump to move air through the e-cigarette. Finally, I added a splash of foul-smelling liquid fart to the fog mixture to add to the experience.

In 2018, Saleae, Inc. released a new suite of documentation to support their logic analyzers. I contributed the Getting Started section along with some hands-on demonstrations found in the Example Projects section. The written documentation is used to assist new users as well as increase Saleae’s search engine rankings to attract potential new buyers.

This series of written documentation taught readers how to program in Python with a focus on controlling hardware from a Raspberry Pi. The initial foundational piece, “Python Programming Tutorial: Getting Started with the Raspberry Pi,” covered the basics of programming in Python, how to control voltage levels on the Raspberry Pi’s GPIO header, turn on LEDs, respond to button pushes, and read data from sensors. The others furthered these concepts by introducing the idea of graphing live sensor data and controlling hardware from a graphical user interface (GUI). In the end, these tutorials propelled SparkFun to top search engine results for “Raspberry Pi Python.” Click on the following links to see each tutorial:

• Python Programming Tutorial: Getting Started with the Raspberry Pi
• Graph Sensor Data with Python and Matplotlib
• Python GUI Guide: Introduction to Tkinter

Several other tutorials were created to support setting up and using the Raspberry Pi, unrelated to Python:

• Headless Raspberry Pi Setup
• Setting Up a Raspberry Pi 3 as an Access Point
• How to Use Remote Desktop on the Raspberry Pi with VNC
• How to Run a Raspberry Pi Program on Startup

Image credits: “Python Programming Tutorial” by SparkFun Electronics (CC BY 2.0)

This 10-part YouTube video series was created for Digi-Key Electronics in 2018. Over the course of the series, I guide viewers through the process of creating their own printed circuit board (PCB) using the open source KiCad electronic design automation (EDA) tool suite. The series gained over 10,000 viewers in the first few months and increased subscriptions to Digi-Key’s YouTube channel.

I partnered with Hackster to create an online course hosted by Udemy. In it, I cover the basics of C/C++ programming in the Arduino development environment and introduce some electrical engineering concepts (for example, Ohm’s law and how to read a schematic). The rest of the course covers a variety of topics including interacting with buttons, lighting LEDs, reading data from sensors, constructing a robot, and posting data to the Internet. It has helped thousands of people of all ages dive into the world of embedded systems. To see a preview of the course, go to this Udemy page.

This 4-part YouTube series walks users through programming the micro:bit using Microsoft’s online MakeCode editor. Several example projects are given, including making a virtual Magic 8 Ball, using a servo to display temperature with a physical gauge, and creating a remote burglar alarm with the accelerometer and Bluetooth radio. The micro:bit was a collaboration between the BBC and several technology companies to create a device to help middle school children dive into programming and electronics. The video series was aimed at giving teachers ideas for classroom projects.

Outside of SparkFun, I created a 2-part series that shows users how to begin programming the micro:bit using MicroPython. The videos are aimed at teachers and hobbyists who wanted to move away from the graphical programming on the micro:bit.

BadgerHack was a marketing campaign designed to give event goers a uniquely SparkFun experience upon visiting a booth at SXSW Create (part of SXSW 2015). Visitors were given a kit of parts that needed to be soldered together at SparkFun’s booth. The kit ultimately created a badge complete with microcontroller (based on Arduino) and LED matrix. The visitors could then visit one of two “programming stations” where they could configure their badges to scroll their names (or other messages), static images, and animations. The badges could be taken home and reprogrammed or combined with other electronics to make any number projects based on SparkFun’s tutorials.

The campaign resulted in subsequent follow-on projects and media attention. Hackaday wrote a glowing post about the badge experience. Add-on kits were introduced, including a gaming kit, a plant-monitoring sensor kit, and a synthesizer kit. People were thrilled to show off their self-assembled badges on Twitter. The success of BadgerHack resulted in two new products at SparkFun: the RedStick and the LED array. The following year, SparkFun ran a contest to see who could create the most compelling projects with their BadgerHack-inspired boards. The recap video from SXSW 2015 can be seen below.

In 2014, SparkFun developed a series of stackable boards for the Intel Edison, a small single board computer. I developed a kit for the Edison, complete with documentation teaching users how to set up and program the Edison with JavaScript. Similar to the mbed kit, we put together a fun, faux commercial for the kit on YouTube. The kit sold well with good reviews, but Intel retired the Edison a few years later.

As part of the media push to promote the SparkFun ecosystem around the Edison, I created a series of “Getting Started with Intel Edison” videos for YouTube that garnered thousands of views.

SparkFun partnered with Georgia Tech to create a custom kit around the ARM mbed platform. I collaborated with Dr. Hamblen to identify the parts, lay out new boards, and put together documentation for SparkFun’s mbed Starter Kit. This kit sold year over year to sophomores and juniors in Dr. Hamblen’s embedded systems class as well as to customers interested in learning about mbed.

We also had a little fun and made a faux commercial for the kit.

This three-part series was created for SparkFun to introduce Python programming for the Raspberry Pi single board computer. The first video starts by blinking an LED attached to the Pi. The second video has users post a message to Twitter programmatically. Finally, the third video walks viewers through reading temperature and humidity data from a sensor and posting the values to Twitter. The series drove over 1,000 subscriptions to SparkFun’s YouTube channel.