I’ve been on a bit of a sabbatical leave these past few weeks, just to take some time to recharge my creative (and technical) batteries.  I love what I do, and I feel lucky to be able to design, build and test interesting stuff all day long.  Most of all, I love seeing how people take that work and do amazing things with it.  I can’t overstate how grateful I am to be a small part of this amazing community!  But sometimes — even in a situation or job you love, with colleagues you appreciate, etc. — you really need to step back and try to remember what got you excited about this stuff in the first place … to make sure you’re focusing your attention on the right things with the right priorities.

A big part of the reason I wanted to take a bit of a break was to look at all these (literally) hundreds of drivers I’ve written, boards I’ve designed, chunks of code I’ve collected, and see what can I do with it all.  I’ve never had easier access to more data, more easily, but it’s never seemed more challenging to do something genuinely creative and useful with it.  I’ve spent my last few weeks trying to finalize a pair of boards that themselves aren’t terribly interesting (there are probably a couple hundred wireless sensor platforms out there!), but it’s really just a spring-board for some other ideas I wanted to explore trying to visualize some of the amazing invisible stuff that goes on around us.  I posted some technical details up about them on my own website, but honestly the technical side is secondary and I rolled my own just to use the parts I’m familiar with and already have a zillion drivers for.

I’ll post some more details about some of what I wanted to do with these boards once I get the first batch in and have 100 or so assembled later this month, but I thought it would be fun to mention what I was up to all the same … even if in this case the core platform isn’t really the main objective!  LPC1xxx 1GHZ Wireless Board Preview