And now for something completely different!

Q: What’s an electronics nerd do for his dad for Christmas?

A: Refinish some furniture!

This stout old walnut desk literally sat in a barn for years before my dad adopted it as his office desk. The finish on the top was utterly destroyed, so he always kept it covered with clutter (that’s the logic I’m using, anyway), and nobody thought too much about it.

After having seen another member totally transform a beat-up tabletop a few months ago, I hatched a plan. While my folks were out of town for the holidays, I snuck in, absconded with the desktop, took it to i3, and proceeded to apply copious amounts of elbow grease. After planing the old varnish off (with the help of a slightly-overkill dust collector) and sanding the surface, I applied some new stain, and then went on to relearn everything I’d forgotten about polyurethane.

Four coats later, plus a day to dry, the desktop is back in place, back in use, and pleasantly less cluttered. I still spend most of my time at i3 in the electronics room, but perhaps I should avail myself of the other facilities more often!

Arduino meetup Thursday 12/8. Featured: The Chronotune’s guts

We’re kicking off i3 Detroit’s new Arduino meetup series with a show-and-tell project that’s near and dear to our hearts: The Chronotune, (as previously covered all over the freakin’ place).

For those following along at home: The Chronotune’s user interface is a rotary encoder, read by the Arduino. Year is indicated on 7-segment displays, and audio files are handled by a uMP3 board. (That’s what we had sitting around. If we had it to do again, we’d use an mp3 shield.) The speaker is driven by an LM386. The dial is moved by a stepper motor from an inkjet printer, with an EasyDriver.

Anyone tinkering with the Arduino experimenter’s platform is welcome to attend, as are those who are curious but don’t know where to begin. We’ll also have a look at the Arduino-LabVIEW bundle recently offered by Sparkfun. Things get under-way this Thursday (12/8) at 7pm.

Reminder: Halloween Party and Matt’s LED Display

*WARNING* HALLOWEEN PARTY IMMINENT *WARNING*

Just a friendly reminder. Put all those little final touches on your costume and head out to our halloween party tonight! Matt has rigged up a personal interactive LED display for people to mess with. Send tweets to @MattsCostume tonight (7pm and later) to display your tweet on his sign. Pretty cool! Be sure to do a twitter search for @MattsCostume after the event to read all of the past hilarity that he had to walk around with. Dont be too wordy though, the sign is only capable of displaying 76 characters at once, so you’ll get cut off if you ramble too much! See the video below: