It was a squeaker, but Brian and I got the Make: TV Episode Dispenser to work in time for Maker Faire 2009.

If you haven’t been following this project, the idea is simple. You’re at Maker Faire. You’ve never seen Make: TV before. You have a USB drive in your pocket. You walk up to our quaint, blinking machine, plug in your USB drive, choose an episode of Make: TV, and download it to your USB drive so you can take it home and watch it.

Here I am demonstrating it, appropriately enough, to John Park, the host of Make: TV.

And here’s an assemblage of video I shot of people using the dispenser.

We were still putting on finishing touches and tweaking code a couple hours into the first day of the expo, but once we got the kinks worked out, it hummed along nicely. About five percent of visitors had problems with our machine. We identified two circumstances: NTFS- or HFS-formatted drives, and FAT32 drives that appeared to have no partition table. If we do this again next year (if Make: TV Season 2 gets funded), we’ll definitely try to solve these shortcomings for in Dispenser 2.0!

Thanks to Nick at Twin-Cities Public Television for his support on this project. Thanks to Brian for his help coding the software. Thanks to Don and Jason of Dorkbot PDX for their ideas and material/moral support. Thanks to James Provost for whipping up some graphics on super-short notice. Thanks to my wife for her user interaction suggestions (many of which I stubbornly ignored at my peril). And thanks to my dad for his woodworking help and various material contributions.

Well, my last post about Make Magazine turned out to be premature. The review of the Chronulator, slated for volume 17, was bumped due to space constraints. But in the latest issue, Make Volume 18, there is now a Chronulator review! You can find the review in the Toolbox section, page 159, titled “Like Clockwork”.

John Park, the host of Make: TV did the honors, and really dug the kit. Sadly, his most excellent Chronulieta cigar-box Chronulator, which he built for the review, was not pictured.

One editorial comment: I must defend my engineering prowess by mentioning that the Chronulator consumes 200 microamps, not 200 milliamps as the review states. At 200 microamps, that’s more than a year on two AA batteries!

A couple of months ago, I jumped on an opportunity to build a Make: TV media dispenser for the May Maker Faire. The basic idea is that you plug in your USB stick, choose which episodes you want, and the machine will copy them to your USB drive. I thought this would be a great way for people to get Make: TV without having to download the files themselves.

The process has been slow-going. It took a while to design the user interface (big push buttons!), design a control circuit board, and set up a little Linux computer to run it all. Last weekend, we finally got to the step of building the cabinet. It doesn’t look like much yet, but just wait…

John Park, the host of the fantastic new MAKE: Television show, recently built a Chronulator 2.0. He just posted to the MAKE: Blog, sharing photos of his “Chronulieta” cigar-box Chronulator and saying it’s a “great kit”. A full review will appear in the next issue (volume 17) of MAKE: Magazine!

Here’s a picture of John’s handiwork. Very nice!

Chronulator 2.0 is now available. Come and get ‘em!

Thanks again to everybody who’s been asking for Chronulators for months now. I hope you agree the new design was worth the wait.

OK. Everything is ready. I feel comfortable and confident that Chronulator 2.0 will be a good experience for all my customers. Come tomorrow evening (GMT-8: Pacific Time), Wednesday December 10, Chronulator 2.0 will be available for sale. It was a long time coming, and I am thankful for all your patience.

I’m so excited and so relieved. And so tired. I was up until 4:30AM, attempting to resolve a bootloader problem. There were competing issues… I want the Chronulator to run on worn-out AA batteries, meaning approximately 1.8 volts. According to the Atmel microcontroller specifications, the chip can only run at 4MHz, at a voltage that low. But all the Arduino bootloaders are compiled to run at 8MHz, 16MHz or more. There’s the conflict. I had to recompile the Lilypad Arduino bootloader with a few tweaks. Messing with a crucial piece of code like a bootloader is rather nerve-wracking. So I tested, tested, and tested some more. I also had to mess around with the AVR microcontroller fuses — a risky affair, I’ve learned. I managed to brick one of my boards because I set the microcontroller fuses wrong. Fortunately, I was able to evolve a scripted process that will practically eliminate this sort of error as I burn the Chronulator software on each chip I ship.

This weekend was a long slog. First, I needed to build a programmer so I could efficiently program raw microcontroller chips. I have one of those green zero-insertion-force sockets that I wired up to program chips through the AVR ISP interface. I also worked out a command-line script that does checksums and everything to make sure each chip gets programmed correctly.

I also got all the paperwork in order — the component envelope and shipping labels. I revised the envelopes to reflect the new list of contents, and created a shipping label printing script. I can’t tell you how often I cramped my hand writing out shipping labels for my customers. “Ow, that’s my soldering hand!”

I got the documentation “done”. But before I post it, I must go through it once, with the parts all boxed up just as they’d be shipped. Call it a dry run. The perfectionist in me wants to make sure everything’s right before I unleash Chronulator 2.0 on the world. So first thing tomorrow (Monday) morning, before I go to my day-job, I’m going to assemble a kit from the instructions. I’ll make last-minute adjustments as necessary. At that point, I am ready. When I return from work in the evening, I will update the Web site with all the kit documentation and enable the PayPal “Buy Now” buttons! Then I’ll e-mail everybody who asked to be notified. Then the fun begins!

Thanks everybody for all of your patience and encouragement. I hope you’ll enjoy Chronulator 2.0 even more than the original!

On Sunday, I set up the video camera and recorded the Chronulator assembly process a couple of times. My plan is to first grab still images from the video and insert them into the updated Chronulator assembly instructions. But then, I want to edit and post a video assembly guide which I think will be very handy, regardless of your electronics assembly experience. I’m pretty excited about this. You’ll get to see my soldering technique (such as it is), how to fit the microcontroller chip into the board, how to disassemble and reassemble the meters, how to adjust the clock, and a few other activities that are easier to show than to describe in words. Of course, I’m still providing the complete PDF manual, so if you prefer to work from printed documentation, you won’t miss a thing!

I don’t think I ever mentioned — there’s LOTS of pictures of Chronulator projects on Flickr! The craftsmanship just amazes me…