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!

This is astounding craftsmanship. I must say I am humbled. I never imagined my modest little clock kits would be worthy of such incredible attention and craftsmanship. It gives me immeasurable delight to know I am, in some very small way, helping to bring these beautiful works of art into existence. I’m so grateful for the opportunity. Thanks to all of you.

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

If you have a Chronulator and haven’t sent us pictures or posted them to Flickr, what are you waiting for? Send them to ideas@sharebrained.com or post them under the Flickr tag “chronulator”.

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

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.

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!

I wanted to see something meaningful on my Chronulator, besides the time. So I cranked out a bit of Python code to read the SNMP statistics from my Internet gateway. Now, the “hours” meter shows how much stuff I’m downloading, and the “minutes” meter shows how much stuff I’m uploading! It’s pretty cool to load a Web page and see the meters dance around. For extra credit, I set the LED backlights to light up whenever the upload or download rate is above 5%.

If I have some spare time tomorrow, in between all the documentation work, I’ll try to make and post a video of the bandwidth indicator. It’s fun to watch!

Over the next week, I’m going to see what other gadgets I can code up. I’ll put all this stuff on the Web site — for you to learn from and modify for your own evil purposes!