This weblog has been slowing down for some time now, as you probably have noticed. The reason is that I’ve been shifting gears to a new (but not necessarily disjunct) direction. These past few months I’ve been involved in a number of new projects dealing with “Physical Computing”. Tiny / cheap hardware has become very powerful these days, and the revolution is that these are both very easy to interface to the real world through sensors and actuators and that the whole thing can be programmed in standard C / C++ using gcc.

I stumbled upon that new world last year, and decided to really get into it. In a distant past, long before the PC was invented, I used to build (and blow up) amplifiers, then simple digital circuits, then crude microprocessors - so it’s really all a fascinating bridge back to the past. I’ve been interested in getting to grips with energy consumption around the house for quite some time now, and all of a sudden there is this technology which makes it possible, affordable, and fun!

Lots of people seem to be getting into this now. It’s not likely that someone will come up with something as advanced as an iPhone - but what’s so amazing is that the technology is essentially the same. The playing field is leveling out to an amazing degree, because now just about anyone can get into exploring, designing, and developing hardware (and the firmware / software that makes it do things, which is usually the bigger challenge).

Anyway, in an attempt to create a structure for myself, I’ve set up the Jee Lab - a weblog and a physical area in my office to explore and learn more about this new world. If you’re interested, you’re welcome to track my progress there. It’s all open - open source, open hardware, open hype? ... whatever.

This weblog is the spot where I will continue to post all other opinions, ideas, and things of interest - as well as news regarding the software projects which remain as near and dear to me as ever: Metakit, Tclkit, Vlerq, and more.