( this is a repost of http://blog.tempusdictum.com/index.php/don/uncategorized/reinventing-the-wheel-watcher)
Its not very often that you get to go back to old designs and make improvements. But when you do its nice. Recently I got to rework a design from last year and build on the collective knowlege of 2 design teams and 3 design cycles.
Does practice make perfect? We shall see.
When I developed the dorkboard I was working in conjunction with brian riley and paul badger. The dorkboard was an attempt to take the things I liked about the original really bare bones arduinofreeduino and refine them. Although I intended my design to be used with my programmer I tried to make it compatible with brian rileys programmers and the programming header pins are ordered according to the standard that paul and brian were working on. I will try to clarify some of this and show you how to use the dorkboard with other programmers.
will write more here later.
I generally dont use my dragon. Its notoriously fragile and complicated compared to my trusty avrisp-mk2. However somewhere between loaning it out and taking it to dorkbot meetings my mark2 has gone awol for several months now.
And since I am stuck using the dragon I might as well share a little.
This is my first real pd patch.
The noise gate was stolen from the samples. I would like to stuff more of the cruft in the right hand corner into the noisegate chunk so it will look nice.
In the one chanel It makes my bass sound like a cheap toy keyboard. In the other I can hear how closely it is tracking.
And if you missed this one there will be another session on may 8th at techshop.
Cary and Allison at the coffee shop around the corner bought the business they had been working at from the previous owner. As a bonus I got to hang the first months worth of art on the freshly painted walls.
It’s like art. in frames. with paint. (imagine that!)
Or come see it at “Contrary” (1876 SW 5th Ave — through the month of april).
It feels good after all of this running unsuccessfully after “the money” and chasing all of these technical problems to look at your art on the wall and say “oh yeah. I am a obscening artist. I almost forgot.”
As previously announced this months focused workshop is about prototyping and it is intended to go with a second focused workshop on fabrication (in may). We will go over breadboarding, point to point wiring, breakout boards and a variety of techniques to get your projects prototyped. 
A few people including myself have had some issues with their Benito’s where the programmer sets one light on constantly and the next thing that happens is the the mac will go comatose (or to the beach if you like spinney ball metaphores). Not a very confidence inspiring behavior. To make matters worse the behavior was completely inconsistent.