Back in the solder again

I finally made an initial release of my game, Sedition, not yet on the market, but to a few people I know personally. It is not complete, I'm torn whether to call it 'alpha' or 'beta' at this point. At any rate I intend to 'flip the switch' and Google's and Amazon's markets within a week or so. More on that in a future post.

I also have a Blog dedicated to my game and any future software I release: Digital Popcorn

Anyways, one thing that working on this game has kept me from is doing hardware hacks. Now that development efforts have (hopefully) peaked on Sedition, I want to get back into it.



I recently purchased a 'Papilio One' FPGA development board, available here.

It's similar in spirit to the Arduino AVR development platform. In fact, it can emulate and Arduino with a soft-AVR.

It comes with the headers un-populated so that you can decide for yourself how you want to populate them, male or female.

My first task, solder some headers on to this bad boy. Hmm, where all my soldering tips....?

Oh oh:

For shame! (Actually these have seen a lot of service)

Every now and then I can find the right solder tips at a local hardware store. Every time I see the price of them, I debate just buying a new iron.

Come to think of it, where did I put my iron:

oh oh:

I have a monthly hobby budget, so while in game development mode, I've stockpiled a bunch of parts for future projects. Most of them are currently sitting in the shipping boxes in my lab. This is so that when I do get around to them, I still have the packing lists so that I have enough info to Google for data sheets.

So I was eager to drop a build of my app so that I might start playing with hardware again, and it turns out my first task is administrative.

I think instead I'll head off to the hardware store to gawk at man toys that my wife wouldn't let me have.

--P