Alpha Numeric LED Matrices and Good Articles

I'm writing about a slew of different items because I don't have anything I can write about particularly concerning my own research projects. For the past several weeks I've had to dedicate the majority of my spare time towards my job because we'll shortly be delivering a large project that I have worked on with several other people for the past six months. Major research objectives in the work project concern:
1. A new social media API which can be remotely updated and uses caching techniques; the first I am aware of in a kiosk environment.
2. Real-time content management of custom Flash/AIR kiosk applications.
3. Advanced media and AMF caching techniques on kiosks.
4. Deployment of virtual machines, and automated backup of those machines.
5. The usual research and testing that must take place when developing custom solutions for museums.

From what little time I have on my own, I've been continuing to work in parametric CAD, but am not comfortable posting any of my designs yet. I've also been working with some killer alpha numeric seven segment displays from Kingbright that I really like. If you don't like being jerked around by Digikey or Mouser I would suggest purchasing parts directly from Kingbright USA. Kingbright USA also carries Tri-Color LED's that are very similar to the RGB high output from Sparkfun, but at a fraction of the price.

Every Thursday night I have been working with my co-worker Jake to do electrical engineering, microcontroller programming, and have fun. We've gotten past some of the basics, and have some 8x8 LED matrices wired up that we have been controlling. This week we're doing to do analog input, and I"m going to attempt to reverse engineer the electronics I tore out of one of my birthday cards that plays a popular tune. I have a feeling we may have an interesting beginner-level interaction-design project by the end of this Thursday night.


I came across some great resources this afternoon that I wanted to share.

The first is "Limpkins Blog", and his article titled: "A few advices for those who would like to create a product..."













Limpin's writing has some really good advice.
The second article is Ponoko's "Ten Rules for Maker Businesses", which Limpkins article actually links to. This is hands down a great article summarising several great pieces of advice for maker's everywhere.



The third article, again taken from rule #8 in the previous article "Design For Manufacturability" is Sparkfun's article on their testing procedures for printed circuit boards using Pogo Pins called "PogoBeds: SparkFun Production and Testing". Neat!