I'll be making the trek over to Queens for this, from California.

Actually, I live three or four miles away from the fairgrounds where they hold the SF Maker Faire. This will be the first Maker Faire I'll attend as a visitor instead of an exhibitor...looking forward to it!

I'm hoping a bunch of familiar names in the Maker and/or Arduino communities will gather for dinner in NYC.

A lot of Jameco's parts are cheaper than you'll find most places. Their "Valuepro" blank label rectangular and DSUB connectors, for example, are a much welcomed relief from high prices for Amp and Molex connectors. I've been buying resistor packs from them forever. And what semiconductors they do have, are often reasonably priced too.

Of course the main draw for me is that they're a couple miles down the road, and I can order up components and walk in 1/2 hour later to get them.

And Osgeld: as for hanging up after you refused to pay the quoted shipping and said you would never buy anything from them, what did you expect? You called them to complain over a matter of probably less than 12 dollars, most of which they would be paying back out into shipping. The person on the phone obviously realized an incompatibility and decided not to waste more of everyone's time. You told them you weren't a future customer: conversation over.

They do actually have a USPS option but it's not any cheaper than the rest.

Before I lived close enough to to walk-ins I still ordered from them, but it's always been easy for me to pile up a big enough order that the shipping price makes more sense.

You can file a DMCA counter-notice with YouTube.

http://www.google.com/support/youtube/bin/answer.py?hl=en&answer=155562

You found a link for it somewhere, right? It should just open up and compile. By no means am I a Visual Studio expert, so I don't even know what would cause problems and how to fix them. The plugin code I made is really just a quick hack, even with a hardcoded serial port. You could improve it greatly.

Just put "winamp" into the search box and you will find a number of posts using a simple plugin I threw together. Or just investigate winamp plugins, there are free SDKs available.

I learned how to quickly filter a few desired pieces of information from thousands of irrelevant items. How to listen for the ring of truth in a cacophony of lies. How to find an expert in a crowd of amateurs. How to detect the original in a sea of copycats.

Everyone in this thread with less than 10 posts is a spammer.

Not enough pictures, too many text descriptions in this thread!

Mine:

The GIMP export is pretty cool, but only really works for RGB or indexed images (as far as I can tell). For Osgeld's project, it's much less wasteful of space to pack 8 pixels per byte instead of one or more bytes per pixel.

The only feature the layout module supports is drawing free-angle lines from one point to another. It's a lot easier to say that than to list the hundreds of absent features considered standard in any PCB CAD program.

If your experience with electronics progresses at a normal rate, there's a very limited amount of time you'll even care about a breadboard design tool. Breadboards (physically) are design tools already, no one spends any time doing CAD to figure out how they are going to wire up a breadboard. Most of my designs go straight from a schematic to a PCB. If I use a breadboard it's typically very temporary, to test a few concepts that I want to verify while designing a schematic, usually in the analog domain.

I've only been designing PCBs for 7 or 8 years, non-career, so I'm probably in the bottom 10% of PCB designers experience wise. However I've used quite a few different tools and eventually settled on Eagle having the mix of features and price I found acceptable. Started with freeware and eventually bought the pro version.

Doesn't really matter which one you choose, though, as long as it has the basic set of features and you spend time getting used to it. Some people do very well with gEDA. Other swear by Kicad. Some (shudder) like ExpressPCB or PCBArtist and lock into a single proto supplier.

I would say that if you spend a lot of time in Fritzing you will eventually realize, if you plan to design real PCBs in the future, your time would be better spent learning some other tool.

Fritzing is not a practical PCB CAD compared to Eagle or any other PCB CAD program, the part library is only the tiniest problem to solve. I would feel more comfortable sketching a PCB layout with a permanent marker than using Fritzing at this point.

It's open source and shows promise, but that doesn't necessarily mean it's any good yet. By all means put in the 10,000 man-hours of software development necessary to make it an acceptable alternative to gEDA, Kicad, or Eagle, I will root for you.

Pretty much the only program that will import Eagle files is Eagle.

Are you aware of the non-profit version of Eagle? It has all three modules and board area of 160x100mm (instead of 100x80mm in the freeware version). You can use it as an individual for non-profit projects. It only costs $125: http://www.cadsoft.de/nonprofit.htm

You'll shoot your eye out, kid.

No.

You can't really use shift registers as general I/O, you'd have to have separate chains of shift registers for inputs and outputs.

I'd really still go with the MCP23017 unless you think 128 pins will not be enough.