If there is one thing that grinds my gears it’s table based design and the “web development” companies that continue to use it.

Web development is one heck of an industry. It changes, transforms, and adapts. I feel that in order for you to call yourself a web developer, or your company a web development company you need to develop with the web.

Development as defined by dictionary.com is: the act or process of developing; growth; progress: child development; economic development.

Growth, progress! Our job as web developers is to promote growth and progress of the web. We must adapt as the web adapts. When a “web development” agency provides it’s clients with old, outdated, un-accessible, table-based, web development they are not only stifling the growth of the internet they are literally taking money out of business’ pockets.

So how does someone developing a table based website take money from people? Well lets look at it this way. Let us say that you “Bagels R us” want a website done by “WMOTBWFY Web Development Firm” and its going to cost you around $800 as you just want a static site with no CMS and maybe a google maps. Well that’s great you take a look at the proofs and make some changes and within a week or two you have a shiny new site. Excellent! Now after a little while you start getting some good business. You expand, and open 2 new locations. Well your site now needs to be updated so you contact “WMOTBWFY Web Development Firm” and they make some updates for you and all seems to be going well. Until one day you find out that one of your most loyal customers (a man who lost his eyesight in a tragic origami accident) stops ordering bagels from you.

In fact it seems that almost all your vision impaired customers are leaving, as well as a lot of your other customers. What is happening?! Well my friend you have just been SEO‘d out… Google does not like websites based on tables and your website is no longer on the front page when you search for bagels in your respective city on Google. But why does Google not like your site? It looks amazing! Well Google doesn’t like your site because it is not accessible. Being accessible means that it is very easy for programs to read your site aloud for those who are visually impaired. Believe it or not even though someone is visually impaired they still can and do use the internet. When a page reader encounters a table based website it reads out a lot of information, most of which makes little to no sense to the person listening. So now that you’ve lost your spot on the top hits list on Google and all your visually impaired customers have defected to the new “We got Bagels” stores popping up everywhere you are effectively loosing money because a certain “web development” firm provided you with a state-of-the-art 90′s website for approximately the same price as a properly developed div based website.

Lets just pretend now for a moment that a few months later “WMOTBWFY Web Development Firm” goes out of business. they aren’t getting many customers and business was too slow to pay for all those “in-the-know” developers. Now you need to find a new developer to work on your site. So you come to hire me and say “Hey John! Bagels R’ Us is in trouble! We have lost our spot on the Google front page and a large amount of our customer base has already defected to that smarmy new shop!”. I now have to tell you that your website needs a complete redesign and guess what. It’s going to cost about $900-$1000 now, unless you want new graphics. Why is it so much more than the original site though? Well Not only is the old site’s code useless the new web developer would need to piece the graphics that were cut apart by the table based design back together. At the end of the day “WMOTBWFY Web Development Firm” not only took your money once (by making it necessary to re-develop your site) they took who knows how much of your money a second way (defected customers).

Table based design is dead. If any developers are out there reading this please, for the love of God, start learning how to properly make div based websites styled with CSS. For you business out there please ask any possible web development firms, freelancers, or friends if they use table based development before you make something that stifles the development of the internet and costs you money.

After about 20 minutes of trying to get this chip out with a solder sucker and solder braid, I finally succeed. I pop it into my breadboard (which had the starting of my time fountain, but who cares PLASMA SPEAKER!) and begin wiring up the schematic. Everything looks wired up properly and I have a speaker in place of the flyback transformer (another steal from the discarded television that I got the flyback from). I attach a 9V battery and…. nothing happens…. shit ok well time to pull out the big guns… the 12V motorcycle battery. I attach the battery and…. it kinda works… except the speaker is just puffed out all the way…. it’s not making any noise at all! What should be happening is the speaker should be oscillating at some high frequency but it’s not, it’s just sitting there all puffed out…. At around this time my father gets home from work. I have a question for him. The TL494 chip has a black dot on it (which usually denotes where pin 1 is) as well as a notch in it (Another common way to denote pin 1) on the opposite side. Theres your problem. the chip is in backwards! I reverse the chip and TA-DA a squealing speaker!

Now it was time to attach the flyback transformer and get to the sparky sparky, singy singy. I put it all together and PFFFFFTTTT! all the magic smoke flys out of my diode. At this point I have let the magic smoke out of so many ICs and Diodes my nickname should be John the wizard. I go back to the drawing board and my dad points out to me that diodes (unlike capacitors) have a white line marking their cathode (whereas on capacitors it denotes an anode). Well shit! I must have blown this diode 20 times because that stupid quirk of electronics. I put my last diode in, turn on the power and….. LIGHTING! It verks! for the next 20 minutes I walk around the house with a big shit eating grin on my face looking for some sort of CD, Cassette, or shitty MP3 player to plug into this potential device killer to make me some audio. I finally find an old Mp3 player that I found on the bus in grade 6 and hook it up (the MP3 player needed a non-standard usb cable so I had to settle with what was on it…. Dr.Dre lol) after about 20 sec0nds of it working…. PFFFTTT! magic smoke billows from the IRF540 MOSFET. So I take a look at it… the heatsink isn’t hot!? I put some heatsink compound on the back whats the deal!? Well it turns out there was a sheet of mylar between the heatsink and the original component and it wasn’t very efficient. So I pop off the mylar sheet, clean everything up, add some new heatsink compound and a new MOSFET and there we go… it works for a longer period of time and I am able to bring you the following video.

It has been brought to my attention that I neglected to cite the source of this schematic. I built this setup by following plasmana’s instructable. I will be making another, more powerful plasma speaker based off another design.

Want to help me make the next one? I need some funds to get the components and if you’d like to see me make this bigger and better please feel free to Donate.[paypal-donation]

So here’s a quick recap on whats going on with the projects and what you can look forward to seeing in the future. Yesterday I received a couple of iButton Dallas keys from Dallas Semiconductor, a subsidiary of MAXIM. This goes to pair with the iButton probe sent to me by http://www.rys.sk a Slovakian company. This means in the near future you will see a neat little post about iButtons and 1-wire technologies.

Shortly there will be a nice post about my roommates and I putting together the plasma speaker that I was speaking of in an earlier post. I am in the process of getting some supplies for making circuit boards so that I can make out my own breakout board for the surface mount TL494 chip I have. We were all standing out in front of our house when we saw a Television on the side of the road and decided that it was time to pick it up and pull out the fly-back transformer to use. Since then we created a project jar that would be filled with certain amounts of money depending on a set of rules we made (spill a beer 2$, make a ridiculously stupid comment 25¢). Within one month we made $27.32 that is helping us pay for all the parts of the speaker.

What else in on my plate? Well I have 3 more projects on the go. One I have been meaning to do for over three years now. A long while ago I stumbled onto something called a Time Fountain. What is does is drip water with a florescent dye in it while illuminating it with a flashing Ultraviolet LED. This causes the illusion of the drips slowing down as if time itself was slowing. Once the strobes sync up with the drips it looks as if time stops, if the strobe is slower than the drip then it looks as if time reverses and the drops drip upwards. I have all the pieces for this but have not had the time to put it all together as of yet. I found a fountain at a local value village which seems like it may be good to work with however if Murphy and his law has anything to say about it I may be wrong.

Another project which kind of goes along with the time fountain is my GArduinio project. The thing is I’m having one hell of a time trying to keep my moss from drying up and dying. I just don’t pay enough attention to it. So if the pump doesn’t work out for the time fountain (which isn’t really a big deal because gravity works just fine) then I will use it to water my moss once the resistance of the soil becomes infinite (it has no water in it). That’s not a priority but could be a lot of fun.

Last but certainly not least MicroControl. Last month a couple of my classmates and I created a site for beginners to learn about microcontrollers and rapid-prototyping platforms. mBed has graciously provided us with one of their units to allow us to better create content geared towards another popular, widely available prototyping platform. I have been in the post production stages of a podcast for the un-boxing and first steps tutorial of the mBed for a few weeks now and will have it completed in awhile.

So that’s just few things to look forward to. I haven’t left of stopped doing things, I’ve just been too busy to talk about them. Not to worry! There will soon be some exciting videos and tutorials. Keep in mind these are just projects in the works. There are several ideas floating around up there and each one of them could potentially be really cool.

I’ll see you when I have something cool to share… I know what you’re thinking… there better be video… there will.

While figuring out how to organize all my files, folders and programs I said to myself “I cant get rid of that I need it there” then it occurred to me. I share my computers between 3-4 different versions of myself. I live different lives at different times. Think about this for a minute and I think you’ll agree that at least 30% of the stuff you have on your computer or desktop is used for a very specific, goal oriented task that you would otherwise do nothing with. For me I broke my lives into categories. I am a student, an employee, myself, and I also own my own websites and podcast. So what am I going to do with all this newly found information?

Well I realized that the only thing to do when you don’t want others (or yourself) clogging up your desktop, and allowing your lives creep together at the wrong times (think producing a website and suddenly playing counter-strike) is to give those people their own user accounts. So today I created myself a “School and Podcast” user on my Macbook and started transferring files. While transferring all the appropriate files over I found that the often inconvenient lack of being able to switch between users and keep programs open on a Macintosh machine became perfect for the need to compartmentalize my life. I cannot go play games or watch my movies unless I want to completely drop everything I’m doing and log into another account.

So I went from this:

To this in less than an hour and had done a little bit of work to make myself a more productive, organized individual.

So what do you do to help fight back a crazy desktop? What do you think about the idea that you lead several different lives on your computer? Please share your stories tell me what steps you have taken or are planning to take to make your life and your computers life that much easier!

The question that may be rattling around in your head may be “Why the hell would you want to grow moss!?” Well first off I love the smell of moss. It’s like a summer breeze mixed with the soil like smell of the woods. Secondly I am no gardener. This stuff is beefy! I brought it home and it dried out completely like I could probably light it on fire and it would burn. I put a little water in with it and it cam right back to life! Also it can take almost any temperature. Why was it the only thing green while I was walking home that day?. Because it was able to thrive in the cold winter air.

My next step is to possibly grind some down with some beer and sugar and try painting it on a rock to see if it’ll grow on that well. Tell me what you think! Have you ever grown moss? Would you like to? If anyone can identify this species of Moss please do!

So you want to create your own membrane keypad? Why? well making your own keypad can be useful for many reasons. It’s cheap and easy to do, it can be placed in situations where it may be vandalized or stolen without much frustration, It can be fully customized to display whatever you like, and you can make as large a keypad as you like with as many inputs as you can handle. I created my keypad to go on the exterior of my door in residence to act as a keypad entry. I however have some more tricks up my sleeve for this coming up in a later tutorial.

1. Understanding the Keypad

The first thing I want you to understand is how this keypad works. I know what you’re thinking… Matrix keypad?… “I’m not going to have to take any blue pills to get this to work am I?”. No its not that matrix.. The best way to think about a matrix style keypad is to think about battleship.

A matrix is pretty much a grid like in battleship consisting of rows and columns. each button corresponds to a certain row and column. See the first picture to help illustrate this better. On a 9 button keypad you would use 3 rows and 3 columns. The first button would make a link between Row 1 and Column 1 (R1C1) just like in battleship. 2 would be R1C2, 3 R1C3, and lets say 8 would be R3C2… the rest are illustrated on the image.

The point of this is instead of having 9 different buttons to wire up, all you would need to do is wire up 3 columns and 3 rows for significantly less wires. The real benefits come when you begin adding buttons. adding another row and column (2 wires) would add 7 buttons… see where I’m going?

2. Collecting the materials

The really cool thing about this project is you probably already have all the things you need to build this in your house! Yes when I say that this is a simple, cheap, effective way of making a keypad I mean that it is simple and cheap. For this project you will need:

Aluminum Foil (tin foil… some sort of foil) *foil tape works well also
Some sort of paper or flat material (what you choose here will effect the durability. I’m using a dry erase pad for my fridge)
glue (unless you’re using foil tape)
and a spacer of some sort (a few layers of paper with holes cut in them may work I’m using double sided sticky foam pads)

Laminator (COMPLETELY OPTIONAL)

3. Decision Time

The first step to putting your keypad together is deciding what you want it to look like/how many buttons do you want on it. For this project I will be using a 3X3 setup with the numbers from 1 to 9 on it. Once you have decided what it will look like draw it out and decide where you want all the wires to go. I want a lead off from my keypad so it will go around my door so see the image below for what mine should look like. Make a mock up on your computer using whatever software you like (paint, photoshop, illustrator…) and proceed to the next step.

4. Mapping out your Cheap “Circuit”

What we are going to be doing is gluing on foil to make a flexible, cheap, however effective circuit board. What we need to do now is on our computer mock up we need to make how our columns and rows are going to be set-up. If you are using Photoshop make 2 new layers, one called rows the other columns. if you’re just using paint make a copy of the file called rows and another columns.

On these new layers we will put large black lines where we want our “Circuits” to go. See image 1 for rows and image 2 columns if you are confused. Image 4 shows what both layers turned on looks like. Starting to look familiar?
Now you need to flip one of your images vertically… or is it horizontally… see image 5 you’ll get what I mean.

Go ahead and print these out for the next step.

Rows

Columns

Both rows and columns

5. Faux Circuit making Time!

Here is the fun part… well in my opinion the whole thing is fun but whatever…
Now that you have your printed out templates you can start making your circuit. Now is the time to glue down your foil where ever your rows and columns are supposed to go. Look at figure 2 for both of my circuits, yours should look somewhat like this. Also, notice how my leads go away from the keypad in an organized way to facilitate easy hook-up? Just like I planned!

*NOTE* At this point its a good idea to re-make your front design to include labels for the hookup at the end of the leads with the labels
R1
R2
R3
C3
C2
C1

This is just going to make it easier for you.

6. Putting It all together

So I hooked up the laser and I got a beam! it was cool, then I started to notice that it had some artifacts. Artifacts are dark spots where there should be light and some light beams where there should be none. Kind of like shining a flashlight through broken glass. This means that there was a problem with the diode. Well the next day when I got back from class I set everything up again and nothing happened… not even a faint blue light.

Now Andrew over at Modwerx tests every laser diode that goes out to make sure they work. I have complete confidence that he did not notice the artifacts when he tested it, this may have occurred during shipping. I asked him about what was going on and he had told me that usually laser diodes are sold as-is due to them being so fragile. All I can say is Wodwerx has excellent customer service and I will soon have a functioning laser diode shortly.

You can see the Hackaday article here

As far as the project goes and me keeping my blog readers out of the loop, I have an excellent excuse. I forgot! I had started paying attention to the blog long after I had started making the keypad. The only reason it came up was because I had found some of the images I’d taken of it on my computer while cleaning up and remembered about the instructable. I should put the instructions on here as well but as for now look below for the link.

If you’d like you can see my instructable here Make your own Membrane Keypad. Be sure to give it a rating if you like it!