GOSHtastic - Game shows, Options, Software, & Hardware!

Those of you who have ever been curious about making your own font should know that doing so on the computer isn't easy.  Sure there are several good programs out there that can help you take your design and digitize it, but a well-made font has been crafted with much care and attention to detail by a computer scientist just as much as a designer.  Some considerations that need to be made on the technical side include, for instance, how to "hint" rendering at very large or small sizes, accounting for grayscale devices in such hinting, making characters by compositing glyphs to save on file size (e.g.  fi  = f + i), and dealing with different platforms and character encodings across different computer systems so the font can be portable across Windows, Mac, and others. Now, think back to one of my long-time projects that relates to displaying text and images.  Yes, BriteBlox can certainly be capable of displaying messages set with TrueType fonts, and thi...

Background People interested in the stock market might be inclined to have a cool stock ticker in their room or office.  While it's not quite as useful as a whole bunch of monitors displaying entire panels of quotes and graphs, it does provide at least a mesmerizing distraction, not to mention your room now looks at least a little bit more like a real trading floor in a big office.  This was the original use case for BriteBlox , the modular LED marquee designed by #DoesItPew and myself.  Not only is the marquee itself modular (i.e. you can configure it in various lengths, heights, and shapes), but ideally the control software is modular, leading to a design where any coder can develop plugins to drive the board from any data source they can convert into animated pixels. Unfortunately, we haven't gotten the software quite to the point where it is incredibly easy for third-party developers to write plugins; right now, they would actually have to integrate the feature ...

Modified 9/16/2014 Those of you who have programmed an Arduino through the Arduino or AVR Studio IDE may have noticed the utility that is really doing the work: AVRDUDE (AVR Downloader/UploaDEr).  This is a powerful program that can facilitate programming new sketches on top of a bootloader, load a brand new bootloader or chip image, capture the current firmware programmed on the chip, and set fuse bits (which can render your chip unusable without special tools if you're not careful). You mean I could have been doing this the whole time? The LEDgoes USB Communicator supports both programming over serial (bootloader must be present) or via ICSP bitbang (very slow).  The ICSP operation is identical to Adafruit's FTDI Friend product.  The serial programming is identical to the Arduino, except that in my case, I'd like to be able to program two ATmega chips at the same time without switching cables.  What's the best way to do this? My original train of thought ...