yesterday I did a smt soldering course making a blinken button. Here's the parts:

I spent most of today playing around with my FX2LP board getting sending buffers over the serial port using interrupts and trying to get the usb stuff right. I'm pretty sure i've got the descriptors right now.

The Laser cutter we've got at the London Hackspace has very crappy windows software so I've started reversing it.

I've got the usb protocol mostly done, I can upload, list and delete files on the controller, there's a few more commands that can be implemented, but they aren't critical.

I've also (after years of not getting round to it) started using Mercurial and I've setup a repo, which you can find here.

I've had a garmin Etrex (RS232 interface, takes AA batteries) and it's noticeably bad in woodlands so I've been wanting to get a new GPS for ages.

Since my Pandora should be here soon i've been looking for a Bluetooth gps. I found the iBlue 747A+ on ebay and it's rather nice, if a bit of a fiddle to get working. The Usb interface is a bit off standard and corrupts data on win2k.

There is a nice java front end for it. It's also supported by gpsbabel with the 'mtk' input thing.

Here's an picture of the difference in accuracy compared to the Etrex:

Notice the track that zooms off the road down towards the bottom left and then sharply turns to rejoin the road - that's the etrex loosing lock in the wood, interpolating and then jumping back to the road when it regains a lock.

The other nice thing about the 747A+ is that you can specify how and when it should log - every n seconds or every n meters etc...