My kit arrived on Friday for the Dare to Dream Different Challenge. Very very cool. The only minor disappointment was that the supplied XBee modules were Series 1. Fortunately, I had a few 2.5 modules laying around from a past project that I upgraded to ZB. Fortunately for me, Michael Schwarz created a library that contains code to talk to 2.5 and later modules for the desktop and micro frameworks. After a few hours of leaning how his library worked (and not worked with Series 1) and upgrading XBee...

Now I am officially in round 2. I didn’t realize I had to fill out some forms to make sure that I met the contest rules. Fortunately, that is all behind me now, and my development board is on it’s way. Which doesn’t give us contestants a lot of time. Round 2 ends March 31, 2009, which is a little over 2 months away. I plan to blog about my progress. Right now, I am in the “getting reacquainted with Micro Framework” that I last looked at a couple of versions ago. I had bought the book “Embedded Programming...

Wow! I was accepted into Round 2 of the Dare to Dream Different Challenge by winning Round 1. Round 1 consisted of making a proposal of what your dream device would be and telling a little about yourself. My dream device is a bedside digital assistant. It is much more than an alarm clock (although it will have that feature). Through the use of RSS feeds, it will act as a morning newspaper, weather report, and digital picture frame. It will have some other features that I always wanted at my bedside,...