Big News!

Here's an update that everyone should be pleased with!  I certainly am.  Over the past few days I've been receiving packages in the mail like crazy, due to a helpful donation I got a little while back.  Today came the big important ones.

As you can imagine, there's nothing like coming home and seeing a bunch of packages lying on your desk!  It's like Christmas!  The two small envelopes were just resistors or something, but the big ones were much more exciting.  Starting with the brown box in the front, the first thing there was the Bluetooth module.  This little bad boy will let you control the Qube from a computer pretty far away!  Yep, wireless   Notice how small it is too!

The other thing in that box was pretty cool too.  Remember those double relay boards I mentioned a little while back?  Well, they're here!

Now the exciting big box in the back.  The one covered with some sort of black plastic wrapping.

I'm sure nobody expected that!  Well, as it turns out, neither did I.  When I opened my new Canon EF 35mm, I found something a little bit different.

The one on the far right already has a Qube in it just to do a fit test.  All I have to do now is come up with some good stickers to put on top and they are ready to sell!  Well, once the firmware is done of course.  But the bootloader is complete, meaning that tinkerers can get a head start playing already!  Here's a few close-ups for fun.

Last but not least, I obviously had to play with my new toy!  Since I've been getting so many components for these damn relay boards, I had to put one together!

It doesn't do much right now, but in theory it has great potential.  With one click you can switch up to 7A at 250V.  What does that mean?  It means you can hook up your electric door strike, your extension cord, your lamp in the living room, your lights in your bedroom.  You put the wires into the big blue terminals and then with a simple click (or Bluetooth command, or website command, etc) you can switch huge loads on or off.  There are two blue status lights on the relay board to indicate when a relay is activated.  In the picture, they are both turned off.  Here's a picture with one of them turned on.

Well, that's it for the pictures.  I will probably be making 6 more Qubes this weekend and probably all of the 40 relay boards while I'm at it.

I also have some new plans for the firmware.  Since I said that you can use the Qube without a USB connection (firmware rev 2), I decided to let users upload code to the Qube to tell it how to run.  There will be an "Event Designer" which basically lets you drag and drop a list of functions to occur whenever the Qube has a new event (such as an interrupt or receiving a byte from the internet).  Obviously this type of firmware is quite a way away, but I already have it planned out!  Can't wait!