That smily faced slot is a bill acceptor. It is mounted in a box, which will soon be a membership payment system for the Tokyo HackerSpace.

A while back, I ordered a NV10USB bill acceptor, made by Innovative Technology. They are in the UK, but I ordered the machine from a retailer in China.

I recently found this weather station strapped to a tree near a the Akabane-Bashi train station in Tokyo.
I sort of feel sorry for the tree. At least they wrapped it up good first. :)

Materials science can be fascinating. Take glass for example. Apparently, whn molten glass is dropped into cold water, the drop becomes incredibly hard. So hard that it is nearly impossible to break it. However, the tail of the drop acts similarly to detonation cord on a stick of dynamite! One little nick and the whole drop explodes in a shower of tiny glass fragments.

The Ardunio development environment (Wiring) has changed the way we do things in the microcontroller world. It is no longer necessary to deal with make files, configuration tools and so many lines of code just to set up the serial port so you can print "hello world." By obfuscating all the hard bits that go into just bringing up a micro to a working state so you can write some code in the main.c file, the Arduino made entering the world of microcontrollers so much easier for artists, hobbiests and young engineers.

Was browsing hackaday today and saw a post about NOAA weather satelite images. I realized I never posted my own experinces here, so I thought I would go ahead and document it.
First off, it is important to remember that this all came about due to a number of different factors: My brother had actually bought two EZCap SDR tuners because he was interested in scanning police bands and some other stuff. He had mentioned he had them, and by then I was already aware that one could tune in the frequencies required for satelite reception.

Here is a shot of the insides of my quiz show box.

Lots of space in there! The arduino is bolted to the metal base plate. The shield is only there to provide a strong attachment point for the wires. Unfortunately, I only had solid core bell wire, so the cabling is quite stiff and hard to work with. Next time I'll use ribbon cable!