Gift-giving for engineers
A male engineer I once worked with told me that, when he got married, he told his wife that he didn’t pick up on hints. If she wanted something for her birthday, she would hand him a magazine, point to a picture, and say, “I want this for my birthday.” I’ve personally used a similar approach after a couple of events where my husband said, “I wanted to get you something, but I didn’t know what you wanted.” If I see something I like, I may send an email to him saying, “If you’re thinking about birthday gifts, you can put this on your list.” Sometimes I’m more subtle, like when we walk into Barnes and Noble and I make a comment about how it sure would be nice to have a Nook or Kindle…and then proceed to play with the demo model for a half-hour and ask the salesperson…
An Interview with Ytai Ben-Tsvi, Inventor of the IOIO
Ytai Ben-Tsvi is the creative mind behind the IOIO (pronounced “yo-yo”). It is a hobby development board similar to the Arduino, but designed specifically to attach hobby peripherals to an Android phone through the USB port. I recently had a chance to interview him. What is the story behind the IOIO board and what has been your involvement thus far? In the summer of 2010 I was in California on a business trip (I was living in Israel then). A colleague of mine was telling me about the cellbots.com project that he was involved with. They were building little hobby robots based around Android phones. He was unhappy about the hacky ways they were using to connect the phone to motors and asked me whether I have an idea to fix this. After a couple of days, I thought I found a solution and that’s how IOIO was born. Another thing that makes it…