The past few weeks have seen huge updates in the Rosencrantz HW land. The project is clearly starting to come together. A few of the different components are now working, and it’s become easier to visualize what else we need to get working, and how we will get there.

There’s a magical thing that happens when you are building digital hardware, where the hardware grows up from a series of loosely connected circuits (that don’t tend to be functioning in any way) to a cohesive unit, working together to accomplish the task we put in front of it. The hardware can’t work as a unit until its sub components not only achieve self awareness (they know how to work themselves, usually requiring firmware), but they also start to have a small amount of awareness of others (they know how to interact with the other components in the system). Seeing your project grow up is very exciting, and it’s not that far fetched for engineers to see themselves as parents of their projects, both excited and slightly nervous to let them out in the world to live their own lives and leave their own marks (we all know about the iPod™, but who among us can talk about the engineers who designed it – no the iPod left its own mark on the world, a mark independent of the people who created it).

In the past few weeks our Rosencrantz has passed through a few phases of early childhood. I know I personally have not had as much sleep, and it’s true, bringing up a board is hard work. However, it’s also very exciting to see your work grow, and begin to give you hints on who it will be when it grows up – what it will be like to work with.

These past few weeks we’ve gotten our new power boards up, our hall effect sensor at least basically working, our flash system starting to work, and we believe our OLED isn’t far behind. Rosencrantz will require some minor surgery before the piezo buzzer begins to work, but it’s ready to buzz when that surgery occurs.

Goals for this week are to get the camera working (something that has proved much more difficult than expected), the display working (we think/hope we are close on this one), and to make real ground on the application code that will communicate with the Life Library application (Claes-Fredrik has made some ground on this already, so the framework is in place).

This is an exciting time, and in the next few weeks we’re going to see our little device come together a lot, it won’t be long till Rosencrantz will start exploring a little more of the world… starting with our desks.