A Detour

I figured it would come to this. Minor setback -- the Zaurus's serial connector doesn't provide power (more specifically, it doesn't provide enough power), which makes the accelerometer useless out-of-the-box. It works fine and dandy on my PC, but the Zaurus can't drive it just yet.

There are two options:

• create my own serial cable, splicing the power wires to run to a separate power sourcepower
• power the accelerometer directly

Either way I'm in the land of soldering. Now, I've constructed some pretty basic circuits in the past, and done a good deal of cable splicing for theatre stuff, but I don't feel comfortable doing work that's potentially dangerous (at least, dangerous for the equipment) without some training. Or at least some practice.

Since I don't have the time/energy/money to actually take a class, I'm thinking of giving Electronic Circuits for the Evil Genius a try. It seems like a fairly thorough introduction, but doesn't assume you need to be told what electricity is. I took AP Physics -- I know what a resistor and capacitor are, and once upon a time could decipher a circuit diagram. I see this as a combination refresher course / hands-on training opportunity. I'm all about the hands-on. (If anyone knows a better resource, please feel free to interject. That book is recommended by MIT OpenCourseWare, so I'll take that as a fairly respectable endorsement.)

So that will probably take a little while before I'm comfortable enough to actually tackle this part of the project head-on. That's ok. It's not like I'm working towards a deadline or anything. Hobbies rock.

It seems that someone (Matt? The same Matt I know?) from the Center for Applied Biomechanics (where I worked during the summer of 2004, programming databases) found this blog recently. How he found it, I don't know, but he provided some useful feedback on the data analysis and capture. Pretty neat! Maybe some more useful people will drop by and give me hints.