Personal Experience: Making a game-show buzzer controller

To kick off the new year, I teamed up with Aaron (he has a blog!) to put together a game show buzzer system for a project he's working on. We followed the directions from an Instructables guide, which were pretty straightforward. You'll want to read that all the way through if you want to follow in detail what we did; I'm going to talk about the highlights and gotchas we discovered, but not do a blow-by-blow replay of the Insructable itself.

Personal Experience: Building the MintyBoost v3.0 USB mini-recharger

Happy holidays!

This Christmas, my brother-in-law gave me the best gift: a MintyBoost v3.0 construction kit and associated small electronics components. I set to work right after the holiday rush died down putting it together; my thoughts on the project follow.

Personal experience: Patching a Galaxy Nexus with (expired) sugru

After several lucky years, I finally dropped my Galaxy Nexus in just the right way to crack a corner of the screen. I did a bit of research and found that one of the things sugru can be used for is to shore up a crack like that. I gave it a try, and I'm pretty happy with the results. The full steps are here; this is my personal experience following this process.

Note: If you follow this hack, be aware that it is not suitable for repairing cracks that intrude into the display or touch-sensitive areas of the screen. The hack guide on sugru.com points that out also, but I wanted to make it clear here to save you the trip if you've got a bigger crack.

So, some thoughts:

1. Sugru is great stuff to work with. It's easy to mould, cleans quickly off of hands, and cures to a very nice, smooth-but-grippy surface. Documentation on it warns of possible allergic reactions to uncured sugru; I had no problems.
2. The package of sugru I used was a free gift from a project last year; it was actually significantly past the expiration date (2012-12-13). I found that it still worked, but subsequent comments should factor that in.
3. I found the steps of the guide suggesting you "delicately place the sugru into cracks" and "gently guide your finger" to be pretty untenable; the sugru I was working with had the texture of Play-Doh and tended to rub off of the phone or break up with too much handling. As a result, I ended up with a bit of a bulge in the finished product; I find it passable, but my wife doesn't score it to highly for attractiveness and it fires both of our OCD circuits. :) There is a good FAQ on how to get a smooth finish; I didn't try this process myself. I had thought that perhaps kneading it would make it less gummy, but I didn't try that; the same FAQ suggests this would not be desirable.
4. My biggest concern trying this was that I'd inadvertently cover the front-facing camera. Fortunately, keeping the sugru off of the camera was quite easy, and I've noticed no diminished picture quality.

Sugru's pretty handy stuff. Now that I've gotten a chance to try it, I'm going to add it to my toolbox on future projects.