In the early months of 2015, I decided to stop doing pretty much everything I had been doing up until that point — certainly to stop thinking the way I had been thinking up until that point — and unplug everything. I had spent the previous fourteen years trying to make the internet care about everything I did, and somewhere between how that's obviously a terrible endeavor for anybody and how it's a particularly terrible endeavor for me, my spiral of increasingly-tiny validation windsprints collapsed into a disgusting pile of panting jackass and everything stopped.

This story isn't about that at all, and I will set it aside after pointing out that the mess above is where my head was at when I, out of nowhere, and for the second out-of-nowhere time in my life, did something my friend Paul told me to do and dove into something I knew nothing about.

(The significance of this is only dawning on me now — previously, Paul had been the shoulder-devil telling me not to blow off a friend's generous offer to produce a record with me, and now Paul had installed a little birdie on my shoulder to sit there and insist that I learn Arduino. I didn't even know the word Arduino prior to him saying that it seemed like the kind of thing I should get into, so, I owe that guy a dinner; I also still owe him some piano lessons from a previous obligation. The moral of this paragraph is, "if you're lucky enough to have a Paul in your life, make sure your Paul is treated better than mine.")

Arduino, for the uninitiated, is an electronics platform that brings together the concepts of basic electrical engineering — wires, resistors, microchips, circuit boards, motors, switches, LEDs — with the concepts of software coding — programming, debugging, writing scripts for various complex outcomes based on user behavior — in a friendly ecosystem of institutional tweakability and with a broad community of like-minded tinkerers. Want a machine that sends you a tweet every time your cat poops? ...why? No no, sure, okay — you can knock that out in an afternoon. How about this: want to keep the door to the litter box closed unless your cat is walking by, so the dog doesn't get into it? We'll need a couple parts for that, but pre-made versions of both of them are already being sold online for a couple of bucks each. Let's do it. What's that? You want to receive a text that confirms your cat has been drinking your beer and just failed a breathalyzer test that you've hidden in their litter box? You might be powerfully insane. Done.

As you will have no trouble imagining, when Paul explained to me what Arduino was, visions of unlimited power descended upon me. I knew nothing at all about electronics or programming, so I got a book for beginners and a spiral-bound notebook and started taking notes, like it was a class; resistors are measured in ohms, capacitors are measured in farads. At the same time as I was wading into the Radio Shack stuff, I was learning first principles as a programmer; if/else arguments, floating point numbers, looping logic. I had fine-tipped Micron pens in a handful of colors, and I'd sit down and make diagrams for myself until everything seemed to make sense.

It was boring. It was abstract. Nothing I was learning would stand a chance of being committed to memory without having some practical use to weigh that memory down; 'necessity is the mother of actually remembering Kirchoff's Law,' etc.. What I needed was a big, cool project to work on, something where I'd be learning these things because I had to — something I'd want to want to finish, something that promised to be cool enough that it'd be worth the inevitable frustration of figuring out how to do it.

I don't care about Connect Four at all, it must be said. I'm bad at Connect Four; I don't have any particularly fond memories of playing Connect Four. I think my mind drifted to Connect Four only after I had established limitations of sensibility; "maybe a video game something," "with minimalist gameplay," "and minimalist control surfaces." I settled on the faux-antique furniture styling — which, when combined with period-incorrect electronic fixtures, I would later refer to as "radiopunk," dorkiness be damned — because I happened to know that said look is, secretly, pretty easy to pull off if you know your way around a hobby store; that particular combination of aesthetics gives a high coolness-return on your difficulty-investment.

Take a dead-simple user interface of knobs and LED lights, use it to run a dead-simple game of stacking lights, build it into an almost dead-simple wooden box; I figured I had arranged a solid threefer for myself. I had no idea at all — no idea at all — how any of the stuff beyond, "first you drill holes in a box, then you finish the rest of the project," was going to actually happen, but... whatever.

My "day job" is visual effects for movies and television; every day I'm asked to create images of things that don't exist. It's fun work, and applying those skills at home for dumb little projects is just gravy on top. In a week and a half, I had gone from throwing out everything I used to do in my free time and having no idea what I would do with myself, to finding an exciting new direction to explore, and then conceiving of a place to aim for. Then, after an hour of fiddling, I found myself staring at a concept image.

Everything up unto this point was all well and good — a big idea, a couple intentions, a handful of completely unqualified assumptions that several things I knew nothing about would be doable upon trying — plus one quick 3D graphic — but then, staring at the image I'd made, a couple of things settled on me. I really, really wanted that stupid Connect Four game, for one thing, and — without really considering it — I had somehow gotten myself into a position where the only way to silence the buzzing in my head would require tricking electrons into dancing for my amusement, and the only part of the process I understood was drilling holes.

I've been looking into getting some arduino's for Grayson and I to work on together.  what's a good resource?

Eddie, you should look into a thing called the Makey Makey, which is along the lines of an Arduino without the coding. Great jumping-off point. Anything you can control with a keyboard, you can now control with anything.

I got Paul one of these a while back — he made a joystick out of a cup of water and we used it to operate an online flight simulator. All sorts of possibilities, very little confusion.

Makey Makey looks stupidly fun!

One of the forgiving aspects of diving headfirst into a pool of unknowns is that, while the pool is mostly comprised of "struggles" (cold water), there are also a few warm areas of "ease" (pee). Such was the case for me and my LED problems; for a week I floundered among various deeply confusing strategies for making a light matrix, learning about things like "Charlieplexing" and persistence-of-vision gags and all kinds of disheartening complication, before I found myself in a pleasantly warm pocket of surprise.

So, there are these things called Neopixels.

For anybody looking at the end result, there's not much of a difference between normal LEDs and Neopixels; they're just little lightbulbs. In fact, the Neopixels I ended up using are pretty much a string of Christmas lights. The difference is that a string of Christmas lights would be a daisy chain of bulbs, and the Neopixels are a daisy chain of microchips. Each Neopixel is a little circuit board with a chip on it that can be given instructions — really, each pixel is like a dumb little Arduino — and the chip controls an RGB LED.

The salient feature of Neopixels is that the first pixel knows it's Pixel 1, and the next one knows it's Pixel 2. As such, instead of sending voltages to each of your lights, you send data to one. Instructions for the whole string of lights goes into Pixel 1, and Pixel 1 takes the first command and passes the rest along. Each Neopixel sorts out its own voltage.

One short week after my initial plan fell apart, with one stroke of surprise luck-pee, I'd gone from needing 147 wires to needing 4; a red one for power, a blue one for ground, a green one for timing, and a yellow one for data. (Most newer Neopixel products only use 3 wires, in fact — power, ground, data.) I bought two strings of 25 and connected them end to end. They arrived a few days later, and worked immediately. No fuss; sudden glory.

Which — huh. Right, so that's one thing down.

After psyching myself up for mountains of confusion, and then immersing myself in said confusion for a week or more, the whiplash success of the Neopixels gave me a goosin' of confidence that this whole thing might really come together as anything more than an idea. Up until this point, everything I had ever done with electronics had been included in the little starter kit my Arduino came with — minor blinky contraptions, built on plastic circuit boards meant for prototyping. My attempt to make a buzzer buzz was unsuccessful; such was my level of physical expertise. I had a bit more theoretical experience — spending a week trying to comprehend Charlieplexing will do that to you — but I still hadn't actually done anything, beyond filling a notebook with doodles and filling a folder with the bookmarked secrets of the universe.

In the same online order that bore my Neopixels, I also snagged a handful of bits and bobs I thought I would end up needing for my first foray into the physical reality of electronics: I got myself some knobs and the potentiometers they would be attached to, a giant red button for mashing, a giant chrome toggle-switch for power... and also a soldering iron, for binding the metals of Earth together at 700° Fahrenheit.

The Neopixels were unproven at purchase, so there was a bit of nervousness about that. I had never put a knob on a potentiometer before, so I wasn't certain I'd matched the sizes correctly; plus, I bought the pots after doing no math at all, so whether or not they'd adjust voltages within the right order of magnitude was a shot in the dark. It all felt quite a bit like being Harry Potter and walking through Diagon Alley for the first time, picking up magic items at random, hoping they're the right ones — and that's just the components. There's a second kind of nerves reserved for purchasing equipment that gets incredibly hot and does things with molecules — I didn't even engage with those nerves, I bought my soldering stuff at random. I trusted myself; there's a million magical items for you to choose from at Diagon Alley, but the soldering iron chooses the soldering wizard.

("Boy, that metaphor took a turn for the precious." Shut up. "Can't we go back to the pee in the pool metaphor?" Shut up.)

After testing the Neopixels — finding myself suddenly able to control the color and brightness of 50 individual lights with ease — I set my sights on the rest of the project. I needed to mount a 7x7 matrix of Neopixels, I needed to mount my knobby-pots and toggles; I needed to reach a rapprochement with my wand and figure out how to solder without cooking myself, to say nothing of the fact that I also needed to teach a computer to play Connect Four using nothing but logic. My work was cut out for me; all that was left to do was suddenly bring back the pee metaphor and stop typing.

<--- Really digs Teague's writing style and sense of humor.

Really hoping you follow through with the audio-book thing, "The Internet Knows Where I Live" is still in regular rotation amidst my DiF Highlights playlist.

Thanks, peeps. Once I get the whole thing down on paper — and then go back over it with a fine-toothed comb a couple times — I'd definitely do a narration thing with it. Shit, the narration is the fun part. 

Nice write-up. The way this simplifies and explains a lot of important coding aspects is great. As a bit of an "editor's note:" It's not immediately clear that the "six inches in front of my nose" thing is part of the metaphor, I briefly pictured you trying to code with your face pressed against the screen. Unless you actually did go temporarily blind, then carry on.

Also, the way you format your curly braces is insane.

Teague, this write-up is fantastic!

I love that, never thought of it that way. Though in some instances I've found it feels like the computer couldn't care less what I think.

I don't know if you're at all interested in expanding this project, but I wrote a connect four AI in school a couple years ago. If you're interested in implementing a single-player option, I'd be happy to help with it.

You know the problem with customizing a box? There's no drama in it.

So, scientists thought rogue waves were a myth until 1995, when an oil rig off the coast of Norway, on an average day of thirty-foot seas, recorded an eighty-five foot wave. You can look at the recorded chart of waves that day, and it looks exactly like the chart for every other day — a steady sine pattern, a million identical peaks — with one peak that stands three times taller than the rest, starkly un-mythical, making you nervous. There was no warning. The wave before was normal, the wave after was normal, and the wave between was a tower. Fields of math were changed to reflect reality, prediction models snapped into place, and now satellites see rogue waves all the time. They're a fact of nature; behemoth vertical anomalies reminding the sky that the ocean is always coming for it.

Anyway, you can buy boxes at the craft store.

A brief word about the process of drilling holes: I knew that my Neopixels would require a 3/8" bit, and my first attempt at drilling made use of a "normal" drill bit at that diameter. Anyone following in my footsteps should know that what happens next is a supersonic collision between the box and the drill, which is a mistake that costs however much a box costs. A spade bit is the way to go for this; nice clean holes, nice sane drilling. Throw a printed grid onto the box, Sharpie a little dot through all the intersections, and nestle the spade bit into the dots. Drill, plunge, repeat.

(Continuing in the general spirit of scientific reporting, I want to provide one other key insight that was discovered along the way. Once you have a box of holes — perhaps, say, covered in sawdust and needing to be cleaned — pressing the pipe-end of a floppy vacuum hose against those holes and sliding it around creates exactly the sound of a radio being tuned. It's crazy. You're welcome, future.)

I went through over a dozen arrangements of buttons and knobs before settling on a layout; once determined, another few spade-bit holes were popped into the box and components were finger-tightened into position. The Neopixels were also temporarily added; later, I decorated each with a little black necklace of heat-shrink tubing before poking them through for good. I punched a couple holes through the side of the box for power cables, and added a giant comedy-sized "draw hasp" — that is, a latch for keeping the halves of the box locked together; one of those Pelican-case-style latches where you pull one tab over the other and it snaps down into a locking position. My giant comedy-sized toggle switch was installed next to the giant comedy-sized hasp, bringing the number of chrome-ish protuberances to two and the external assembly to its completion.

I threw an Arduino into the mix just to see what the thing would look like with the lights on, and took the photo above while in the throes of a painful grin. It was, on the one hand, totally premature to say that I had "done it" — on the other hand, it was clearly not premature to say that, and holy shit look at my glowing box.

"That looks exactly like a real thing almost," I marveled.

I cranked the brightness until it hurt. I stared into the light like a Spielberg character.

After taking the bits and pieces back out of the box and sanding everything, I treated the wood. The first thing I did was give everything a couple coats of wood stain, a sticky affair that can be affectionately thought of as kamikaze for brushes; a couple days later, now dried and pungent, the box was attacked with a fork. My idea was to give it an artful coat of faux-antique wear and scratches first, and then cover those bruises with a glaze-y finish on top, in a way that doesn't actually make sense as a replica of antique things but looks cool as sort of a "heightened reality" indulgence. I tore little nooks and scrapes into the wood on all sides, as well as re-sanding the edges and anywhere that would have been "handled" a lot over the "lifetime" of the thing. Two different kinds of damage, and I went in opposing directions with their contrast — the worn-down edges were left brighter than the surroundings, showing the original butter-colored wood instead of the stain; the scrapes and gashes were liberally gooped with black acrylic paint and then immediately wiped, leaving them dark and striking.

I went through a bunch of designs for the logo — at first I was thinking in terms of my invented relic having been a finished product that just happens to be seventy years old, and thus needing a professional period-appropriate logo that would have been professionally applied at the time and weathered since. I've done quite a bit of lettering and sign-painting stuff, and I love the look of those old "Coca-Cola"-logo style image marks, so I started merrily down the path of fanciness before coming to a sudden stop, right after sketching out my third design; my work-in-progress itself was a cooler image than the logo was going to be. The guideline rings looked wonderful with the intersecting scrapes of the text's x-height and base lines; the whole thing felt very authentic and "drawing-board"-y. I wanted to keep it, so I changed my mind: the actual (fake) history of this game was that it was a proof-of-concept that was being passed around the engineering department as a potential future-product for the company that was making it, and someone had slapped this half-assed logo on the side right before presenting the game at a meeting or something, where the company rejected the whole project and this one prototype is all that remains.

When you spend a long time on a project, you start telling yourself stories about it. Whatever. Sold.

I had been calling this thing the connect fourduino in the previous weeks; I settled on the abbreviation "co-fo-ino" during the design phase because it was fun to play with the "o" shapes, and eventually arrived at the stylization CoFoiNo with the all-important minuscule "i" for the visual balance and hint that it's not a lowercase "L." I'm aware that to someone completely uninitiated it might read as "Co-Foi-No," and I have decided that I'm gonna spend the rest of my life explaining myself anyway, so what the hell.

(If I had this whole process to do over again and could only change one thing, I wouldn't add any color to the logo. Right before I applied the clearcoat, I got nervous about having the logo be totally unvarnished and penciled in a bit of color as a compromise; it still looks fine, but it looked cooler without the filled-in letters.)

I rigged up a little tripod to dangle the box from and went over it several times with clear gloss spray, maybe five or six coats in total. (I have yet to encounter a situation wherein I regretted doing too many clearcoat passes; it has always gotten better with more coats. Be brave.) I didn't do any sanding or polishing between coats, as I wanted to keep a little bit of the natural chunkiness and texture of the wood. I'd spray a coat, wait fifteen minutes, and spray again. The clear coat was the last step in the box-stylization process, and once it was dry, it still looked wet. That's the dream.

(The big red button is missing from the control surface; it adds something, I think.)

There's not much drama in customizing a box, but I think it turned out well. It was just an empty thing — the parts that were installed didn't actually do anything — but the big push and little progressions were finally getting me somewhere. It had now been several weeks since I started in on everything, and in the intervening box-time time I had begun to experiment with soldering and circuitry. I had some electrical concepts figured out; I had some electrical experience under my belt. I had the electrical components, and now I had the console. I had a plan.

All the pieces were coming together; the process of diving-in to learn the waters had turned out to be relatively safe after all. Except, fun fact — you know what's not a myth?

Sooooo....what you're saying is, you gave it Dino-Damage (tm)