A few weeks ago I attended linux.conf.au 2012 in Ballarat, Australia. I've attended it for many years now (every year since 2006!) and the conference has always been a great place to see what other people are doing with open source, discover new things I want to play with when I get back, and generally feel it's okay to be a huge open source nerd.

This year was also the first time I'd presented at the conference, although just in one of the miniconfs. The Arduino miniconf is usually quite popular as the first half of the day is spent assembling a project - this year a full Arduino clone with a bunch of extra peripherals - and then more conventional presentations on things related.

I've embedded my talk below, you can probably guess the subject given how often I've posted about it. (The clip is a bit of a wonky encode, the AV team didn't quite trim it properly so it doesn't start until 57m into the video. It's not really an hour an a half long!)

In other news, I've started to embark on designing an Arduino clone based off the XMEGA MCU line, probably a D3 to begin with as it's what I'm most familar with. The rough bought layout has been done, although it's missing switching power sources between the DC jack and USB. It's also deliberately not using the USB capabilities of some of the XMEGAs since there's a lack of good code around to support it and it complicates the board layout a fair bit.

The rest of the projects are slowly making their way towards further progress!