. . . but we were busy delivering this awesome new product!!!
(The baby is the product in question, not the hat; I also made the hat, but we're mostly psyched about the baby who's wearing the hat. The hat, though, I'm still happy with the outcome on that. It's a good hat.)
My wife gave me a Wicked Devices MintyTime kit for Non-Denominational Gift Giving Holiday. It's a great lil project, well within the reach of anyone with basic soldering skills and a steady hand. The instructions are clear (although, I swear to God, there's no mention of placing resistor R17 on the board--I missed the damn thing on *two* separate builds of this kit [more on that follows]). Conclusion: A fun, geeky project with attractive result and a graceful design; recommended for anyone with basic soldering skills, or more advanced hobbyists who want a very tidily executed binary clock.
That said, what really pleased me was Wicked Device's excellent customer service. After I built my first MintyTime, I discovered that it was keeping terrible time (loosing several minutes from every 24 hours) and burning through batteries like a lunatic. In fact, the behavior was *exactly* as bad as the extreme beta version they describe here (scroll down to point #4 on "Keeping Good Time"), back when they were trying to use the chip's (crappy) onboard RC oscillator rather than a dedicated crystal oscillator.
I emailed Wicked Devices and got a reply that same morning. Evidently a chip with the old software had slipped in among the current batch. Vic was happy to reburn it for me. Unfortunately, I hadn't socketed the chips when I built the kit (contrary to *my own damn advice!* Always socket your chips, kids!), and drove myself nuts trying to desolder a 16-lead DIP without destroying it (which is basically impossible with a standard soldering rig). I shared my grief with Vic, who suggested I mail the finished project to them, and they could reburn the chip onboard--which they did. Then the damn thing got lost by the USPS on the return leg, and so Wicked Devices sent me an entirely new kit *plus* the an extra little jumper board and jack so that you can run the clock off of a USB wall-wart instead of batteries.
The new clock runs *perfectly*: not a lost minute over the course of *weeks* of operation.
So, the final verdict: This is a good project from a great company; totally worthwhile purchase or gift.
[FYI: I've mounted the LEDs on the "wrong" side of the board here for my own aesthetic reasons.]
