OHS2013 BADGEr MacOS

The 2013 Open Hardware Summit was in Cambridge at MIT's Kresge auditorium. The attendees were as awesome as ever, and the line up of speakers was right on stupendous. Better than everything was the badge - a programmable repaper [1] display. To make it easy to get started hacking, the Wyolum folks wrote a utility program called Wifit (rhymes with Whip It) that let's you do a hello-world pretty fast on the badge.

Alas, installation instructions were provided for Linux and WIndows, but I carried a MacBook Air. I got real-close-now during the first block of speakers, but the MIT guest network blocked rsync (argh!). Finally home now, here are quick instructions for anyone attending OHS2013 who is Mac-limited.

(1) Install MacPorts [2] . I tried out MacPorts v.2.2.0 on both Mac OS 10.6 and 10.7.5. After the initial install, run the selfupdater to make sure your install is totally up to date:

    sudo port -v selfupdate     

(2) Install the numpy and PIL libraries. MacPort takes care of the dependencies which is very sweet.

    sudo port install py27-numpy
    sudo port install py27-pil

(3) Download and unzip the wifit code [3]. Change into the directory and call the wifit program from the command line. It'll open up an interactive window.

    python2.7 wifit.py

I didn't want to remap my default python in order to play with my badge, so I call "python2.7" If you want to make the MacPort 2.7 the default do this:

    sudo port select python python27
    python wifit.py

(4) Follow the Wyolum instructions for using their awesome tool.[4]