Retro visions of the future. Why is the future always silver?
(monorail/Peoplemover and General Motors HQ in Detroit)

Lately we’ve been working quite a bit with Philips (now NXP) LPC2000 family of ARM7 processors like LPC2138, LPC2148, etc. I’ve designed a serial-programmer board for these chips a while back and this second PCB revision came in with our most recent order. The board has a 3.3V voltage regulator, MAX3232 transceiver and a few components to interface with the microcontroller’s programming pins. LPC-ARM chips feature a built-in serial bootloader, so this board has everything needed to program one with the free LPC2000 Flash ISP Utility. Perhaps we’ll try to make some of our general-purpose PCB designs like this one available for sale through the website..

While in Moscow we dropped by for a visit to Russia’s premiere design agency - Art.Lebedev. The studio is located in the hub of things just a few blocks away from Kremlin. We got a chance to meet Art Lebedev himself, the head of ID department Timur Burbaev and a few other desigers. Artyom purveyed a bit of his philosophy on perceptural mapping of three-dimensional space and showed some examples of trademark Lebedev stretchy site design ;)

On the way out Scott took the opportunity to play a game on Soviet-era arcade machine called “Morskoi Boi” (roughly translates to “Sea Fight”). Using a periscope for aim, you get to sink enemy battleships with blinking-LED torpedoes. I remember dropping my 15 kopeks to play this game as a kid, but this was a rare chance: I read in a paper that these arcade machines used to be custom manufactured at some Soviet army factory. A University in Moscow now has a student-run museum dedicated to these old arcade games and apparently Art.Lebedev made a deal to lease a different machine from them each month in exchange for designing their website :)

Arriving in Moscow on May 9th, we got a chance to catch Victory Day celebrations in the center of the city. The streets were closed to traffic and filled with people, street vendors and performance stages. May 9th has always been a BIG day in Russia - in a nation that lost tens of millions in WWII, every single family was deeply affected by the tragedy and so a great feeling of celebration pervades on this day. It is especially nice to see so many people mingle together: pensioners waltzing to the tunes of a military orchestra, young (and old) dancing at pop-music tents, foreigners absorbing a flavor of Russia’s holiday culture..

In May, I spent a week in Moscow installing an interactive project we did in collaboration with Scott Paterson at Frog Design. It is really fascinating to see how much the city has changed in recent years, new-found wealth transforming it into one of the most expensive places in the world. Scott and I split a business suite in a centrally located Katerina hotel at some $800+ per night.. let it just be said that the level of luxury didn’t quite match the pricepoint ;)

The site of our installation was in the reception lobby of Mirax Federation Tower, a tall scyscraper still under construction as part of a huge development that is going to become the headquarters of Russia’s premier real estate company. Moscow’s overheated market is making these giant structures possible, but the city is paying the price: news reports have it that the historic buildings in city center are crumbling due to the shifting landmass caused by heavy structures that are going up everywhere.