[Hackability] Hello and welcome!

[Ian Smith]

> Can't wait to see your blog with all those pics and to start documenting on the internets some real scooter hacks! Can you believe no one is doing this stuff ANYWHERE and putting it online?? It's hard to believe, but I guess we will have to pioneer this important step in making life easier for our bretheren!
To quote from the Hearing Aid Hacking livejournal: "We're frustrated that we're behind the technology curve and pay huge dollars/pounds/euros for good hearing aids that are unaware of and incompatible with anything resembling recent advances in consumer audio tech.

We're willing to blaze our own path because no one will do it for us until they realize there is money in them thar hills."

(Relatedly: I'm new to Noisebridge.  Is it common to document projects centrally, on the wiki or something, at least as a link to one's personal web presence?  Documenting these sorts of hacks on our personal blogs is all well and good, but having a central resource of "here are places to look for things that people have done and tried and learned" is even better.)
  
> http://www.ti.com/product/bq2013h

That looks really neat - I'd be interested in working on that, maybe getting it into kit form?  My chair can display the current voltage (in a diagnostic menu), which seems to be standard on powerchairs but ~unheard of on scooters … but it'd be nice to have even more information, and maybe do some basic logging and tracking over time.  

(Switching to Liz' email)  
> I'd love to see us have a meetup and fix or hack something in the next
> month, maybe on a Saturday or Sunday afternoon.

I'm hosed next weekend, but I'd be very excited about doing this another time.  (Or even making it a semi-regular thing, if there's sufficient interest.)

Intro time:

I have three-ish projects in various stages of planning:
- USB charging from my powerchair (24v power supply.  Although the plug may have the wrong polarity, checking that is my next step.)

- The door to my building is triggered by a remote transmitter; I've found the points to short to activate it, and replacing the battery with DC from my chair will be simple.  But I'm still undecided if I should have it constantly on (and rely on the fact that it's short range) or just wire a more discreet button into my chair.  (Or a happy medium: a toggle switch such that it can be disabled when I'm staying in the lobby rather than just passing through.)  Either way, I'd like to stop carrying this bulky remote in my bag.

- A Raspberry Pi.  My hearing aid and cochlear implant can both take audio input through an induction loop; the idea of putting  having my chair be an audio routing mechanism (music?  Phone?  Laptop?  Maybe an interface to navigation or other data?) is intriguing.

Ian