Yes, I enjoy birdwatching but no, this is not some ornitho-existential question on the existence of birds. I just returned from the National ACS conference in San Diego, where I spoke about my feather-chem project. As this was the first time I’ve talked extensively about the project to someone who wasn’t a student or my wife, I realized there are still a number of concepts that I take for granted. One of those is related to the feather microcontroller development board created by Adafruit. Here is their 3-minute video introducing the product line:

I decided to use a feather microcontroller for my instrumental methods project because of the advanced microcontrollers used, the diversity of featherwings (and you know what those are because you watched the video, right?), and the small form factor which makes prototyping and creating custom featherwings pretty cheap. Plus, “feather” can be spelled with chemical symbols from the periodic table, which is something I like to do. That’s why you’ll see my project called FeAtHEr-Cm.

Now that you know what a feather is, head on over to the documentation for my project and learn a bit more about how I’m using feathers.