Holy Smokes!!!

The Traveling Hacker Box was placed in the mail on the afternoon of January 27, in Hawaii. Today, January 30, I received it in central New Hampshire! Even the mail carrier was surprised that it arrived so quickly. Kudos to the US Postal Service for sending the box across 5000 miles in less than 3 days, despite the fact that it was sent via plain old $13 standard flat-rate priority mail. I'm not sure I'll ever use another carrier after this.

The box arrived in good condition, despite having broken the sound barrier on its way here (yes, I am kidding, please don't nit-pick).

I had planned on doing a YouTube video of me opening the box, but by the time it got here I was just too excited to bother with setting the camera up. I'll still do a video, but I'll have to exclude the opening ceremonies.

Next I laid out the contents of the box on my work bench. Please excuse the condition of the towel, it has seen several years of hard use on my bench. It's ugly, stained, burned, and has a metric butt-tonne of solder blobs all over it, but it is still functional and I always know where my towel is (I feel all cool and froody).

Most of these items will look familiar to you if you have been following this project, as they were nicely presented in previous logs. I will limit my descriptions to those things that I don't remember seeing before.

1: BigIslandCandies.com shortbread treats. Those definitely came from Hawaii. I'll probably give one a try but leave the rest for future box recipients.

2: A strip of WS2812B NeoPixel LEDs, in a bag that also includes a strip of header pins and a couple of breakout boards. Those puppies will be staying here, as I've always wanted some NeoPixels to play with.

The rest of the stuff looks familiar. There are some really cool things that came in the box, but I will be leaving most of them in the box as it continues on its merry way. These are the things I decided to grab:

Those switches will be perfect for a 12V power controller project I'm working on, the perfboards will be very helpful for future Arduino projects, the NeoPixels I already mentioned, and I've been wanting some solar cells to experiment with for quite some time. Thank you to whomever provided these goodies!

Here are the things I'm currently planning on adding to the box, though there may be some changes to this bunch depending on how well they fit into the box and whether I get any new ideas between now and when I seal up the box.

At the top are some vintage DPDT switches to replace the ones I took, to their right are some vintage (early-mid 1960s) oddball transistors. Going clockwise, there are six small perfboards to replace the three I took. These are very handy for small projects. Below them is a 10,000µF 100V capacitor, and to its right is an RTL-SDR for anyone interested in radio. This one has been modified with a BNC antenna connector, because I hate tiny antenna connectors. Continuing clockwise, there is a 12VAC to 5VDC USB power supply board. Next is a Hack-A-Day edition ProTrinket microcontroller. Above it is a pair of Addicore nRF24L01 transceivers. Above those are some vintage 7-segment LED displays that would be perfect for a retro project. Last but not least, in the center of the photo, is a pair of XMOS StartKit microcontrollers. These are multi-core MCUs that (I think) program in fairly straightforward C. More info can be had on the XMOS web site. They are way too much for the kind of projects I do, so hopefully someone else can get some use out of them. There may be some other items included, and the capacitor may or may not make it into the box due to it's size.

Speaking of which, there was one item which I very much wanted to include, but sadly it just won't fit into the box:

Bummer, no frickin' lasers.

So the box has now made it further than the original one had, according to @Benchoff . So far, so good. If we keep this going, we can make a lot of people happy. If one of us gets selfish, it hurts everyone. Let's all be decent and keep this going.

Long Live The Traveling Hacker Box!