This stumped me until past noon, when I took a breather, drove over to the sewing place and negotiated a January special. Fourteen hours of class for $11 per hour. This is the same place I took the intro at more than twice that rate and was satisfied with the product. I want to learn to make something out of a pattern and maybe some useful things around here. Like the electronics, I could probably buy the finished articles for less, but thinking like that is a dead end.Off to the library where, as I sat down, I had to field a bunch of calls from guitarists who didn’t make it last Friday and wondering how it went. Most of us have a common understanding that the new guy gets support to the extent of showing up at his first few gigs and playing audience. Also, Ray called and it seems Bose has a smaller edition of the L1, that prohibitively expensive tower PA they’re hawking. Ray and Cowboy Mike report “The Big Picture” (a club on University Drive) have the smaller unit, but I can’t get there on Saturdays to hear it. That’s bingo night.
Then I did something many won’t identify with. I drove all the way back to Barnes and bought that book on knitting socks. Only those who know how hard it is for me to find something I’ve never read before will see the logic. Come on, be a sport and ask me anything about socks. That part the covers your ankles? That’s called a gusset. Tube socks have no gusset. The directions use a grid layout, which made instant sense to me. The stitches are produced according to the layout, which any decent programmer will spot is an array of symbols.
I’m not promising a thing, but you know, as I read those symbols I could see the sock taking form in my mind’s eye. I’ve got my Boy Scout merit badge for knitting, peeps. I made a scarf I wasn’t too proud off, but I got that badge. So it’s not like I don’t have a sense of what is involved. But knitting something round instead of flat? That’s another doozie. What say I give it a stab? Get it? Knitting needle. Stab. Are you with me?
I’ve started another lawyer novel, “Eclipse”. The typecast guy is such a wonderful lawyer his wife is leaving him. The premise is he is defending a tribal leader in an African village that is being polluted and corrupted by American oil interests. It’s okay so far, let me make some hot chocolate. It is a chilly winter night, probably down in the 60's.
You’ll want to know what’s going wrong with my circuit. Well, the way it is set up, there is a capacitor that discharges current, and this declining current is sent to an integrated circuit that flashes on and off. As the current drops, the flashing is supposed to become progressively slower and finally stop. If you play the slots, you’ll be familiar with this effect. Well, mine flashes but it never stops or slows down. I’ve built enough circuits to know the problem is in the part of the wiring that “has to be right”. Hence, all the meters shown here as I follow the voltage around the wiring paths.
For my Xmas treat, I bought myself two new shirts and two new pair of slacks. So I’ll look spiffy if I meet Snow White over the holidays. No wait, I’m confusing elves and dwarfs again. Hey, it’s not like my brothers wore name tags. I’ll have to develop a mnemonic to get those classifications right. You know Skipper, the boat guy? He always knows. But that’s because he doesn’t call them elves. He calls them “those little Santa-f**ks”. With the hammers. From Homo Depot.
At 9:46PM I got the circuit to work. Due to the ICs, it was not as difficult a build as the LED matrices I managed six months ago. However, the behavior was not program-controlled, and what made it complex was everything had to be done with “dumb” components. There’s a paradox if you ever had one. If the author had known me, he would have taken the opposite tack and described it as an apparatus that acted like a computer, and I would have grasped it all on the spot.
What was the problem? The resistor color codes most familiar are in the 100Ω to 1000Ω range. I’m now into timing circuits that operate with 10MΩ parts. It’s like reading decimals without commas, here, you try it: 1000000 or 10000000. The three darkest colors are green, blue, and violet. I had one resistor with a green instead of a blue band. One resistor was one zero off. The circuit was flashing, but so fast I thought the lights were on steady.
So pardon me if I spend the remainder of the evening with some nice simple sock schematics. Knit one, purl one, careful never to confuse such a level of mental activity with real thinking. But if you do, there is always a career in drywalling.
