My decision on bingo at Buddy’s is to stop until at least I have my own transportation. The game was dependent on them helping me move the equipment and total staff support, both of which have waned over time. Mind you, that doesn’t mean I’m a stranger and I stopped y’day for Thanksgiving. This is the biggest holiday of the year in these parts. Not like other states and provinces where they treat it as a another commercialized tradition or family reunion of sorts.
Here, there is a genuine outpouring. A rotating crowd of 40 people at Buddy’s could not begin to make a dent in the mountains of food that showed up. I’ve seen the cruise ship buffets meant to amaze and the wedding banquets to impress, but they don’t compare to an unplanned Dixie Thanksgiving. Seven kinds of pumpkin pie. I didn’t stay (was home by 7:30 PM), but I’d ballpark there was enough food left for 150 people with more donations showing up by the minute.Home, it was, to read my newest mystery, “Obsession” by Jonathan Kellerman (yeah, Jonathman Kellerthan). He delights with wording intended to trick the reader into assuming each new character is a man, Holy 1970s, Batman. He’s a psychologist for sure. I’m just starting but he’s already used up most of the clichés. The wild gal who was molested, her sister who hates sex, the adopted daughter. The pace is a bit uneven but ever enough to keep it going.
Music. The new lady singer has responded, but I think I mixed things up. For some crazy reason, I thought she said she was a guitarist with vocals looking to start a band. Then I saw her song list and postulate if she could play all those tunes, she’d already be doing a solo act. Some wires got crossed here and I see from her most recent e-mails she does not have any notion of the amount of work involved or where to begin. Worse, a lot of her tunes are listenin’ music and personal faves rather than audience grabbers.
New things on the Internet that we all just love, how about those sites that advertise a free download to install a program? But when you get back home, the install wants an Internet connection to proceed. There must be a word or term for the dismal azzholes who do that. No doubt they have a standard set of defenses why they pull that stunt, and there’s words for that, too. Think the install for RealPlayer, the software needed to play back youTube files.
There were no library lineups y’day, so I used the extra time to look for a school that teaches me how to solder, a trade school of basic electronics. (I can solder big components, but small ones give me the slip.) Can’t find any school that will teach that one course. Same with compilers, the local schools won’t let you attend a single course without signing up for an expensive degree. They all use the government continuing ed money to print flyers of easy courses to sucker you in for an “interview” by a “counselor”. Nothing illegal but still pretty scummy.
I had been looking for a temperature-sensing transistor when I stumbled on the pixel algorithm reported last day. I, at the same time, ‘unearthed’ something else small enough to fit on an Arduino: GPS code. The expense of a GPS isn’t the chip, it is the antennas to receive the satellite signals while bouncing around on the dash of your car. With two Arduinos [and half a brain] anyone can be in the covert surveillance business.
How about an Arduino progress report? Sure, since you insist. It isn’t the $30 Arduino controller, but the $100 for parts I would need to test the software I’ve written to date. The photo shows an Arduino microcontroller, albeit an older version as evidenced by the serial port instead of a USB. The long black rectangle on the lower right is “the chip”. That’s where my code goes. This is the little gadget causing all the fuss.
And my code will run, I can guarantee, as I have considerable experience processing code in my brain. Had no mainframe at home and PCs did not come along until 8 years after I started programming. I’m learning fast and Arduino is almost always initialize, setup and loop. I’ve already coded around 30 projects since April, or another way, over twice the number coded during my entire five years in financial programming college. There is a reason.In finance, the only input was numbers, the only output was reports. One had to be conscious of the report layouts so that non-users could read them. That is partially where and why I learned to be a good typesetter; the only effective output device was the printer. The Arduino can have many inputs, which fascinates me. Light, temperature, sound and radio waves are my reading for now. This data can be used to operate a variety of components or simply record changes.
This is a bare beginning; consider me in Arduino nursery school. But what I’ve learned is solid. I’ve already envisioned circuits that are too much for existing (Arduino) pinouts. The most complicated circuit I’d ever touched previously was a three-way light switch in the basement hallway. By comparison, the most basic flashing LED with the Arduino is orders of magnitude more complex. It is not the circuit that makes it flash, but remote computer code. I will soon make it flash any way it possibly can without repositioning a single wire.
What’s more, it is one thing to get a pixel to flash on a computer monitor. It is another to get an external apparatus to flash on its own when a certain condition is detected, and to do so even after the computer is disconnected. This is a first for me and I’m glad to get to this level. May I point out that while I’m learning the Arduino language, watch out once I do, for I have in this lifetime already programmed vastly more complicated (non-robotic) routines than the most advanced examples in the final chapters of the Arduino textbooks.
Think of it as the complexity of robots finally meeting the sophistication of financial planning. My original aim was to understand robot technology and believe I could now build a basic unit similar to what you’d see at a kid’s science fair—but make no mistake what a key accomplishment that would represent for someone who started late and from scratch. I’m not putting together some store-bought kit or following a list of directions over here. How was your day?
Mine was: Temp: 76.5. Press: 30.0 Humid. 88.
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