It is still early, so I took a break from the Arduino work of y’day by reading an Ortho Booklet “The World of Herbs & Spices”, inspired by my stroll with Alaine through the fancy garden of her neighbors, the religious group. There’s nothing quite like watching millionaires plant some carrots, as they supervise the staff on the best methods.
I’ve tried time to time but I’m not much good at recognizing non-vegetable types of garden leaves. I did learn lots from this book and here’s some to share. Did you know when a plant’s species contains “officinalis”, that means at some point it was used as a medical treatment. (Before discovering it was poisonous?)
Tradition being what it is, the lack of that term does not mean the plant isn’t therapeutic. Sort of the Dewey decimal system of the botanical gang, the Charlie Brown multiple guess method. Most curious was the rating of each plant for grow-ability. Is it coincidence that the more expensive cannot be grown here? Allspice, chocolate, cinnamon, cloves, cola nut, frankincense and myrrh are “not recommended”.What? No frankincense? How are people supposed to celebrate Labor Day? On the other hand, other advice made darn good sense. Like kelp, just you try starting your roto-tiller in twenty fathoms of water, or poppies, which are illegal in the USA, period. They steer you away from nettles as well, like you needed to be. An interesting book, light reading, if uninspired at times.
Hello world! Success. 8:47 AM and the Arduino is blinking away. I’ve tested a variety of different delay command settings and all work precisely as predicted. The lower limit of 20 milliseconds corresponds to what little I know of POV (persistence of vision) and at that speed a yellow LED takes on a slight greenish tinge. The flashing on-board LED and the reason a non-programmed LED will flash is not mentioned in any of the literature I’ve read, representing a serious lapse in the performance of the Arduino documentation department.
But you want to know about the driver trouble and how I fixed it. Well, old-timers with Windows will recall a quirk with the file structure. Take another look at the photo from y’day, shown here again. See how the FTDI file is five layers deep from its master folder? Windows, and incidentally your anti-virus programs too, really suck at finding anything more than three layers deep. So as to preserve my original filing system, I moved a copy of the drivers into the folder shown as -0022 and the device manager picked it up right away. Com port 6.I will admit that the Arduino unzip process does attempt to place the software in a top level folder, but that is not harmonious with my filing system, or for that matter any filing system that does not consider Arduino as the most important thing on the hard drive. I moved Arduino, as you see, into a highly organized file structure containing all my Arduino information. Still, success is success and time to move on.
First, kudos, I must reward myself. I’d like to thank my support staff, but I don’t have any. It was me and myself the whole nine yards. For my next round, I will test if how the Arduino handles two loops and how volatile the uploaded software is with a non-USB power source. I do believe I’ve already independently done more with robotics than anyone within 500 miles, the operative word being “independently”. That calls for a special trip for coffee to Dunkin, and a real donut like I have not had in years.
Before I got out the door, I tested another sketch and already found a serious problem in the Arduino procedure. The sketches do not cross-reference with the schematics. It becomes an easy mistake to run one sketch while configured for a different second project and your only indication will be that it probably won’t work. I’ve noticed the sketches are non-volatile and if disconnected from a power source, run again when the Arduino is reconnected to the computer. After two blinks of the yellow LED. Now I’m leaving for Dunkin, to see how long the [Arduino] memory persists.
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