Why lookie, it’s the poor man’s Segway. Laugh it up, that’s the only humor today. I was up late again with the Arduino. You already know this blog is not the main resource for news from the development department. You’ll have to imagine all what is happening over there. Good stuff. I’ve run up against another hurdle; here’s the facts.
The problem again is, there is no middle ground, that is, the easy parts are too easy and the hard parts are too hard. I cannot afford the sensors I had originally wanted to play with, but now realize with the LEDs, I can learn the concepts and keep going. There was a time I never stopped to think of the logic behind those rows of lights on an equalizer that kept beat with the music.I’m conceptualizing getting a single pattern to move across an LED grid. Picture it as one slice of a moving LED display. My idea is a 7 x 10 lattice of 70 LEDs. The goal is having a single pattern move across said LEDs. This is the most ambitious project so far. The Arduino only has a maximum 16 output pins, so (and I was afraid of this) I’ll need to use matrices.
Hear me straight, not just matrices alone, but matrices exclusively as they apply to microprocessor circuitry. Sure enough, in all the tottering empire of Arduino on-line publications, nothing covers this topic at a beginner’s level. That, or as often happens, it is well-hidden from search engines because the authors know nothing about metatags or common usage. I mean, try to find the term they use for what I call “the space between pages”.
But I did find some material, most of it on a store-bought 8 x 8 matrix. You don’t learn nothing by going that route. Several articles on smaller grids tended to focus on what it does rather than how to do it, the surefire mark of amateurs trying to impress. (C’mon guys, there are no babes trolling the schematics for nerds like you. What are you thinking? That she’ll fall in love with your huge selenium rectifier? Then again, that’s why you are called nerds.)
Yet, I must start with a small grid, and the smallest is 3 x 3. Many diagrams showed elaborate arrays of junctions with a transistor at each intersection, again, no explanation why. As another hurdle, the library has all new computers that are immune to a realplayer install, so I’ll have to work around that as well before I have any examples to follow.
Mid-afternoon brought a fierce windstorm that strew everything on the street, from palm fronds to Wallace’s patio furniture. I was stranded out at Pembroke Pines Mall, where I had, for the first time in years, Arthur Treacher’s Fish and Chips . The quality has declined, but I suspect the cause is they have cut back on calories and salt in their recipe. An hour later I was hungry again.
ADDENDUM
Oh, and my doctor did not okay popcorn. My test results still show abnormal levels, though within the safety zone. It was all those years in the company cafeteria what did me in, lads. Not incidentally, the same tests showed again that the only thing wrong is my heart and related cholesterol. Other than that, my results are as perfect as an athletic man half my age. Yes, I support stem cell research, and forget the ethics. You want ethics, look at the ocean, where everything eventually eats everything else.
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