One thing folks, is I know where to get $30 worth of fresh hot pizza for $5 in this town. It’s not what you know. And, I get the assorted, as shown here. Hey, I’m only allowed pizza once a week, so I like to do it all at once. Just look at those calories, and my juicy juice, and a good book from the Smithsonian Institute. It don’t get no better.
Another perfect day, the kind you dream about living in the frozen north. I recall my college days, my dorm room had a view to some foothills to the southwest in the Rocky Mountains. College is supposed to be fun and I suppose it is for those whose parents are picking up the tab, guys like “Snake”, whose parents paid him to go to college to keep him out of their house. Sometimes I would melt a hole with my hand in the ice on the windowpane and look at those hills. One summer I took the bus to the city limits and walked through them for six hours. But in the winter I would wonder if there was anywhere in the world it was nice to live. The only warm places one knew of, like Hawaii, were too expensive.
Dave-O was over on his bicycle. He is getting a big cash buyout soon, maybe even this month. He seems content to rent a room, but does not understand that isn’t a long-term solution. With just a room, you can’t develop your projects, although I’m the first to admit my music and electronics could be done on a tabletop. At least he’s eating again, albeit at McDonalds.
My latest experiment 019 shows a splitting point between matrix studies and mechanical robot studies. That should have been predictable since I have plenty of LEDs but no servos, gears, sensors and drive mechanisms. It is a matter of budget constraints. My budget works, but does not allow for expensive parts, although I’m on the lookout for a source. The closest local supply is remote control airplane hobby stores. For now, I’m planning an 8 x 40 matrix, a total of 320 LEDs.
Since nobody on the Internet wants to tell me where to get the perfboards and how to connect the parts, I will independently develop that technology as well. I believe that now that I can get patterns to flash and to obey keyboard commands (experiments 018 and 019) I am ready for a larger project. It will take longer, as I can’t just scale up what I’ve already done. I will also need to discover what kind of multiplexing is needed, as the Arduino does not have 48 pins.Even that isn’t the final plan, for it may not even be possible. The largest perfboard I can afford is 59 pins wide. Perfboard refers to the small wafer type used for electronics, but without the copper clad holes. That makes sense, because I would have to wire-wrap everything. Soldering such a beast is completely beyond my skill set. Also, it is dependent on getting that real bargain on 500 matching red LEDs from Hacktronics in California. Face it, LED dot matrix displays are expensive doohickeys.
Note that at this time, the planning stage, all is speculation and the final outcome may be totally different.
Another consideration is the code. To control the last experiment, I used up over 11% of the available memory space in the Arduino. I don’t know how to interface with any other code, so I must shoehorn everything into 32,256 bytes. It sounds like a lot but I will need at least 3,080 of them for the alphanumeric shapes alone. Of course, the answer is to use subroutines for anything that repeats, but such programming demands immense brain thrust. Maybe I’ll have to call in Patsie, the school board programmer. According to the impression she gives her family, she can design the multiplexer in her sleep.
ADDENDUM
You want to know about bingo. It was average in every way, except that I raised some money for the Haitian charity. This is rare, since I only associate with small unregistered charities staffed by volunteers. I do not accept any type of tax receipt, and the donation is listed simply as from “Friends of veryatlantic”. But it was a significant donation toward that wicked customs charge of $230. Then again, if Haiti was once governed by the English, such taxes will surprise nobody.
That being said, March was my worst month since, ooooh, my worst month ever. Let me double-check that. Yep. Good thing I’ve got steady income to pay all the bills, wouldn’t you say? Good, because that’s what everybody else is saying.
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