April 26, 2014

Yesteryear
One year ago today: April 26, 2013, walnut paste.
Five years ago today: April 26, 2009, wearing my "lucky shirt".
Ten years ago today: April 26, 2004, carrot juice.

           Who wants to know how the gig went? For all my high hopes, it turned out to be only reasonably okay. Even upscale parts of town need support staff who in turn need places to hang out. The place was also not as big as impressioned by the advertising. It was also married-couples-ville and the bar paid by check, two things I’m certain all single bass players love to find out at the very last possible moment way too late in the evening. I drove home and had Marmite on toast, mulling this over. At least we got a repeat gig in June.

           Musically, same as before. This band needs stage time and lots of it. That’s where the distractions and surprises are and there was no shortage tonight. Overall, I say we got it 85% right, which is good but not good enough. Shown here is the bandshell slash stage, where we played to a captive audience. Captive to the Florida Pythons (or whatever) basketball game above our heads. That’s a joke, Florida pythons, get it?

           To the left is our keyboard player and to the right, our vocalist. All bands have singers but ours is a babe, neener, neener. See that outfit she’s wearing? Want to hear a funny I made up? Here goes anyway. I had to keep reminding the married men in the audience that they didn’t have to stare so deeply into the pattern to notice that what’s inside was already 3D. Am I on a roll, or what?
           Back to this morning, before siesta I rigged up the 1-bit memory, the gizmo I’ll need to advance, a circuit commonly called a flip-flop. All it does is stay on when you turn it on and vice versa. That is, you need two separate switches to operate it, however there is more to it as can “remember” where it was last set. Hooray, I’ve finally reached the point where the majority of circuits I rig up work right the first time. Each memory circuit requires four transistors. Can I even afford this? Well, remember that batch of “upside down” transistors from California? I think I may not have to throw them out after all. My interim goal is to build a byte of memory. Eight bits.

           [Author’s note 2021: I never did get to building the byte of memory, but I managed a couple of one bit prototypes. Life got just too busy.]

           I’m also investigating how to get the Arduino chip on to the cheap board. I’ve reported here a mini-chip available for most simple Arduino tasks but intuition says the Arduino is already limited enough, no need to help it get worse. Except, that is, for the simplistic one-trick programming featured in most how-to videos. Shown here are initial photo documentation of this step. The top photo shows the H-bridge socket for motor control and the bottom is a close-up of the fake 28-pin socket I’m assembling for the Arduino ATmega chip. Notice how the sockets spring back up out of the breadboard by themselves? That is the best that this planet’s engineers can do despite 50 years of lead time.

           Yes, those are pieces broken off header strips and old phone wires. All I can tell you is that real robot research is not nice clean workbenches and a pristine laboratories. To be fair, that is where most people start. Even the recent NOVA meeting was held in a classroom with nary a soldering iron in sight. That group needs to develop the mechanical skills or sign up some mechanical types or, as I warned, risk building a kit. Risk? Yep, risk not learning what you need to know.
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nbsp;          For example, I cannot find any instructions on making the Arduino pulse at the correct frequency, but I’ve sort of got it figured out. That is the definition of “striking dissimilarity” when deciding if a project will fly. Finding instructions vs. figuring it out. You can be sure I’ll be watching which route any future meetings take. That flasher thing I built with two capacitors, if I chose the right pieces, could be modified to pulse the required 16,000 times per second. I’m guessing, but if it works then it ain’t stupid.
           Summer’s here. 92F in the Florida room until I cranked on the A/C. For the dork in the news who drove that Lamborghini into the SUV at 100 mph, let’s hope things get even hotter for you. I don’t like middle-aged men who drive expensive cars way too fast. You can tell I read the newspaper at the bakery.
           Had to [read the paper], the crossword was too easy. As for the article that house sales are down because new buyers can’t afford both a house and student loan payments, anyone is free to rperuse the article I wrote eleven years ago on the topic of colleges pushing loans onto students. Starting with Broward Community College, [now just “Broward College”] who manipulate continuing education flyers as bait and switch. When you express interest in any course, no matter how small, they put the squeeze on you.

           [Author’s note: BCC is the outfit who tried to buffalo me into a $48k computer degree when I responded to a $39 evening course. That’s the same outfit that told me if I didn’t enroll then and there I was already depriving my grandchildren of my “duty to help them with their homework”. That slimy BCC pretend-counselor actually worked God into the pitch but I don’t remember exactly how. If I have time, I’ll find the report, but this blog does not have an index so failing that, find it yourself.]