One year ago today: April 17, 2019, daffodils in blue plastic.
Five years ago today: April 17, 2015, SUV = Tiger Tank = mpg?
Nine years ago today: April 17, 2011, surprise, Arduino anniversary!
Random years ago today: April 17, 2010, no money in writing reviews . .
My day off, and it was needed. My physiology said to shut down for at least eight hours. Most sources refer to heart attacks as an incident with a start and stop time. Nope, the effect is on-going and long term. Recovery is never total but the good news for me is complete shut down is now rare, as in a few times this year at most. Hey, that beats two or three days a week like before. I spent a lot of the time studying the Auvoria Prime Forex trading model. The news is encouraging from my standpoint, which is different than calling it good news.
I attended what they call study hall, a Zoom meeting where an experienced user answers questions. I gravitate to the ones that talk about the software, as I’m not that keen on all the lifestyle and business model blabber. Get me a million bucks and let me worry about my quality of life. Listening to others is amusing. Many are not prepared to lose money to make money. That is not compatible with maximum returns, which they a psyched up about. The package seem popular with military types.
My immediate strategy is to learn the signals that say when to hit the stop trading button. I confirmed that open trades remain active after my account is shut down for the week. I saw the traces, but didn’t have the knowledge to cancel them. So my demo account lost a bit. Now that I know that, I can delete the trades that even stand to lose. It’s a matter of reading the spread in the Forex window. Having the time, I watched another session on them helping new people to set up accounts. Strange how the computer should have made such things easy but they screwed that up, too.
One emerging development is that where the Reb & I find a surprise glitch with the software or the system, we have a damn good track record of guessing right. There could be many reasons for this, but the trend is undoubtedly there. Even where we differ on a setting or a trade, we are consistently finding out later that’s because the issue itself was contentious or questionable. I am so far immune to all the hype. Keep checking back, trading starts again this Sunday.
Humbolt University Moot Team.
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A drizzle kept me indoors, where I did some work on the bathroom, including more cedar panels. It is starting to look right, if you like that Texas outhouse motif. I measured out and marked where I have to run in a new circuit for the planned oscillating fan, and my pull chain light. Nothing spells rustic like a pull chain, the reason is actually practical. The secondary lighting is best in the vanity and shower areas, the commode is recessed at bit and a bit dark. I don’t call it the reading room for nothing.
How is my old sort of hobby, the Arduino, faring? It’s still the largest following in the micro-controller world and I long to have a work area set up again. You can thank the belayed renovations for this lengthy interruption. I still read CircuitDigest and similar. One thing that has not changed is the utter lack of anything new. Many “new” projects are nearly senseless and expensive copies of what is already out there, and there remains that Gen X fascination with getting around, storing, or automating passwords. Not typing in your password or relying on a memory locations defeats the purpose, folks.
One such “nothing new” chapter that still fascinates me is moving displays but let me narrow that down. The only new approach (and we are calling 1995 new) is a method called charlieplexing. It derives from multiplexing, which is the controlling of more than one entity per pair of wires. If you go back eight or so years, you’ll find I posted a number of flashing LED projects that used the method. My most celebrated prototype was the RAM seven-segment number display completed the week after my potential sponsor went bankrupt.
Here’s the quick explanation of how charlieplexing differs from multiplexing. With multiplexing, you use a pattern of digital on-off signals to operate your project, usually some kind of display. What happens is diodes (one-way components) channel your DC current around for the desired effect. But there is a maximum amount each pair of wires can do, so you have to add more pairs and more overhead to control larger projects. This, to me anyway, explains why moving LED displays are so damn expensive.
What charlieplexing does is take advantage of how DC control is possible by utilizing two ground wires connected to a common power supply and diodes arranged in opposite directions. It adds a third dimension of control by pairing up relatively cheap diodes that still react digitally, but now depend which of two grounds is “off”. For some reason, I always remember the formula because it is used in statistics. N*(N-1) possible states where N is the number of pins or wires, same thing. Thus, five pins could control 20 LEDs. In my mind’s eye, I find it convenient to imagine another distinction. Multiplexing is wired in series, charlieplexing is wired in parallel.
If you like this sort of hobby, by all means, look up examples. They tend to not stress that your don’t just turn the pins off and on in combinations. Fact is, while but that at any given split second, two pins are active, you must also “null” the rest. Most trials that fail overlook this step, caused by (again, I only think this) the fact the most efficient way to keep organized is the use matrix storage of the pin conditions, and you must expand the matrix to allow for the “nothing” conditions. And hey, that is the easy explanation.
Why yes, I have a theory that could expand on charlieplexing. I suggest that yet another layer of control could be possible by changing the direction of current flow. This is not the same as AC, but instead of using two grounds and one current, control is achieved by one ground and changing the current direction. If somebody figures out how to wire the thing, I’ll write the code.
ADDENDUM
Old Zane does his best to make the west romantic. Constrained by his times, he just spent side B of tape 2 avoiding saying the girl was horny as hell. By his late career, Grey was also suffering from the early signs of political correctness. His heroes all have "some Indian blood" an the only feuds that really persist are between white men. It's a Hatfield-McCoy theme, this book is called "The Last Man". I'll let you know when he finally puts the rod to her, and how old Zane sanitizes the account.
