One year ago today: December 14, 2024, JeePee, my friend.
Five years ago today: December 14, 2020, sextant fluff.
Nine years ago today: December 14, 2016, a batbike trip.
Random years ago today: December 14, 2002, some books I hated.
Anniversary of JeePee’s passing. Very missed. I spent the early morning over hotcakes and coffee, with some deep reading of Arduino quirks. And discovered a mystery that may get me to bring out some old sketches (Arduino programs) that would not work right. It has to do with the delay() function, which pauses your code for a specified number of milliseconds. What could go wrong? See addendum. And here’s a video for anybody who thinks they work hard nowadays.
Today, I get half again as much due to the delay and you bet, back then this strategy made me broke. I recall saving up the $45 for this unknown gadget, shown here today properly mounted on a solid base with laser-etched captioning. I dug it out this morning after the neighbor started a motor—and I was still too weak to get mobile. So I searched around and got some parts together for a test run of this board. One of the defects with Arduinos is there is no way to tell what, if anything, is already loaded onto the device. And it uses the old USB-A plug, which is now beyond rare.
Funny, innit, I foresee a time in the future when this blinking light is considered comically primitive. Yet today, there are very few people over 40 who could pull this off. It involves mastering many tasks the average person in my age-group does not even know exist. Downloading the IDE, matching it to a COM port, debugging the code, and the dozen smaller steps that need to be figured out. The way I approach the challenge is by reading until I understand, but there is no proper guidance on what to read. Trust me, a thousand hours of intense study is an efficient start. I think this is why everything these days is done in teams—and the poor results show it.
Take the micros() command just mentioned. It comes with a description of how to use it by copy and paste code. That’s your indictor of how far most users grasp the concept. But I know those microseconds are too short for the Arduino to generate, thus concluding there is something they are not telling you. At first, I thought it was a special motor, then I saw it. The schematic, but not the directions, shows an added component called an A4988 driver. Another thing to learn they don’t tell you beforehand. It takes the millisecond pulses and chops them into even integer multiple fractions of two, that is, 1/2, 1/4, 1/8th, but not 1/3 or 1/5th. Therefore, it is using some form of register. Is it necessary to know this to use the command? Of course not. Until the plane crashes.
Blue silkie bantam.
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Flour grinding with stone mills. I learned there is still a demand for this, which got me wondering how they still make grindstones. It is rated a dangerous occupation due to the dust conditions. It seems the stones have only a five-year life before needing to be “dressed”. I’ve never had an explanation why stone ground grains don’t contain a lot of grit. Next, I carefully went over the joint account, I cannot shake the feeling of a pending surprise expense landing on her lap right before Xmas.
Today 15 years ago was the last gig Ray-B and I formally played, it was a half-gig. That is, he had a stand-up bassist who could not show up till 10:00PM. It was a great show, but Ray-B was like so many soloists—and guitar players are a separate species of soloist. This entails a belief that certain instruments have magical properties. Onesuch is the stand-up bass, which is useless for much other than blues and jazz. And what the guitar player does not get is that people who play specialized instruments are themselves looking for the same magic. And the bands never last.
But, the first few gigs go well, and why not? They represent novelty. How quickly that wears off. The same thing would happened if it was bagpipes. Not chipper enough to even poke into the shed, I sent through some archived material. My current plan is to maybe post photos that have file dates matching the many gap between 2000 and 2006. There’s no blogs, but by then I had equipment to scan and convert many photos to digital, so there is a ton of material. Just no way of accurately matching it to any specific dates, but for example, see those toothpick photos of 2004.
Last for today, here’s the best view I can get of the vaccinated news anchor who had a stroke in front of the camera. Oops, looks like the censors got there first. Media removed, just too many people knew damn well what was going on. There you have it, if you want even the news the media creates itself, you’ll have to move fast these days.
ADDENDUM
Plenty was going wrong—because I know how to program. Thus, reading my listings shows how I used a master set of commands to call subroutines. This is an ability, for anyone can code a subroutine. Ah, but the master knows that routine isn’t proper unless it is able to do its task without interfering with any other module of the operation. (If this aspect is lacking, the result is eventual chaos—best evidenced by how MicroSoft has to keep coming out with new versions that add nothing.)
I take extra care to design each module. Today I learned they are not and cannot be as independent as I thought. That delay() function has many uses, but most common are to ward off buffer overflows, take intermittent sensor readings, and (for me) to slow down displays that would otherwise occur to rapidly to observe. Hence, I regularly have the situation where one module is displaying data while another module is called to update the variable.
Well, I just found out delay() is more than a pause. It idles the entire code for the interval. I had run into this several times and wrote it off as a equipment error. A button press would not react, often causing the operator (me) to press it again. Now I know the reason. I often use a 5000 millisecond delay—5 seconds in people time. I would be miffed when my monitor would not react to sensor data in real time. The delay() command was blocking all operations.
One that was most annoying was when one delay() command called another—the result was the timings were additive. The solution is to avoid the delay() unless you want it. Use the Arduino timer instead, the internal clock that logs how long the current code has been running. Beware this is trickier to code. You record the time on the system clock, then compare a later time to see if your interval has passed. I’d say you learn something every day, but most people my age do not.
What tipped me to look at delay() anew was I saw a new Arduino command (new to me) in the documentation I read for the latest IDE. The timing command millis() now has a companion called micro(), that is ten-thousandths of a second. Where is this leading? I don’t know because I was just beginning to study stepper motors when the Tennessee Age began and changed life out of all recognition.
