Just got back from grocery shopping at the Mart of Walls. And SCORE! Totally unexpected in the DVD section, a BABYLON 5 BOXED SET! Having heard of how bad the semi-pirate ones you find on Amazon are, and once suffered from a BitTorrent that some "Clever" guy thought he could compress by speeding the episodes up, I'm looking forward to an official re-release. $60, and worth it, I'm sure.

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More!

Posted by: J Greely at November 03, 2024 05:30 PM (oJgNG)

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One thing I did to help pass the strike-time (which frankly, I wasted with extreme profligacy) was pick up an Ardruino Uno R3 project board and kit from Eligoo, along with the extra 37 sensor pack. And since then I've been slowly working my way through the tutorials. Which isn't so much tutorial as connecting the wires and running the example code. Although occasionally I would edit them a bit.

I hit a hitch though when it turned out that one of the examples was bogus. After doing the one that ran a simple 7 segment display using an extra 8-bit latch chip, the example that ran the 4-gang 7-segment display didn't actually light up each digit differently and strobe through them, it just ran them all in parallel. Eventually I found someone else's example which skipped the latch chip (which, unfortunately consumes more pins) but I made it work.

It was also around this time I discovered water damage and possibly a little black mold in the basement drywall (Could just be dirt though, there was some mud-like buildup on the concrete below). I traced the source and discovered the dishwasher was leaking through a little tiny seal around the shaft that opens the drain valve. It only leaks about two ounces of water per load, so it never became visible under the dishwasher. I might have never noticed the problem if they had not stopped the vinyl flooring just under the front of the machine. Instead, it soaked the particle-board underlayment in a well defined pool, and eventually made it through the OSB flooring into the wet-wall of the laundry room downstairs. I'll deal with the damage later. The leak was addressed with a couple of YouTube videos and a minor parts purchase on Amazon. The actual part installation should have been simple after I got the machine out, but one minor mistake turned it into a major undertaking, as the shaft the drain valve plate rotates on came out, leaving the plate rattling around inside the pump housing with no way to take it out. Still, I eventually prevailed. And I tossed an old cookie sheet under the dishwasher just in case, but it's really not necessary.

But the reason for that roundabout story is that to get from an $11 parts kit to free shipping, I picked up a few more toys to hook up to the Ardruino. a set of three 32x8 grid LED displays and 5 of these microscopic <1" 64x128 OLED screens. The funny thing is, the chip that runs the 8x8 units (4 of which are daisy chained to make the 32 LED length) was originally designed to run 7 segment displays (plus the decimal point). And theoretically, all three units can be daisy-chained together to make something like one of those scrolling displays you see in some stores. There are code libraries that can make these displays do all kinds of tricks. the OLED displays are just pure bit-addressable space. But again, there are Arduino libraries already written to do sophisticated graphics and fonts. It's almost too easy. It all worked the first time I hooked it up. And they each only use four wires.

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