Your leaking thatched hut during the restoration of a pre-Enlightenment state.

 

Hello, my name is Judas Gutenberg and this is my blaag (pronounced as you would the vomit noise "hyroop-bleuach").



links

decay & ruin
Biosphere II
Chernobyl
dead malls
Detroit
Irving housing

got that wrong
Paleofuture.com

appropriate tech
Arduino μcontrollers
Backwoods Home
Fractal antenna

fun social media stuff


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   successful slave
Sunday, February 13 2011
I continued my work on the new solar controller, first adding a pair of 24LC512 I2C EEPROMs (they seemed to work). Then, in order to increase the number of analog inputs, I added another Atmega controller as an I2C "slave." It was an old, otherwise useless Atmega8, and I wrote a little Arduino code for it so it could read its analog pins and send the data back to the master (an Atmega328). There were a few coding headaches along the way; when researching a solution to a tricky programming scenario, it's hard to find cases where someone implemented a similar-enough use-case to yours. But eventually I got the Atmega8 acting like an obedient slave. And that got me to thinking: what other tasks could I give it? My solar controller was now dual-core, and I had a lot of extra digital pins as well as the new analog ones.
Up until this point, I'd been prying the Atmega8 out of its socket and popping it into an Arduino board every time I wanted to change its firmware. But if I wanted to be able to flexibly upload code into it and debug it, I would need a less painful system. So I installed a switch between the Atmegas so I could switch the board's common serial port between them, depending on which one I wanted to upload new software to (or monitor via its serial port).
We'd had leftover Indian food for lunch and it was so delicious that we wanted Indian food for dinner for a second night in a row, as if we were actually in India. It's not often that we go out to the same restaurant two nights in a row, and we didn't do that tonight. But Gretchen ordered Indian takeaway and I drove into Uptown to pick it up.
We ate our meal while watching the classic Steve Martin movie Roxanne, which Gretchen had remembered last night. (She'd compared her wish to be "normal, dumb, and happy" with Martin's character's wish to have a normal proboscis.)
Later Gretchen watched the Grammies, a bombastic celebration of the brain-dead consensus that I would have otherwise avoided. But I couldn't help myself, especially when Eminem & Rihanna, the frighteningly intense Janelle Monáe, Cee Lo Green, and the Avett Brothers performed. Gretchen and I remember when the Avett Brothers were so small that there was actually a chance they might end up sleeping on our couches, when their manager was excited by running across an account I'd written of one of their shows. But look at them now! As for the lame Grammy-award-winning musical stylings of Lady Antebellum, all I can say is: really?


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