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80% of a QuikWall
Sunday, September 6 2015
I spent most of the afternoon applying a product called QuikWall to the freshly-exposed southern concrete block wall of the basement. I've used similar products to finish walls in the past, though I think in those cases I actually brushed it on. This stuff was too thick for that; it contained 3/4 inch-long fibers and needed to be trowelled on. Evidently it contains portland cement or some similar chemically-curable base, since it needs to be kept wet as it sets. Unfortunately, I'd only done a little over 80% of the wall before exhausting my fifty pound bag of the stuff. I would have gone to Lowes for another bag, but my Subaru has an expired inspection sticker and a loud exhaust leak, so I thought maybe I should wait until the Prius became available. At the time, Gretchen had that with her in Woodstock for her Sunday bookstore shift.
This evening I worked on getting an Arduino-based I2C-connected Atmega8 to work as a dedicated keyboard controller. The key to getting this all to work was a USBTinyISP that actually worked. I'd had one from China that apparently doesn't work, but with a working one, I was able to flash a working Optiboot loader for a no-crystal Atmega8 running at 8 MHz. With that, I could work on and debug code that would scan a keyboard matrix, store keypresses in a queue, and then forward them via I2C. Either the bootloader or the fuse settings weren't perfect, however, because occasionally after uploading a new firmware, the Atmega8 would enter a state where it could no longer slurp in new firmware via its bootloader. I'd be forced to reflash the bootloader, a process that got in the way of my debugging. Eventually, though, I had code that more or less worked. Here's a version of it. (By the way, with the Atmega8, I've been forced to use the old Arduino23 environment, which predates Arduino 1.0.)
For linking purposes this article's URL is:
http://asecular.com/blog.php?150906 feedback
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