Squishy circuits
I saw this last night, and can’t wait to try it out.
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It would be cool if there was a nice way to make a cake that was conductive, and yet still edible….
Failure
I have been looking for this video for ages!
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I saw it some time ago and it was amazing. The content is great, but more importantly it show how to give a presentation using powerpoint that actually works!
JRuby, Rails and Development mode
Well, that was fun… I spent quite a bit of time today beating my head against a “memory leak” only to remember that JRuby + Rails + Development mode = very leaky. Switch to production mode and the problem goes away.
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A simple little Rails app with one controller and one model is all that is needed to exercise the problem. Run rails in development mode, and hit it with requests, memory usage soon skyrockets and the app starts to fall over. Switch to production mode and the same app runs really nicely 
Sadness doesn’t even come close
My boy is going to die soon. He has been diagnosed with a degenerative brain disorder. He is almost 4 now and we will be “lucky” if he sees 6 years old. There are is no cure. All we can do is try to keep him comfortable.
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I alternate between numbness and weeping. He’s such a happy little guy and he doesn’t deserve this. It is a horrible disease.
We’re thinking of getting him a Pleo to play with as he loves dinosaurs. I would be interested in hearing from people who have one to see if it is worth getting one for a small child.
Funky Clock 2 is up and running
Funky clock is installed and working really nicely
I had a little trouble with the digital inputs as the pull down resistors I used were 100K instead of 10K. Also for some reason I was unable to read port E2 at all. Once I moved that input to port C4 and replaced the resistors everything started working as expected
Temperature sensor
I added a LM35 temperature sensor to the unit measuring the water level in my main tanks. After a mild calibration issue (shown above) it seems to be reading very close to the actual temperature
I find it amazing how much I am enjoying having this data. Very silly
Funky Clock 2.0
Here is Funky Clock 2.0, well the processor board anyway.
I have several PIC18F452 in the PLCC package, so I decided to see if I could get that working.
My forth is running on it and I am implementing a new UI for the clock allowing the time to be set using a really cool dial/switch combo.
To connect to the new board I’ve made another daughter board that has the power connector, quadrature dial button thingy and a serial connection plug. I have made a little RS232 adapter using a MAX232 chip and a hand full of capacitors placed into a DB9 head shell with some pins sticking out of one end and a DB9 on the other. When I plug the adapter into my Funky Clock it is powered from the Funky Clock and I am able to send code and commands to it via a terminal emulator
It all works really nicely
DeltaSync HU01 decompression code released
I have released an initial version of the DeltaSync HU01 decompression routine on github.
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See https://github.com/dparnell/hu01 for the code
It is AWFUL code, but it seems to work.
PS3
Unless you’ve been living under a rock recently you’ll know that the Playstation 3 is now wide open for home brew code. I’ve been having some fun running my own code on my PS3 The PSL1GHT wiki contains all the information necessary to set up a development environment.
The PSL1GHT wiki contains all the information necessary to set up a development environment.More on the Funky Clock
I had another one of the LED arrays around the place and decided to see if I could drive it directly from the PIC port pins. It seems I can, and the results are much better than my much more complicated previous setup. Of course it uses up almost all of the PIC18F4550′s port pins. All of port A, B, D and E 
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The thing I was really happy about was that the code I had written for the old hardware needed very little changes to work. Forth is really good like that. All I had to do was change the low level code that actually hits the hardware, and the higher level stuff just worked
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