Here is a picture of the clock running. It is showing that the time is 2:12pm 🙂
The funky clock in action
The Funky Clock
We have a problem in our house. The youngest has a habit of waking the whole house at a time that is not pleasing to the rest of us. We put a clock in his room, but that didn’t help much because the monster child can’t read yet.
As with everything I decided a technological solution MUST be the best, so I present, the funky clock.
The dual colour LED array is from Sparkfun. It is driven using two 74595 chips for the columns and a pair of ULQ2003 chips for the rows (because I didn’t have a ULM2008 chip). The brain of the thing is a PIC18F4550 running my native code compiling forth which I control over USB. I plan to produce a screen cast showing this in action at some stage.
I wanted to make the whole thing fit behind the display, so I was forced to put the processor and the LED driver hardware on their own boards.
The top of the processor board.
The bottom of the processor board.
The LED driver board. I was really pleased with this one. The 74595s are positioned so that they line up with the correct pins on the LED matrix so I didn’t need to run as many wires. This meant that I had to rotate one of them 180 .
The bottom of the LED driver board.
The power board plugs into the processor board using the same connector as the PICkit 3.
All four parts of the clock fit together nicely 🙂
I’ve set it up to display the hour in the main display area. Blink the bottom left LED every second to let me know it is working, and display the minute in binary on the bottom row. When it is bed time the hour is displayed in red, and when it is time to get up the hour is green.
I doubt it will make any difference, but I had fun making the funky clock 🙂
It is amazing how easy it is to develop on the thing using forth on the actual hardware.
: CLOCK-TASK ( -- ) HOURS C@ RED-TIME IF HOUR-PATTERN RED-LEDS LEDS! BLANK-PATTERN GREEN-LEDS LEDS! ELSE HOUR-PATTERN GREEN-LEDS LEDS! BLANK-PATTERN RED-LEDS LEDS! THEN SECONDS C@ 1 AND IF 7 GREEN C@ 80 OR MINUTES C@ OR 7 GREEN C! ELSE 7 GREEN C@ 7F AND MINUTES C@ OR 7 GREEN C! THEN ;
It was so much fun making a forth from scratch. It is based very loosely on jonesforth in that it implements many of the same kernel words, however it differs in that it generates subroutine threaded code instead of being token threaded. I have also implemented a very simple co-operative task switcher. The above task is responsible for setting up the display. I have two other tasks running, one that drives the LEDs and another that updates the time. While these tasks are running I am also still able to interact with the forth system via the virtual serial port over USB.
I want to thank my Dad again for all his help with the hardware.
DeltaSync decompression progress
After quite some time I finally have some code that seems to decompress the message data returned from Windows Live via the DeltaSync protocol.
The code is AWFUL, but the results are looking pretty good.
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Content-Type: text/plain;
charset=US-ASCII;
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this is another test message
–Apple-Mail-33–583770588
Content-Disposition: attachment;
filename=”AGL Energy Advisor.zip”
Content-Type: application/zip;
x-unix-mode=0644;
name=”AGL Energy Advisor.zip”
Content-Transfer-Encoding: base64
UEsDBAoAAAAAAANIPToAAAAAAAA********XABAAQUdMIEVuZXJneSBBZHZpc29yLmFwcC9VWAwA
q9WASWXVgEn1ARQAUEsDBAoAAAAAANFGNzoAAAAAAAA********mABAAQUdMIEVuZXJneSBBZHZp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 so on. Once I’ve got things cleaned up a bit more I hope to post what I’ve been able to come up with.
lisp has invaded my brain
I had my first dream in lisp last night. I’ve been reading Land Of Lisp (and a couple of other lispy books) and it seems to be sinking in 🙂
The dream involved building physical matter out of lisp data structures. Very odd!
Bob Lives!
After a couple of false starts with dead voltage regulators, Bob (my daughter named it) the PIC based ethernet device lives in a more permanent incarnation. Bob is made from bits and pieces I had around the place (I now have several very dead network hubs). The budget for the project was zero 😉
My Dad provided me with the PIC prototyping board pictured above and many of the pieces as well as the PIC18F452. The ENC28J60 ethernet controller was kindly provided by Microchip through their very generous free samples.
The original voltage regulator on the PIC prototyping board didn’t seem to be up to powering both the PIC and the ethernet controller, so I went through my old retired networking gear until I found a 3.3V regulator. Unfortunately I think I popped it in the process of removing it from the board and it no longer worked :(. In the end I used a 7805 5V regulator and then ran the output of that through a pair of diodes in a bridge rectifier (thank again for the help with that one Dad) to drop the voltage down to about 3.5V or so.
Now I need to get my PIC Forth running on this hardware and then I’ll have a networked Forth device I can play with 🙂
What I’ve been up to lately
I’ve been really busy recently and have not had much time to work on my side projects.
One that I’ve been working on off and on for some time is a networked PIC micro-controller.
This morning I finally got it responding to ICMP echo request (ping) 🙂
A little further with the decompression routine
I’ve gotten just a little bit further with the decompression code 🙂
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The headers of the email message are coming through now, and I’m starting to get the message body
More Windows Live decompression progress
I’ve not had much time recently to work on the decompression routines as family and work need to take priority over side projects… Last night I picked the code up again and had a bit more of a look. I found a couple of mistakes in the code I’d written and am now getting a bit further in the decompression 🙂
The expected results as before:
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X-SID-PRA: Daniel Parnell <me@danielparnell.com>
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What I’m getting now:
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by
Hopefully I’ll get some more time to work on the code soon 🙂
i48 1.1 is now available for download from the iTunes App Store
I have just uploaded the next release of i48 for review
The latest version of i48 has been submitted review by Apple.
This new version adds support for running the emulation at full speed (although that has some interesting effects on usability). I have also added theme support and included a theme based on Power48 provided by Fabrice Roux. Finally the buttons now highlight when they are selected making it a bit easier to use the keyboard.
I was hoping to add sound support in this release, but have decided to submit what I have now and work on the sound support for the next release.