Too few hours in the day //Jafoca.com

My first order of stuff from DigiKey arrived today – yay!  Unfortunately it is so tightly packed inside the box that I am unable to dig in more here at work.  More on that later…

Yesterday i began exploring making the arduino communicate with the computer it is attached to.  Not having a breadboard left me with few options for what I could connect to the board, so I decided to work more on the software end of things.

I chose to work in Python at this time because I have been meaning to give it a try, and it is probably going to be pretty easy to web-enable python stuff using django.  Plus I am a little bit wary of using Processing for various reasons.

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Last week it occurred to me that I was bothering Nick a bit too much for his knowledge of electronics.  He has been pretty happy to assist me as I explore his realm of expertise, however I think i have a bit too many questions.  

I decided to find an alternate source of reference material and found O’Reilly’s “Designing Embedded Hardware”.  The book looked to be just what I needed, and I am an amazon Prime member – so the book arrived yesterday (friday).  I don’t make the most monies, but I suppose that I can justify this rather expensive book by the fact that it is a useful skill I am learning, not just some trash.

I dug into the book today (yay for saturday fun!!!  Reading reference material is always fun!) and immediately got the sensation that I was back at Hope sitting in a CSCI class.  In this case, the same as it was when I was there, this is just fine as I am learning something interesting to me, so I am enjoying it quite a bit.

The book itself starts out with some of the standard theory – “This is what a computer is”, “this is what a processor is”, etc.  Which is all fine and good, but not what I immediately need.  I quickly read the first chapter on computer theory, microprocesors, and microcontrollers (didn’t concretely realize the difference before), then skipped the next chapter on Assembly Language because it was assembly for a PIC and some other chip, not for AVRs, which I am currently interested in.  The next chapter, “Basics of electricity” is really what I need, and I am knee deep in it now.

Sofar so good.  You can pick up the book at Amazon (note I do not get any kickbacks from Amazon or O’Rielly)

So after receiving my arduino last week from Seeed studio, I have been itching to give it a roll.  Unfortunately, as I mentioned before, I stupidly forgot to pick up a breadboard so I have been pretty limited to what I can do.  That has not stopped me from hooking up a single LED and my giant mushroom button!  That is the standard 2nd or 3rd development tutorial step.

I then set to work creating a toggle’d light switch with the button.  One press turns it on, next press turns it off kind of thing.  The problem is that you experience a phenomena called bouncing where the light may not do exactly what you want it to do when you activate the switch.  I thought I could figure out how to de-bounce the input from the switch myself, however it was a bit more of a pain that I thought it might be.

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This is my 2005.5 (b7 platform) audi a4.

It is a 2.0t (great engine), and has quattro, XM sat radio, an automatic transmission (boo…), and the performance package.

I love it. I will say this again and again, this is the ultimate car for driving in snow. Its 200 HP from a 4 cyl engine is ample, and more than many 6 cyl cars manage. The interior is a study in quality materials. The car feels slow – that is to say… it is so stable, quiet, and confident at speed that I can be doing 85mph and feel like I am only going 65. I have never experienced that in another car, even my previous b5 A4.

It is also, unfortunately, an early model in the b7 product line, and all the kinks were not worked out when it was assembled in December 2004.

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