Because of a strange alignment between my decision to leave Google to find a new challenge, and the pandemic causing a lockdown of most countries (including the UK, where I live), you might have noticed more activity on this blog. Indeed for the past two months I maintained an almost perfect record of three posts a week, up from the occasional post I have written in the past few years. In part this was achieved by sticking to a “programme schedule” — I started posted on Mondays about my art project – which then expanded into the insulin reminder – then on Thursday I had a rotating tech post, finishing the week up with sARTSurdays.
This week it’s a bit disruptive because while I do have topics to fill in the Monday schedule, they start being a bit more scatterbrained, so I want to give a bit of a regroup, and gauge what’s the interest around them in the first place. As a starting point, the topic for Mondays is likely going to stay electronics — to follow up from the 8051 usage on the Birch Books, and the Feather notification light.
As I have previously suggested on Twitter, I plan on controlling my Kodi HTPC with a vintage, late ’80s Sony SVHS remote control. Just for the craic, because I picked it up out of nostalgia, when I went to Weird Stuff a few years ago — I’m sad it’s closed now, but thankful to Mike for having brought me there the first time. The original intention was to figure out how the complicated VCR recording timer configuration worked — but not unexpectedly the LCD panel is not working right and that might not be feasible. I might have to do a bit more work and open it up, and that probably will be a blog post by itself.
Speaking of Sony, remotes and electronics — I’m also trying to get something else to work. I have a Sony TV connected to an HDMI switcher, and sometimes it get stuck with the ARC not initializing properly. Fixing it is relatively straightforward (just disable and re-enable the ARC) but it takes a few remote control button presses… so I’m actually trying to use an Adafruit Feather to transmit the right sequence of infrared commands as a macro to fix that. Which is why I started working on pysirc. There’s a bit more than that to be quite honest, as I would like to have a single-click selection of inputs with multiple switchers, but again that’s going to be a post by itself.
Then there’s some trimming work for the Birch Books art project. The PCBs are not here yet, so I have no idea if I have to respin them yet. If so, expects a mistakes-and-lessons post about it. I also will likely spend some more time figuring out how to make the board design more “proper” if possible. I also still want to sit down and see how I can get the same actuator board to work with the Feather M0 — because I’ll be honest and say that CircuitPython is much more enjoyable to work with than nearly-C as received by SDCC.
Also, while the actuator board supports it, I have currently left off turning on the fireplace lights for Birch Books. I’m of two minds about this — I know there are some flame effect single-LEDs out there, but they don’t appear to be easy to procure. Both bigclive and Adam Savage have shown flame-effect LED bulbs but they don’t really work in the small scale.
There are cheap fake-candle LED lamps out there – I saw them the first time in Italy at the one local pub that I enjoy going to (they serve so many varieties of tea!), and I actually have a few of them at home – but how they work is by using PWM on a normal LED (usually a warm light one). So what I’m planning on doing is diving into how those candles do that, and see if I can replicate the same feat on either the 8051 or the Feather.
I don’t know when the ESP32 boards I ordered will arrive, but probably will spend some time playing with those and talking about it then. It would be nice to have an easy way to “swap out the brains” of my various projects, and compare how to do things between them.
And I’m sure that, given the direction this is going, I’ll have enough stuff to keep myself entertained outside of work for the remaining of the lockdown.
Oh, before I forget — turns out that I’m now hanging out on Discord. Adafruit has a server, which seems to be a very easygoing and welcoming way to interact with the CircuitPython development team, as well as discussing options and showing off. If you happen to know of welcoming and interesting Discord servers I might be interested in, feel free to let me know.
I have not forgotten about the various glucometers I acquired in the past few months and that I still have not reversed. There will be more posts about glucometers, but for those I’m using the Thursday slot, as I have not once gone down to physically tapping into them yet. So unless my other electronics projects starve out that’s going to continue that way.
