Frabjous Dei

More hardware today: cut up and soldered one and a half more reels of LEDs. Looks like I’ll have less horizontal resolution than I originally planned, it’s just too much work *and* I don’t want to have to buy another strip (not to mention wear another half a kilo of battery.)

One thing I did confirm was that tapping in power every six strips or so got around the voltage drop that had been causing a steady drop-off of all but the red channel after four or five strips.

The warnings on the LiPo batteries (DO NOT LOOK AT BATTERY PACK SIDEWAYS, IT WILL EXPLODE AND TAKE A LIMB WITH IT!) are starting to scare me, I might go with two NiMh packs instead of one big LiPo.

Starting to get real now! I originally wrote a small prototyping framework in Java so I wouldn’t have to think about memory leaks and C++ arcana while trying to get my head around the graphics stuff. But I’ve ported the basics and a few of the patterns to C++ and as you can see, they’re now running live off the Arduino. Hopefully I’ll get to catch up with my seamstress extraordinaire this weekend, and maybe cut and solder another third of the LEDs.  

Everybody yurts, sometimes

I had the option of going to the gym or making something tonight, and creativity won. The latest Jack Rabbit Speaks newsletter had a link to a new wiki on Hexayurts for Burners. One of the suggestions was to make a model first so you can see how it all fits together. So I did.

I couldn’t find any foam-core board (not even at Mustafa Centre, fail!) so I made do with half-inch polystyrene. It wasn’t entirely suitable as tape doesn’t stick to it particularly well and the thickness was significant compared to the size of the panels, but it was enough to get the idea.

The wiki is excellent; I watched the videos a couple of times each and then went for it, with the aid of the illustrations. It’s surprisingly easy and all the gotchas are clearly described. I can see how everything would be a bit more unwieldy at scale (you’d definitely need two people to assemble one out of 4’x8’ insulation panels) but at the end it’s amazingly neat, despite my awkward cuts and haphazard taping job.

The cleverest thing is how it’s engineered to stack a neat 12-panels high for storage and transport, wrapped in a tarp. Now you see it:

Now you don’t:

Thanks to the awesomeness of the Hexayurt Project, I will have somewhere cool, dry and dust-free to stay on-Playa this year. I’m going to need it, as apparently we’ll be out early with the Black Rock Syndicate camp and I could be on-Playa for up to 12 days! Daunting, but awesome at the same time.

Test pattern! So this is the LED strips, all hooked up to the Arduino with my own code running a test pattern. Tricky part was the little algorithm that turns an x, y coordinate into a linear address. I was just incapable of doing it without writing a test and there’s no “Arduino Unit” so I took five minutes to play around at work while I was waiting for something late this evening.

Out of this process I’ve now learned two things: all of the pixels aren’t individually addressable on these strips :-O. They’re in groups of three, which means I have a third the resolution on the Y axis as I thought I had. Oh well. Secondly, the strips farther away from the power source get “redder”; I think this is because of voltage drop (I wasn’t able to get the heavier gauge of wire I really wanted and I think that has something to do with it.) I’ll need to plumb in power every five or six strips I think.

On the bright side, I won’t need nearly the memory I thought I was going to, so I can do with an Arduino Nano or Mini which is nice.

Productive day! This is the first of my (now possibly four!) 5m strips of leds, cut into 15-led sections and wired with connectors. Miraculously they all worked first time! Left to do on these is put heatshrink stuffed with E6000 over the ends and double the wires back, secured with more heatshrink, for strain relief.

The reason this is a breakthrough is I now have a working, “square” display I can start coding for.

I’ve put my Angkor Wat/Cambodia photos up on Facebook.

I bought some toys on the weekend :-)

Waaaay back at the start of December I had a friend in town from the UK, so we went to Jurong Bird Park. I only just got around to sorting through the pictures.

Airlines are cabbagetards extrordinaire

To protect the reader’s delicate sensibilities, all profanity in this article has been replaced with vegetables.

So I just booked a weekend away to Cambodia and Thailand, going in and out on two different Asian budget carriers. The total price shown when I selected both flights adds up to SGD$249. So how can these carrotsuckers get away with charging me $315?

You can shove your $6 “convenience fee” for paying by credit card up your potato. How the turnip else am I meant to pay, in sacks of rice? And one site in particular made an extreme effort to trick me into buying their travel insurance—you are in a maze of clicky Javascript popups, all alike, some of which will end up costing you an extra $10. Also, zucchini the direct currency conversion you also tried to trick me into using. I’ve worked in that business and I know what a scam it is.

On top of all that, form input validation on airline sites sucks festering pumpkin. In Singapore, “#” is a valid character in an address (“#42-04” is how you say “floor, unit” parsnipholes) and “+” is a valid character as part of a phone number. It just onioning is, look it up. And also one of the sites in particular is annoyingly (though non-fatally) broken in Safari.

I don’t have the patience for this bulltomato, which is why I normally outsource it to Flight Centre.

Waku Ghin

Terrine of Duck and Foie Gras

Marinated Botan Ebi with Sea Urchin and Oscietre Caviar

Taiheisan Tenko Nama, Hunmai Daiginjyo, Aita Prefecture Japan

Slow Cooked Tasmanian Petuna Ocean Trout with Witlof and Yuzu

2008 Jean-Claude Catelain Pouilly-Fumé Sauvignon Blanc, Loire Valley, France

Alaskan King Crab with Lemon Scented Extra Virgin Olive Oil

2007 Marc Kreydenweiss Kritt Gewürztraminer, Alsace, France

Braised Lobster With Tarragon

2007 Domaine Leflaive Mâcon Verzé, Puligny-Montrachet, Cote D’or, France

Japanese Wagyu Roll with Maitake Mushroom

2006 Cantina Vietti Tre Vigne, Barbera d’Alba, Piedmont, Italy

Australian Blackmore Steak with Wasabi and Citrus Soy

2007 John Duval Entity Shiraz, Barossa Valley, SA, Australia

Consommé with Rice and Hirame

Gyokuro

***

Musk Melon with Sauternes

Ghin Cheesecake

2005 Domaines Schlumberger Cuvee Christine Late Harvest Gewürztraminer, Alsace, France