Boss came to me one day and asked for an old boombox to be outfitted with flashing LEDS and some strobes as a prop for a video shoot he was scheming. So he ordered one off eBay and I got to work outfitting it with LEDs embedded in the speakers while he also located these emergency flashing strobes than run off a single D battery for days, and I was able to take the self-contrained charge/strobe and retrofit them into the lower driver in each speaker housing, since as it turned out weren't even actually fitted with drivers at all and were purely cosmetic speaker cones.

So a while ago hack-a-day introduced a really awesome DIY project called The Bus Pirate which is small device for interfacing with all sorts of different chips and devices using a host of protocols. The really slick part is that despite the small size it's extremely flexible due to being a microprocessor with reprogrammable firmware that can be updated to add even more useful features and support more chips/protocols as times goes on.

The one drawback for myself was the use of surface mount components and a PIC uC instead of the simplistic single-sided etched PCBs with through-hole parts and AVR family of uCs I have more familiarity with, so I kept an eye on it in jealous awe until I found someone offering a through-hole version and quickly ordered one up, soldered things together, and had some fun using a MAX7219 to drive a 2-segment LED I had lying around. Getting it working in OS X was fairly trivial thanks to good old ZTerm, which amazes me that it is both still around, still works (even in Snow Leopard!), and is EXACTLY THE SAME as it was 20 years ago when I used it to dial BBSs on a borrowed Mac 512.

Anyway, someone has already documented getting up and running with a Bus Pirate in OSX with ZTerm so I won't bother to reiterate what's already been said there, except that I believe I had to disable Xon/Xoff flow control to get the Through Hole v1a version working right with my particular USB->RS232 adaptor (I have a couple, each is uniquely quirky in some way or another). What I did want to do though is lay out a little documentation that I myself could refer to about reprogramming the firmware on a Bus Pirate from OS X.

To begin with, the main steps for doing so from OS X/Linux are outlined here and I'm just gonna deal with the OS X specifics. It's A LOT nicer than using the Windows P24QP.exe programmer which I found somewhat tricky in actual execution, even if for no other reason than not having to drag everything over to my wintendo for a minute then move everything back on the workbench.

For quite a while now I've put off straightening the wires under my desk at home, largely because it's one of the last things in the world I wanna do when I come home at the end of a day, often doing exactly that. But since I had some time off and it had grown extra out of hand, action was finally taken!

Been playing around with a 5x7 LED Matrix and my Boarduino, since it takes a dozen I/O pins to address all the lines on the matrix and be able to turn on/off any of the individual quasi-pixel LEDs, and the Boarduino is much friendlier to prototype/experiment with compared to the chip swappery involved in my ghetto AVR development setup (not to mention my AVR programmer is actually sitting on my desk at work, but I digress.)

So, playing around with some simplistic ideas - a "snake" pattern and my usual pseudo random() juju style...

*title quoted from willrad

so yeah, I got a chumby. I've needed a new alarm clock for quite some time and have been thinking it'd sure be nice to have some sort of ipod integration as well. and hey it'd be even cooler if it could tune into my icecast stream. and tell me the weather. and the time is automagically sync'd over wifi. and show me pix from flickr. and some rss feeds. and be hackable. and of course, be black.

So it appears I have managed to break my gripmaster. It's a black one sporting 9lbs of tension per spring, aka the TOUGH model, and somehow I managed to break it still. Clearly the pimphand is too strong.

And if that's not enough... managed to consolidate more of the mp3s and bring them into iTunes and breaking 50k songs, check it:

Now before I go any further let me disclaim that it has already been pointed out, this thing will not tell you anything your body can't already tell you about the current state of too cold/too hot/just right. But I don't give a fuck so I made it anyway.

Title says it all really... didn't have time to upload it last night, but did today, so the latest/greatest fresh pork is up, nab it here via sendspace. It's 208MB so I'm trying to save off works bandwidth. Went with a bunch of different electro stylees from a bunch of tracks I should know better, and rocked it all with Serato Scratch Live. Came out as a nice balance of fuckups and spot on blends, had mad funny doing it either way.

Also completed my work on ninjabong.com updating it with a two double-o seven stylee redesign. Still need to tweak things out a bit to be fully whatever-point-oh compliant but it works fine in most browsers, safari being the quirkiest and I'll go back and adjust for that, eventually, but Firefox rocks it perfect and IE6 doesn't fuck it up horribly so I'm letting it loose.

S'about all for now, time for sleepies for me.

Since my boss decided that we would be closed on Friday, except he didn't quite get the word out until late Thursday nite. Either way I was going in Friday and since nobody was there to get in my way I breezed through my regular Saturday maintenance as well as found time to rewire the gigE segment of the LAN in the machine room and replace something like two dozen RJ45s that have plagued me for years. They're some cheap knockoff brand the Ops Manager got a steal on but they all eventually wiggle their way out of a standard RJ45 jack, so anytime the network was touched it added this extra retarded layer of carefulness and troubleshooting since atleast one would always squirm out of it's place in it's switch. BUT NO MORE!

So I found myself with a proper three day weekend after all....

Much to my surprise I finally got my MAKE Controller Kit on Tuesday and have been poking around the firmwares and documentations and schematics and the Special Controller Section of MAKE's forums over the last few days familiarizing myself more and more with things.

Seems there's currently some gcc bugginess with the more advance "heavy" firmware which implements a network accessable OSC debug system as well as a built in WebServer via additional code for the Application Board. So after lots and lots and lots and lots of effort wasted trying to work with heavy I went at things another way and have been hacking around the "tiny" codebase, which is just a simple LED flasher using just the Controller Board's headers and libraries, and this finally proved fruitful after working out how to access the Application Board's 4 onboard LEDs directly via their IO Pins which interned a lesson in how to setup the basic I/O functionality at the Controller level and also was much easier leaning into this more advanced stage of my microcontroller experiments.

First two were a bit easier since I had a specific purpose in mind when I set about researching, purchasing, and building them (yeah ok, so the MIDI controller still isn't finished yet, but that's due to the intricacies in building the final case not the microcontroller or controls themselves), but this one is functionless at the moment and purely for advancing my learnings from basic to more intermediate through experimentation.

I embeded an avi I made from my successful "tiny" based project in the extended post, it will quite likely not work or freak out in any browser setup but my own so here's a safe link to right-click download / save as if you can't see the video. The background music serendipitiously came on about an hour later and wasn't planned at all, makes it all that much better. Enjoy.

Couple small victories have been won since Friday, here they are in chronological order:

So I spoke too soon in my previous entry about the USB<==>RS232 adaptor working. Now it did in fact work, but I had been flashing the very simple basic "Hello World" example to rule out any sort of weirdness related to my own code, and I can successfully flash that tiny ~350bytes of code with the adaptor from both the Wintendo, and the MacBook boot camped to XP.

I've been trying to get USB <==> RS232 serial working from Parallels Desktop to my BX-24 microcontroller with a whole lot of lack in the progress department including, but not limited to, my keyspan us28x, a new adaptor off ebay when the keyspan didn't work, a new one off newegg when the ebay one didn't work, rigging up a short DB9M <==> DM9F that I could swap pins around on, and not getting anywhere for several hours spread across several days spread across the past several weeks.

But at long last, I got the damn rig working from my "real" wintendo machine where I'd been doing most of the trial-and-erroring since it has a real serial port that has always worked perfectly and made for a decent base to test against. Fumbling with the old Rat Shack 22-802 pocket multimeter and google I eventually stumbled upon embeddedrelated.com and after scoping through their message archives I kept seeing lots of reports of usb working fine, especially with prolific 2303 chipsets, and lots of weird problems that sorta semi maybe kinda seemed related, but nothing that really matched.