Pantomime Voice-Over

Yeah, yeah. I rarely post. I have a job that keeps me busy flitting about the US from Miami to Syracuse to Seattle to San Diego and most major metros in between.

I now have on order a new toy called a ybox2 and so a new post.

ybox2

LadyAda says it shipped today, so I hope to have it by Saturday. It’s kinda like a Chumby, but mostly not. It’s similar in that it outputs PAL or NTSC composite video to a display using widgets, but not as it doesn’t come with an AC adapter, a display, or a furry cover. Nor are there many widgets as of yet. Hopefully, with time, more will come. But not from me, alas. I took many, many coding courses back in my college daze - assembly, basic, pascal, pl1, fortran, c, and one or two others - but didn’t understand that I needed to focus on becoming fluent in just one, then move on to a new language, one better suited to what I wanted to accomplish. I was young, petulant, foolish, wasteful of time and money, and so cannot code worth a damned in any language. While I’m no longer so young…

I ordered a display, a PSOne screen which runs anywhere from $40 to $100. I considered the Pyle 7″ widescreen which is 2″ larger and more versatile, but settled on the PSOne due to price. Besides, I can hack the PSOne to be portable using ExtremeTech’s tutorial on how to substitute white LEDs for the high voltage backlighting bulb, thus allowing it to run on just 5V. I’ll eventually find an enclosure and drop in a LiPoly battery and charger circuit I got from SparkFun some time ago. I picked up a couple after selling a number of MintyBoosts, deciding to develop a self-contained rechargeable version. However, I gave it second thoughts upon realizing exactly what the warning “Vents with Flame” means after watching this video of a LiPoly pack “venting.” Most decidedly an understatement.

I’ll update after getting it assembled.

Lady Ada of Adafruit Industries sold me on yet another kit, the MintyBoost. It’s a USB charging device that fits into an Altoids chewing gum tin.

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UPDATE: I’m an idiot. Once I removed the protoshield, I saw that the board has clearly marked these pins as PWM! D’oh!  I guess I got too comfortable using the shield and never bothered to actually look at the Diecimila itself.

I’m using this particular prototyping shield (others can be found here, here, here, or here) and ran the tests again on the bare Arduino, but found nothing wrong with the shield. I need to research this to find out why. I’ll update this post when I discover the reason.