Next Big Project

I own an exercise bike. It’s a pretty good one and I’ve had it for about 7 years. Trouble is I’ve not been on it since we discovered we were going to have a baby. Too much to do. Now we have a beautiful five year old boy, so it looks like I’ve not been on it for a while.

Said nipper is getting concerned about “Daddy’s big fat tummy”. It is true. I look like Daddy Pig from Peppa Pig. So I’m going to get a sticker reward chart like he nippers. Instead of getting a sticker for teeth-brushing or auto-dressing I’ll get one for 15 mins on the bike each night. A line of stickers gets me a coin and enough coins gets me … A CBeebies magazine? Perhaps not. Something though.

Anyway, the damn this has lain unused for so long the battery in the monitor has died. Corroded I seem to remember. I removed it a while ago as the piezo alarm kept beeping. New batteries didn’t help and I was going to junk it – until tonight. I’m a Maker and a Fixer now. So I stripped it down. Some loose hot-glue-gun glue was rattling around inside. That wasn’t it. The display seemed low contrast. No connectors looked loose nor were here any damaged components. The batteries were new. Eventually I scraped the battery connectors and some oxide came off. Good as new!

On he bike for 15mins full tilt. Sweating like Daddy Pig. I’ll build it up and try a bit of interval training soon.

Whilst pedalling I began to think: it has an exposed heart pulse sensor (contacts on the handle bars) and a rev speed counter. These are used to calculate a pile,of metrics on the unlit simple LCD display. If I were to instead [or in addition] attach them to an Arduino or Raspberry Pi then I can build my own monitor. The Pi could not only display it on a screen but also keep a log and present the results on a web page. It seems like a groovy project. So groovy that I think I’ll do it. A nice little marquee on my OLED display too.

Watch this space.

Hair Cut

I’m at the barbers behind a long queue. Thank God for free wifi. Then again it may have been easy to
Ask for the password in Mr Politos, but in John Lewis they demanded my email address and mobile number and the right to send me junk mail. I complied to stave off boredom. It access didn’t last long before it forgot who I was and went through the entire procedure again.
Why is public free wifi such a pain? Shirley the idea is to. Ale it available to people easily. Why piss off your customers? The Cloud seems to be the most aptly named wooly service ever. Still, looking a gift horse …
Back to the scalping. I’m in for a #1. I’m aiming to lop off my Jim Broadbent wrap around thinning locks and go for a look that says: honestly I have plenty of hair. It just choose to wear it short.
Thick hair has never been my forte. My hair is fine and was only thick and long at primary school in the 70s where in formed an impenetrable jungle that would not yield to the hack of an unforgiving parent’s comb. I was glad to see the back of it.
I don’t miss the wet after bath shiver. I relish my quick dry scalp. But things are different when I venture out into our post apocalyptic sun. There my pale Pictish skin decays painfully in the radiation. I’m expecting liver stops and lesions in old age. Oh yes, I will look the part if I make 80.
So I’m on for scraping my protective layer off now. 6 ahead of me in the queue. Hence the blogging. Time for my book now( Smut by Alan Benett)

UART

Well I now have the Raspberry Pi talking to an Arduino using the UART. I’m seeing my hello-world message popping out at the far end … mostly. It does seem to drop a character in a regular point, but that is probably a script issue.

I’m not echoing back the data yet but I guess that will work fine.

So technically I can send a message to the Arduino and then signal that to the OLED display.

I still a bit bemused that I can’t use the Pi’s GPIO pin to talk directly to the OLED display, even though it is using the same functions as the Arduino.

Still, it is progress.

Image

It Worked!

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I’m amazed. I got home today from our short break in The Smoke and plugged my PICAXE-133Y OLED display into the Arduino Uno, knocked up a bit-basher to send single-wire serial data idling on low and … SHAZAM! It works.

Currently it is running a clock timer next to my PC. I intend now to write a similar bit-basher for the Raspberry-Pi and get it outputting a twitter ticker-tape feed. I should be able to get it working from the UART too. I’m still not sure what went wrong there. But now I’ve at least demonstrated it works.

Santa Brought …

… Me an Arduino Uno. Lovely Santa, thank you!

I’m away from home at present though so no opportunity to plug it in and play. This will marry well with the Raspberry Pi. Perhaps I will get my OLED display running after all with some hard bit bashing.

I invested recently in a PIC programmer but still don’t have a PIC. However the trend is clearly a new venture into the world of micro controllers. Quite exciting in a geeky way.

Shopping in the Real World

Completed my real world Christmas shopping yesterday. I don’t get into town on my own very often so it was quite a treat, further enhanced by the fact that I was just buying stocking fillers rather than gloomily hunting for the gift. A more relaxing ride by far.
Christmas shopping to me always about being jostled and appalled by the consumerism. But town was not that busy and the goods on view are simpler than in previous years. I think people have really given up on real world shopping and do 99% of it online now. I know I do. No wonder people are so pissed with Amazon.
It’s not just the prices. Ordering online or by phone saves heaving the damn stuff back to the cave. Then there is the difficulty in parking – including the endless nickel-and-dimming before you’ve even got to the shops. Public transport is no better. Town is hassle.
I bumped into a mandolinist friend and , to drop you in half way, we ended up in a pop-up cigar shop. Neither of us smokers,me were curious if it had always been there. The decor said yes, the assistant said no. The shelved were crammed with boxes of cheroots and single malt whiskies.

“Do you have any empty cigar boxes?” I enquired.
“Not at the moment, but come back. Making a cigar box guitar?” He probed knowingly. I took is number.

A the bus-stop the rain belted off the shiny new LED marquee that flashed up “20 mins”. Changing my length of focus I spotted the Italian cafe across the road.
Inside it was clean and dry. My nostrils filled with the snug aroma of freshly ground and almond croissant. Half way through I remembered I was not driving. It was also Christmas and I’d been fed up all week. The house was empty at home. So a glass of wine arrived [to hell with my medication] chased by a further coffee (not espresso), perhaps subconsciously to mask it’s predecessor. By the end I was more relaxed.
Little in this world can improve upon the simple pleasure of an Italian cafe. In the UK at least.
Soon the bus rolled in and I paid up, pushing my way out to The Fens. I’d get a couple of remaining important things online. Not quite the same experience.

Mark II

My Mark II Raspberry Pi has shipped, though no sign of it here yet. I’ve decided to dedicate one to the telly and Internet things and use the other for hacking. Not sure which one to use. What would I do with all hat extra memory?

I’m going to try bit flipping on he UART this weekend to see if I can get he OLED display running finally. It will be a treat if I do manage it.

PicKit3

I went to visit an old colleague last night, taking my Raspberry Pi and OLED display. He has a lot of groovy kit in his house such as an oscilloscope and lab power sources. After a couple of hours of debugging we concluded that … I was right! The idle-high RPi UART appears not to dovetail too well with the Picaxe’s idle-low UART. Furthermore my inverting and converting from 3.3v to 5v seemed to be correct.

So I’m going to either get hold of a Picaxe cable or get a new display. Here is where said friend kindly gave me a Nokia 5110 LCD display. “Bought 10 of these for £10 on eBay.”

He gave me a nice demo of his solution with text flashing up on it pretty quickly. Oh yes, that will be a fun toy at Christmas time.

In the meantime he showed me his Pic programmer. I quite like the idea of being able to programme a tiny cheap micro controllers to do what I want – maybe even convert a RPi’s UART to an idle low one. So on eBay tonight I’ve bought the programmer. Should be here by Christmas.