shimweasel

The Amidas are pretty much done now. I spent yesterday afternoon and this morning painstakingly loading support software onto eight fractious little machines, over a usbnet connection built, apparently, out of chewing gum and dry twigs.
It’s done now, thank Christ, and any further changes should be nothing more than cosmetic tweaks to an awesomely flexible and well-designed little program. (Oh, give me this one - I’m not often self-mythologising.) They can talk to each other via IR, or save their brains to a USB key, which ought to be more than enough for field use - I’m going to disregard Zawinski’s Law and leave the mail functionality out, at least for the moment.

The next challenge is to get the Fat Controllers to do the right thing. This is a bit trickier. It’s relatively easy to get them to execute straight-line code with the occasional busyloop pause for timing, but if you want them to control more than one channel at once, you have the choice of:

1. manually compiling it down to a straight loop, which gets complicated and unclear fast
2. using threads - not really an option on a system this small
3. writing an event queueing system and scheduling them asynchronously.
4. using control inversion to write it as threads, and writing a tool to automatically convert from the second form to the third.

Felix does the fourth approach rather well, letting you write it as threads and compiling it to the third form, but it doesn’t compile to anything I can use easily. I’m currently on the first approach, and hating it. The third or fourth might be doable, but either of them brings out something that lies hidden in the first approach: you really need an independent timing mechanism to get the lights firing at the appropriate times. This means learning a lot more about the Fat Controller chips than I had originally intended, but I’ve come this far - no point getting worried about getting my hands dirty now.

Here’s our little monster here. The picture’s not great, but you should be able to see a little picture in the bottom right corner - apparently this took longer to design than the board itself.

In other news, Da Boyz brought home a grand’s worth of booze yesterday.

Don’t ever drink with steelies. This won’t last them a fortnight.