AVR microcontrollers and Arduinos. (by alaric)

I'm a fan of the Atmel AVR microcontroller. The main competitors in its area are the older 8051 and PIC architectures, which have less pleasant instruction sets and are generally harder to program.

Ease of programming is key. Most AVRs can be programmer via a SPI link, which is just four digital I/O pins following a widespread standard that most microcontrollers can drive, and there are widespread interfaces to drive an SPI bus from a PC. It's almost as good as the LPC2000 series 32-bit microcontrollers' asynchronous serial programming interface, which can be driven from an RS-232 port with a little bit of level shifting. I'm also a fan of the LPC2000s, but they fit into a higher-powered niche than the AVRs!

A long time ago I did some AVR development professionally, with a programming board driven from a PC parallel port by some Windows software. I still have the board, and a windows PC with a parallel port and the software installed sitting under a desk, but the "activation energy" of getting the PC powered up and plugged into a keyboard and monitor, and digging out the board, and having to deal with Windows-based development software and all that has stopped me from doing anything with AVRs for a while, given my shortage of time.

However, Sarah has tasked me with developing some electronics for her, as part of a project she's working on. And it looked like the easiest way of doing what's required will be to drop an AVR in.

But rather than dig out the Windows-based dev environment, I've just picked up a USBtiny ISP kit for less money than my original AVR dev system cost. It runs off of a USB port, and supports an entirely open-source AVR toolchain that I can run on my laptop. Inside, it's just an AVR itself, with a USB interface on one end and a SPI interface on the other; everything that I need in one neat little package.

As a plus, it has a cable coming out that I can plug into a header on the board the AVR is part of; my old dev board needed me to pull the chip out of its circuit and put it into the board to program it. Pah!

But while I was there, I also picked up an Arduino Uno. This is a little gadget that has been taking the hobbyist electronics world by storm lately; it's basically an AVR on a board with an inbuilt USB programming interface and a bunch of female headers to make it easy to wire up to various things, and some software to let you program it in C easily with a useful library. There's a wide range of boards that plug directly into the headers to do all sorts of fun stuff, too.

Now, I'm a bit disdainful of the Arduino; given the ability to program bare AVRs directly and to assemble my own circuits on protoboard, I can easily do all sorts of stuff that Arduinos can't, at a fraction of the cost.

However, they're great for beginners, as they are plug and play devices; you can get started without touching a soldering iron or having to work out which pin is which. My disdain is purely personal, I think they're a great thing for the community as a whole 🙂

So why am I getting one, I hear you ask? Well, I have a wife who wants to be able to control LEDs and a six year old daughter who is passionate about building a robot, so I'll be glad to have an easy-to-use module I can just hand them rather than needing to build AVR boards for them all the time; but mainly, I plan to use it as a Bus Pirate clone by putting a FORTH on it along with some words to do things like I2C and SPI...

Stroud Water Festival 40 yrs Party (by sarah)

Last weekend we went to the Stroud On Water Festival for me to read my poetry - it was on our wanting to do list anyway so I was very happy to be asked and in some ways wish we had been able to spend the whole weekend there but obviously I had originally been booked for another festival which had to be canceled due to flooding. (Today we are off to another wet looking festival!).

It was a lovely festival with victorians wondering in to listen to poetry.

I got fed coffee, eton mess and other goodies whilst listening to the other poetry - Alaric and girls missed my performances which was a shame.

After the poetry we wondered about and bought plants and things and looked mainly at bees!

It was the 40th anniversary of the beginning of the restoration of the canals - so here are some photos of work on the canals 🙂

They had a steam roller!

But for me I think the highlight of the day was that as Alaric and the girls left a tent I heard '....good to see the Gotye impersonator has bought his children along...' I missed the rest of the conversation so am not sure it was Alaric that was ment but I think it must have been 🙂 On top of that random people he meets are now saying the same to him :/

Goldy (by sarah)

This is a rubbish photo of the fish but until he becomes a bit more accustomed to things it is probably all we are going to get - his name is Goldy the Goldfish and Jean won him at the Fair. We were a bit alarmed to see that this was still going on and the more we explained why it wasn't a good idea to get one of the fish the more determined she became to get one as they looked so sad :/

So to cut a long story short she had a set budget for the Fair - she got a goldfish - we all went home to sort the gold fish out - she insisted on carrying him home herself and fretted about weather he could breath and showed him to any and all other children we passed along the way.

I told of my carnival fish Sandy and Shelly that I had at her age and Daddy spoke of how he and his mother used to win as many of them as they could in order to save them when he was little.

Alaric turns out to be a fish expert (at least as far as goldfish are concerned) and we had wanted to get fish as the New House Pets as there had been fish here when we came to look around.

Once home Alaric and Jean set about equalising temperatures of water with the bag in a bowl - so that the poor thing wouldn't get shocked being put in new water. Then we zoomed out to buy supplies. Which being a bank holiday wasn't that easy!

It is only a small tank for now as we just don't have the money but hopefully say next month we can get a larger one - Goldy seems abit worried about the space to be honest and has mainly hidden behind the plastic plant and dug himself a little whole in the gravel.

Today we went to the Aquatic Habitate to get a real plant and a snail - Jean wanted a shrimp but apparently Goldy would eat it (it was not much smaller than Goldy!). Anyway Jeany has named the snail Slimy and is now obsessed with alliteration :/

Again Jean insisted on carrying the snail and has been very militant about feeding the fish and has even taken to remembering to feed her rabbit without being reminded.

I'm glad we have the fish and we are all looking forward to establishing an ecosystem but we were not happy to find them at the Fair and worse than that - in rescuing Goldy we are supporting the trade :/ But Goldy actually came out to see us today when we came in which we think is a good sign 🙂

Festival Sheep for Wychwood :) (by sarah)

This is Ianto and Yori who are really looking forward to Wychwood at the weekend - they are hoping that all the festival goers will make them lovely multicoloured fleeces to wear just incase of the rain.

Time (by alaric)

Tired of lying in the sunshine
Staying home to watch the rain
You are young and life is long
And there is time to kill today
And then one day you find
Ten years have got behind you
No one told you when to run
You missed the starting gun
Pink Floyd - Time

I've always felt rather cursed with the fact that I have an addiction to designing things. It's bad enough knowing that I can easily design something that will take a week to actually do in half an hour, and that I can do that designing while walking or driving or in the shower or lying in bed, while I can only actually do any making when free of distractions... I try to make the best of it, writing the best of my ideas up on this blog when I get time in the hope that some of them will inspire others in some way, as I can't bear the thought of them all being lost. I believe that ideas are cheap, especially for me, so there's no point in hoarding them - I can always come up with more!

However, the past few years have been worse than ever; I've been crucially short of time, so I'm lucky to get a day a month to sit down and make things. I knew that parenthood would take up a lot of my time, but I didn't reckon on pregnancy and childbirth making my wife an invalid, or our house flooding, or all the knock-on effects of these things. I'm running a Cub pack on my own, because nobody else can spare the time to help me; I'm already barely keeping up with the basic requirements of running the pack, and I can't put in any less time without shutting the whole thing down (which would weigh very heavily on my heart, as I love working with those kids, and couldn't bear to let them down). That takes up two or three evenings a week. And I lose a lot of evenings or weekend days helping Sarah build her career, to keep her sane (I don't want her being stuck in a dead-end life of childcare) and to help relieve our financial pressures. I lose three lunch breaks a week to transporting Jean. I'm barely keeping up with keeping the house clean; it gets worse all week and I catch up at the weekend if there is time. And yet most of the things that are taking up my time are the kinds of things I can do while still designing things in my head, so the creative output hasn't slowed that much, even though the time I have to follow up any of the ideas has nearly vanished. There just really isn't much time for me in the week; my one safe escape valve is my weekly visit to Bristol Hackspace on a Thursday after work, where I have two hours.

But then a second problem kicks in: When I do get some time without pressure, I often don't actually want to concentrate on things right away. Over the bank holiday weekend I got about a day to myself (in a few chunks of several hours here and there), and I think I spent at least the first three hours playing Cyber Empires; I only felt up to doing something mindless. After that I got stuck in and did some work on a couple of Ugarit tickets (4363bc7631 and 34e21d597f)... But it's too easy to spend my two hours in Bristol each week just nattering to people!

I've found I'm starting to get self-conscious about it. I'm feeling embarrassed about telling people about the fun ideas I've had, because I know they know I probably won't ever execute them.

There are too many people who go around being smug about the great ideas they have, that they can't implement as they don't have the skill (often, these folks feel that implementation is a mindless task to be given to hired goons). But you can't design something you couldn't imagine every step of the construction of; knowing the limits of the medium is essential to designing something that pushes those limits to their best... It's no better than a child triumphantly saying they have designed the best car ever, that drives at a hundred miles an hour AND flies AND has a laser gun AND has a fridge full of cakes in the boot. That's not a design; it's a requirements document (of sorts).

I don't want people thinking of me like that. Every time I've updated the ARGON web site I've put in more and more perrimistic estimates of my hope of ever implementing it. When I started it, it looked like a tractable project I could slowly work on over several years; now it looks like something I might manage to do in my retirement, at best. That makes me sad. I'm not a person who designs things they can't build (except when I'm doing science-fiction worldbuilding, at least...); I'm a person who just doesn't have the time to build the things they design...