"Double, double toil and trouble; Fire burn and cauldron bubble. Fillet of a fenny snake, In the cauldron boil and bake."
Macbeth
Bill Shakespeare
For a school drama production where three "witches" dance around a cauldron, we needed a way of lighting the base of the cauldron in a semi-realistic way without burning any students (which would be way too much paperwork). We have recently received some "flasher" LEDs from 中国 which were bought for a jewellery project (more on that in a later blog), and might be of use in this instance. Also we have a few ESP-8266 modules around, including the Nodemcu development board, so that we can activate the lights remotely via WiFi.
The ESP-8266 does not have the voltage (3.3V) or the current (12mA) to drive the flasher LED, so first we have connection via a small resistor to the base of our old friend the SS8050 NPN transistor. Now that the flasher is running (9V), we can draw it's signal to the base of another transistor, and this time it is a 2SC2655 which can continuously draw 2A from the collector. That should be enough to then to run an LED strip (also 9V, but rated at 12V) and the strip should "misfire" using the signal of the flashing LED. Let's go!
First draw out the circuit diagram
A little neater via EasyEDA
Prototype and test
The PCB soldered up in a box
Wiring underneath
In a neat(-ish) box ready to be deployed
The result is a great faux fire, but sorry for the crappy video from the new phone (still learning)...
In the meantime some weird carrot god has been messing with our garden and the result is not very pretty! Let's hope the goats like mutant carrots.
Supermarket ready? Yikes!!
Take care y'all and come back and visit again sometime.
"You can't be a creative thinker if you're not stimulating your mind, just as you can't be an Olympic athlete if you don't train regularly."
Ken Robinson
The delight we take in blinking LEDs is perhaps a little eccentric, but each cyclic advance takes us inevitably one step closer to Nerdvana, and isn't that where we'd all like to be?
Recently we've discovered our long lost love for programming chips directly in assembler - for size decreases and speed increases; win/win. As computers got faster moving into the nineties, with more memory and hard disk space, we abandoned assembler around 1997 for C, Java and eventually Python. But now we get to once again program genius little devices using rediscovered skills - nice!
Assembler programming was once (not unkindly) referred to being somewhat similar to sitting in a dark room banging six inch nails into your head! Part of the problem was lack of documentation, no simulation and the possibility of permanent damage to your computer - what's not to like?
Things are much easier now...well, take a look!
And if you're having trouble sleeping, watch it again! Kym thinks the best way to avoid AVR assembler programming is to cover yourself in cats.
“Spring passes and one remembers one's innocence. Summer passes and one remembers one's exuberance. Autumn passes and one remembers one's reverence. Winter passes and one remembers one's perseverance.”
Yoko Ono
To those suffering year by year in the endless hell that is mono-season, we salute your perseverance. We did two weeks of Groundhog Day recently in Rarotonga, but there is still nothing like the deep of winter to give one a sense of reposeful quiet that we never experienced in warmer climes.
There's a well known phenomena here in the deep south where climate refugees from the North Island such as ourselves buy a property of unparalleled rural tranquility, only to up stakes and scamper back to the warmth after their first winter. The locals all shake their heads and mutter that the real winters are long gone in the past, and that today's cold is a pallid shadow of previous profound freezes.
We'd like to experience one of those freezing antecendents, but for now we just love the current stillness of the quiet cold, waiting for snow, sitting by the fire's warmth with a rich red swilling about the gums. Such joy!
Our mobile phones are not real cameras of course, and do struggle in the low light, but from the pictures below we hope you get the general idea.
Ruminants joined in peace during the hay ceremony
Leaving Hobart around 5pm to head for the hills
Early morning light straining through the trees
Finally a small taste of the wonders of the morning commute through the shrouded landscape, underwritten by the guitar and vocals of the amazing Alexi Murdoch.
