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east side of the bayou
Saturday, April 14 2012
There's a small but permanent body of water on the east side of the Farm Road, and, because it looks like a habitat suitable for alligators, I call it "the Bayou." Today I walked the dogs on the east (non-Farm-Road) side of it, giving the dogs easier access to it. Eleanor waded in immediately, allowing the cold spring water to rise up to her chin. Ramona, though, was more reticent (as Eleanor used to be when she was her age), though she went in far enough to get six inches of her legs wet.
The main thing I did of any use today was add debugging features to the Arduino slave of the solar controller, allowing me to interrogate it both from the serial console (a computer in the laboratory) or using a universal remote to bring up menus on its built-in LCD (down in the boiler room). It's great that I made its menu system so easy to expand; basically, the only limit to my ability to interact with it directly is the memory of the slave, which, though limited, is much bigger than I've used so far. In terms of being able to interrogate the slave via its serial port, that was simply a matter of copying over functional code from the master.
I love the Arduino environment, and, because an Arduino is used to control the Makerbot Thingomatic, I assumed it had been programmed in the Arduino IDE. Unfortunately, the code is all in non-Arduino C++, calling libraries with which I am unfamiliar. Still, the code looks familiar enough that I can probably get the hang of it if I keep at it.
For linking purposes this article's URL is:
http://asecular.com/blog.php?120414 feedback
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