Your leaking thatched hut during the restoration of a pre-Enlightenment state.

 

Hello, my name is Judas Gutenberg and this is my blaag (pronounced as you would the vomit noise "hyroop-bleuach").



links

decay & ruin
Biosphere II
Chernobyl
dead malls
Detroit
Irving housing

got that wrong
Paleofuture.com

appropriate tech
Arduino μcontrollers
Backwoods Home
Fractal antenna

fun social media stuff


Like asecular.com
(nobody does!)

Like my brownhouse:
   80% of a QuikWall
Sunday, September 6 2015
I spent most of the afternoon applying a product called QuikWall to the freshly-exposed southern concrete block wall of the basement. I've used similar products to finish walls in the past, though I think in those cases I actually brushed it on. This stuff was too thick for that; it contained 3/4 inch-long fibers and needed to be trowelled on. Evidently it contains portland cement or some similar chemically-curable base, since it needs to be kept wet as it sets. Unfortunately, I'd only done a little over 80% of the wall before exhausting my fifty pound bag of the stuff. I would have gone to Lowes for another bag, but my Subaru has an expired inspection sticker and a loud exhaust leak, so I thought maybe I should wait until the Prius became available. At the time, Gretchen had that with her in Woodstock for her Sunday bookstore shift.
This evening I worked on getting an Arduino-based I2C-connected Atmega8 to work as a dedicated keyboard controller. The key to getting this all to work was a USBTinyISP that actually worked. I'd had one from China that apparently doesn't work, but with a working one, I was able to flash a working Optiboot loader for a no-crystal Atmega8 running at 8 MHz. With that, I could work on and debug code that would scan a keyboard matrix, store keypresses in a queue, and then forward them via I2C. Either the bootloader or the fuse settings weren't perfect, however, because occasionally after uploading a new firmware, the Atmega8 would enter a state where it could no longer slurp in new firmware via its bootloader. I'd be forced to reflash the bootloader, a process that got in the way of my debugging. Eventually, though, I had code that more or less worked. Here's a version of it. (By the way, with the Atmega8, I've been forced to use the old Arduino23 environment, which predates Arduino 1.0.)


For linking purposes this article's URL is:
http://asecular.com/blog.php?150906

feedback
previous | next