|
|
|
smallest woodscrews in the hardware store
Saturday, December 28 2024
After an extended cold snap, today was much warmer and rather foggy, the sort of day on which Santa Claus might choose to give Rudolph a promotion.
Overnight I'd been thinking about what might be different in the IC setup with a working Arduino slave at the cabin and the test environment that had failed me so badly yesterday. It was possible that I'd broken slave support in the firmware and was only just noticing it. But there was another possibility: the IC implementation at the cabin includes IC devices in addition to the slave. Perhaps they were doing something to the SCL and SDA lines to keep them active. ChatGPT had suggested adding pullup resistors to these lines, something I'd ignored since, in my experience, pullup resistors rarely fix anything. So I tried adding an IC weather sensor to the complex of boards that included the malfunctioning slave, and just like that, the whole system started working perfectly!
Our neighbor A and her daughter and dog Henry came over this morning to join us in front of the fire. I made some coffee and Gretchen made some sort of warm cider. For the past few weeks, A has had a swarm of Latino tradesman swarming her house (even in very cold weather) as part of a major renovation that will likely change its color completely from green to something else. (Already, almost none of the house facing our direction, that is, east, is green any more.) A talked about the termites and how they had destroyed the floor beneath the refrigerator. The plan now is to use some sort of concrete board as an impenetrable anti-termite barrier. At some point in all this A's daughter drew our attention to Neville, on whom she'd put his cowardly lion mane. A little before A and the others left, Henry covertly barfed three or four or times, producing an enormous amount of material that I cheerfully cleaned up.
A's daughter told us a story about a time during a sleepover when everyone got sick, and this led Gretchen to tell a story from one of her sleepovers that ended well past bedtime when everyone had to suddenly feign sleep at the sight of Gretchen's father's legs as he came down the stairs. My contribution to these stories was to tell about how I was nervous during my first few sleepovers because I'd been a bedwetter until the age of nine or ten. I then told about how my mother had bought a buzzer system that included two conductive perforated sheets that I would then sleep on top of. Then, if I peed in the night, the urine would create an electrical bridge between the sheets, completing a circuit and triggering the buzzer (a sound that is rarely heard now that everything is electronic). I said that it only took being awakened once or twice by that sound for me to be cured of my bedwetting. Best of all, I then got to do what I wanted with the buzzer.
This afternoon I had some big checks to deposit at the bank, so I added a few other goals for the outing and drove out to the branch of our bank on Morton Blvd. But I found it was closed. I then went to the Hannaford to buy cereal, vegan milk, corn chips, bananas, and beans. Finally I went to Lowes hoping to buy tiny pan-head wood screws and a little tank of MAPP gas. But I couldn't find the torch gases anywhere and the tiniest wood screws they had were not very small. Clearly I need to hunt for such screws online. (I need such screws for attaching tiny circuit boards to substrates.)
For linking purposes this article's URL is:
http://asecular.com/blog.php?241228 feedback
previous | next |
