Scott's Blog

I bought the SparkFun LED matrix to go along with the Arduino and here's what I've built. I basically smiles when the build is green and frowns when it's broken. You can find the code at google code . I wanted to have is scroll messages across and there's code to do that, but in the end it was just too annoying since it sits in front of my desk. I have a routine ready, however if I want to give someone a message. To get the text I used wxPython and I draw the text in a buffer, then I look at the pixels one by one and those become the LEDs to turn on. One nice addition is that I can pass Unicode characters and thus it's relatively easy to show special characters like ⚘♂✔✖✈☝ although 8x8 pixels is often not enough and I have to fix them by hand. Another bonus the that program works from the command line so you can print larger messages: ./text2pixels.py --size 30 --bold --font "Delphine" Arduino ### ...

I had some fun this weekend with the sparkfun LED matrix . It's a little bit expensive at $35.00, but looks like it could have a bunch of cool uses. Programming it I had to learn about SPI and I ended up writing my own SPI routines in processing . I've put the code up at led_matrix_tools and some of it is very reusable. Note: I wrote this on October 12th, I just noticed now that I never sent it.

Brazil has a strange relationship with electricity. Something like 95% of the electricity in Brazil comes from hydroelectric, yet they charge an arm and a leg for it. A few years ago we had the "Apagão" (big-unplug or big-turn-off) where you had to halve your electricity consumption from the same time last year. This was because it hadn't rained enough and the water was getting too low behind the dams to make electricity. The real problem, of course, is that the government hasn't been investing in new electric generation plants. Worse was, that after the emergency, everyone had learned how to use less electricity (by buying compact fluorescent lights (at twice the normal price), for example) and was being more energy efficient, so the hydro company increased the prices. Why? Because they weren't making enough revenue! At my home they charge R$0.5684/kWh which is about USD$ 0.3072/kWh. That's 204% more than the New York region ($0.1508/kWh) or 217% more expe...

Puxe (pronounced "push") - means pull no - means "in" or "at", "no happy hour" would be "at 'happy hour'" sex - means "Fri" or sexta feira. Sexo would be sex. uai (pronounce "why") - it's an expression similar to "look", "well".

We we cleaning out some closest and my son picked up an old game of mine: Baldur's Gate from 1998. It's pretty tough for him since it's all in English and it's pretty complicated, but he likes it. These old games still are lots of fun.

So today I'm 101010 (in binary), or 33 in base 13, but nobody makes jokes in base 13 * . I guess most geeks know that 42 is the "Answer to the Ultimate Question of Life, the Universe, and Everything", unfortunately I need to explain the special significance to everyone else. Somehow, I do feel wiser this year, perhaps it's just the senility making me forget my ignorance. * *is also 42 in ASCII.

The self adhesive poster came back from the printers and I quickly realized that I should have re-measured the MAME console. The SVG file that I used was the original blueprints, but not exactly what I actually ended up cutting. My final console ended up being a bit deeper than the plan and some of the holes were placed by eye. So you can see in the image that some decals that were supposed to be on the sides (like "Nintendo" and the packman ghosts) ended up appearing on the bottom. Also, some of the holes don't line up nicely with the text like "Start" and "Pause" are more obvious. The resolution also isn't that great, I'm guessing that it's 100 DPI instead of 300 DPI which I was expecting. But from a distance it looks pretty nice and I'm still glad that I went and did it. I'm a little wiser now - next time I'll make sure to remeasure.