It's been a while since I posted anything, but I finally have made some progress with the Arduino.

Since I'm building my own board eventually for the railroad signals I'm planning, I wanted to prototype a bare-bones Arduino from the ground up... I ordered a '168 from SparkFun, preloaded with the bootloader and then used the schematic and pinouts from Arduino.cc to build a minimal setup.

I built a small carrier board to put my resonator on for a good connection, wired it up to a 10mm jumbo LED, got the FTDI USB->Serial board connected and while it didn't work the FIRST time (It took a little tinkering) -- I finally uploaded a sketch and it works as expected - which is no simple feat for me right now for the amount of time I have of late...

After I got the Hello Blinky LED sketch running, I did tinker around with a sketch to set the brightness of the LED based on values from the serial port and that worked, too!

At any rate, progress in the forward direction!

[My Sketch after the break] 

As I was leaving work tonight I happened to see that they have started turning on the LED lights on the Duke Energy building… and boy does it add a lot of color to the skyline… I can’t wait until they get it all synchronized and coordinated…

And on a side note – this particular view has changed a lot in the last couple of years – here is a picture from the same location in July, 2006

On October 4th, 1969 (That’d be just over a year before I was born) Monty Python aired their first episode on BBC…

And the search for the Holy Grail has never been the same.

(From David Maliki’s Website - http://wondermark.com/554/) – there is also an automated version of it at: http://fictiongen.boxofjunk.ws/ that I couldn’t look at.*)

I Saw this this morning when I was getting ready to leave the house… and I think I have found yet another site to add to my collection of RSS feeds that I don’t really have time to read, but do anyways ;)

My Story turns out to be:

The Blackphages.

In a dystopian terraformed Mars a young flying message courier stumbles across a crazy old man which spurs him into conflict with murderous robots with the help of a sarcastic female techno-geek and her propensity for being captured, culminating in a false victory with a the promise of future danger.

*--It didn’t want to work on IE8 and I didn’t have time this morning to figure it out or get FireFox installed…

Just wanted to let everybody know that was waiting for me to post these - I have uploaded the pictures from the Caribbean Carnevale on my Flickr site: http://www.flickr.com/photos/tuck/sets/72157622087418489/detail/