I am so fucking happy right now! I have been developing a custom digital watch on and off for the past 2 and a half years; and 10 minutes ago I did a complete test of the first Beta release of the code.

Everything works, even the rushed shit that I just chucked in on caffeine driven late night code binges. Not only the code, but the custom hardware checks out too.

Seriously YEEEE FUCKING HAWWWWWW 😀

Tonight has been a damn good night.

Next project Ideas

CC1101 – Low-Power Sub-1GHz RF Transceiver (vhttp://www.ti.com/product/cc1101)

Si4463 – HIGH-PERFORMANCE, LOW-CURRENT TRANSCEIVER (Frequency range = 119–1050 MHz) (https://www.silabs.com/Support%20Documents/TechnicalDocs/Si4464-63-61-60.pdf)

I got it working, the bloody thing is actually working.

I have been working on a project for months. I have built new hardware and spend over a hundred hours to make sure it was right. Then when i went to program the thing, it didn’t work. It programmed ok, but it wouldn’t do anything. It was as if the clock had just had it and was giving me the big FU i’m sleeping. Tens oh hours trying dfferent things, then as i unplugged it before going to bed, the LED blinked. It shouldn’t have blinked but it did.

What should have happened was that the LED stayed on, but it was off except for that momentary blink. I tapped the board and it blinked again. More tapping and more blinking.

It was that moment when I realised that it wasn’t the code, it was the hardware. Turns out that the 0603 pull up resistor on the reset line had a dry solder joint and the pin was floating. This kept putting the micro in to a constant reset. A small stab with the soldering iron and BAM. It all comes good. Just a small bit of coding. BUTTON1 turn LED on BUTTON2 turn LED off.

Compile

Program

Led comes on. Press BUTTON2 LED goes off. Press BUTTON1 LED turns on.

YYYYYYYYYYYYEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEESSSSSSSSSSSSSSSSSSSSSSSSSSSSSSSSSSSSSSSS!!!!!!!111!!!

Yee fucking haw

I haven’t been that happy to see a Red LED since … well … ever.

Tonight I was working on a project and I was looking for the next electonic part to solder to the board. I had it in my hand only a few seconds ago but now i couldn’t find it. I need that part, I was getting frustrated as i hadn’t even got out of my chair yet. i looked on the floor and moved almost everything. It was about the time when you get shitty with yourself and say fuck it and put it down for the night when I realised that it had been with me all along. It was hanging out of my mouth, I had put it there because i had run out of hands only a few minutes before.

Stupid temp sensor,

Note to self, the mouth is not a storage area.

I don’t own a set of noise cancelling headphoness and didn’t borrow a set before heading off on my honeymoon Europe adventure.

So to combat this problem, I broke it down into 2 parts, “noise cancelling” and “headphones” This turned out to be rather simple.

step 1, find a pair of foam 23dB ear plugs, (cost 47 cents)

step 2, use a set of headphones (not the ear plugs variety) (that i do have) over the top.

This worked out supprisingly well. See noise cancelling headphones only work in a certain frequency band (the low frequency). They work great to remove the rumbling of an aircraft engines, but is useless against the crying baby 2 frigging seats in front of you. Instead the foam ear plugs which reduce sound accross the whole spectrum.

The down side to this was that you now couldn’t hear what was playing throught the audio system. However if you turn the volume up to max you can hear as if it was playing at a comfortable level with out the ear plugs. So now you really can’t hear anything around you.

All in all it was a complete sucess, and it definitly helped reduce the jetlag.