Perspectives of a Canadian in the Old/Deep/New/Geographic South: This is where I ramble on about nothing in particular and post a few nice pictures.
The two Sparkfun RedBoards I ordered during their Arduino Day sale arrived yesterday.
With the two RedBoards, the Netduinos, and the Ham Radio for Arduino and PICAXE book I picked up a couple weeks ago, I should have a lot of fun exploring and playing. Now I’ll have to start accumulating shields…
I think I’m going to need a new project box to store these boards in now.
After using up some spare time over the period of a few weeks, I finally finished going through the parts bin of ICs and inventoried them. Right now it’s a big long list in a Google Drive spreadsheet.
I don’t know what most of them do, have no idea if any of them are still functional and probably won’t ever use any of them, but I did have fun going through them, digging up datasheets for them and reading the descriptions for each of the chips. Datasheets for most of them were pretty easy to find, while a few others I had to dig a bit. There were a handful that I wasn’t able to find anything on.
About a half dozen of the bins had EEPROMs in them, which I ignored for the most part. One bin had a stash of 555 timer chips that could find some use in a project if they work. There are CPUs, digital logic gates, op amps, buffers, registers, counters, even some RAM chips. If I had the know-how, I’ve probably got just about everything I need to assemble a simple computer based on the Z80 CPUs I found in the bins.
One interesting find in one of the bins was this Defender ROM.
Absolutely no idea if it’s any good, but it would be neat to plug into a Defender console and see if it does work.
At some point this month, I made it to 15 years working here at MUSC.
There have been a lot of changes over those 15 years, lots of new equipment, new people and new sites. I can definitely say that working here has never been boring. Routine at times, but never boring.
Now, heading into 15+ years, the boss is retiring at the end of May, and hopefully by the time fall comes around, there will be a new head of the Diagnostic Medical Physics division to work under. That, I’m sure, will involve more changes and adjustments. So far I’ve been very fortunate in my career to have been able to work with and under some very good mentors and colleagues. I’m looking forward to seeing what the next few years bring.
This year I’ll be skipping Dragon*Con again to make a trip back home. Flight and car rental are booked. The plan is to be in Edmonton September 19-26. Hopefully if there are no flight hitches, I’ll be going CHS->DFW->YEG and the reverse going back.
I’m looking forward to the trip. I think this time I’ll be able to spend more time playing tourist in my home town.
Today we picked up a Spirograph on sale at Target.
I had one when I was a kid and spent many afternoons using it to make all kinds of neat patterns. Mine had ball point pens, but this one came with felt pens.
I played with it for a bit, and let me tell you, it can be just as frustrating as a big kid as it was when you were a little kid.
I didn’t really like the felt pen because of the blobbing and bleed through that happens when you get stuck. Pen or pencil was much better.
Still fun to play with, and I find the patterns you can create just as fascinating now as when I was a kid.