Okay, so, getting back to Electronics. I decided, last year, to try and dig my way back from the nothingness that's plagued me for over a decade.
A couple months ago I came across the free tutorial Getting To Blinky from Contextual Electronics. Now, I can't afford the fee's he's wanting for the classes, but he has been nice enough to release a few freebies here and there, and I've been wanting to learn KiCad for a while now, so this was perfect.
Following along with the tutorial, I drew up the circuit (making my own version of the 7555 schematic design along the way), flipped that over into the PCB designer (and making another footprint), had the boards made up by OSH Park (who doesn't love purple PCB's!!!), and watched the tutorial episode where Chris realised he goofed up and had to get medieval on the 7555. Thanks Chris. Anyhow… Ordered the components while I waited for the boards (and forgot the LED's), and then left it all sitting here in my desk for several months. Yeah, life, it happens, what can you do.
Then this morning I woke up absolutely determined to put the thing together. Pulled out my crappy cheap soldering iron, perched myself in front of the corner of our TV entertainment unit by the window, with the bits and pieces laid out in front of me; components, tweezers, scissors, solder, de-soldering braid, and my phone, with it's 4x camera zoom in place of a magnifying glass. No flux, no clamp for the board (used double-sided tape to hold it down instead), but it was enough. The solder joints look horrible, and I'm sure there's at least one or two on the IC that are only barely holding on, but after I was done, and I'd cleaned up the bits of packaging and put most of the stuff away, I pulled out a spare coin cell battery and threw it into the holder, and it blinked! To my utter astonishment, the darned thing actually worked! There it was merrily blinking away at me… I Made A Blinky!
So now I have a fully functioning Blinky. After over a decade of feeling like I need to get back into it but never quite getting there, I can't say that enough — as simple and small a start as it is, with so far yet to go to relearn what I've not used in so long, I'm happy. I've learnt to use KiCad (including making custom schematic components, and footprints), order the board through OSH Park, find and purchase the parts required, and managed to assemble it successfully with barely adequate gear (and SMT to boot). Most importantly, I've proven to myself that I can — and that little spark of confidence regained, is what Blinky was all about.
Where to now… Well, first, I'd fixed up the little mistake from the tutorial in the design files, right after having ordered the boards. So I think I'll order up a new set rather than persist with the nasty clipped IC leg hack I had to do with this one. That, and purchase some flux, decent tweezers, a 10x magnifying loupe to check the joints and read part numbers, a clamp to hold the board rather than the horrid double-sided tape, and a hands-free magnifying lens so I can actually see what I'm doing.
Beyond that, I think, it's back to my desk clock with better display driving, an RTC module, and some updates to the firmware I've been planning. Get that going on an Arduino prototyping shield, then off to OSH Park again (what can I say, I like purple!) for a single-board version.
Saturday, 27 May 2017
Friday, 19 May 2017
A touch of Religeon.
To begin, let me start by making my view on religion reasonably clear: I think religion is mostly nonsense, the church exponentially so… I however think the core ideals of the religion known as Christianity are well worth upholding, and modern Christianity has the ideal of being a predominantly private choice (which in my mind makes it a prime contender for the mantle of "the one true religion"). And I do believe that the intelligent design philosophy is at least plausible. With that in mind, on with the story…
A little debate recently happened in one little corner of my family, a new round of a recurring debate on the evolution vs creation issue. I've heard it a few times, the argument that the chances of a species like us evolving being so very unlikely, that it must have been intentional. But is it? Really?
Is it really just 1 chance in whatever sized space? In an infinite universe, even if just one in every nearly infinite number of possibilities is us, there's still an infinite number of possibilities we will exist, within an infinite space of possibilities — infinities are weird that way, and I often hear it said, and agree, humans just really are rather crappy at correctly judging extreme quantities; really small numbers like 1 in infinity, or really big ones, like that infinity itself.
And why should we be the only possibility. While it's true we're the only us, so far as we know, would a different version of us also not think, "we're the only us"? I think it is, perhaps, a little egotistical to think we're THAT special. Unique, sure, but what makes us so special? Did we achieve universal peace quicker? Have we figured out our purpose for existing yet? We're a million years old, on a planet several billions of years old. What have we done to make ourselves as special as we think we are, among all the species that may or may not exist out there.
Then, even if we are indeed alone in all the knowable universe (and I kind of hope we're not, personally), there's still a fair bit more of it out there. There is the suggestion the solution to the Fermi Paradox, is that the universe itself has an age-wise Goldilocks Zone for the creation of life, so we may just be one of the earlier species to appear in this region of the universe, and there may well be the radio bubble of another species screaming it's way towards us right now, just as ours does towards them. And speaking of which, there may well be more us's that we'll never in the lifetime of the universe have a chance to meet, and we'll never know because the expansion of the universe is taking even their radio signals away from us too fast to reach us in time. (And even assuming future FTL travel, that simply moves the bar, it still doesn't actually remove it.) Assuming the universe is as big as scientists seem to believe, there's still a distance beyond which we will never be able to observe, and a far more populated region of our universe could begin just the other side of that line, and neither us nor them will ever know.
Now, does any of that make creationism impossible? Well, before the universe existed, what was there? If some entity was responsible for our existence, perhaps they simply chose a beginning that they knew would lead to the end they wanted. Perhaps without even knowing how, and they're looking down thinking, "wow, look at these weird little creatures I made". Or perhaps they did choose the one that will have us in it, with all that we are, and all that we will be. But no matter how much you play statistician, that question, along with whether in fact an external entity was responsible for any of this at all, is for the time being still the provenance of religion, and we have only our faith (or lack thereof) for answering the question of whether religion is even real at all, or just a creation of our own making intended to make us feel a little better, and/or behave a little better too.
All I know for sure, is that if God — in any of the forms imagined by mankind — is real, and He's aware that I exist, I hope He isn't too disappointed in me.
A little debate recently happened in one little corner of my family, a new round of a recurring debate on the evolution vs creation issue. I've heard it a few times, the argument that the chances of a species like us evolving being so very unlikely, that it must have been intentional. But is it? Really?
Is it really just 1 chance in whatever sized space? In an infinite universe, even if just one in every nearly infinite number of possibilities is us, there's still an infinite number of possibilities we will exist, within an infinite space of possibilities — infinities are weird that way, and I often hear it said, and agree, humans just really are rather crappy at correctly judging extreme quantities; really small numbers like 1 in infinity, or really big ones, like that infinity itself.
And why should we be the only possibility. While it's true we're the only us, so far as we know, would a different version of us also not think, "we're the only us"? I think it is, perhaps, a little egotistical to think we're THAT special. Unique, sure, but what makes us so special? Did we achieve universal peace quicker? Have we figured out our purpose for existing yet? We're a million years old, on a planet several billions of years old. What have we done to make ourselves as special as we think we are, among all the species that may or may not exist out there.
Then, even if we are indeed alone in all the knowable universe (and I kind of hope we're not, personally), there's still a fair bit more of it out there. There is the suggestion the solution to the Fermi Paradox, is that the universe itself has an age-wise Goldilocks Zone for the creation of life, so we may just be one of the earlier species to appear in this region of the universe, and there may well be the radio bubble of another species screaming it's way towards us right now, just as ours does towards them. And speaking of which, there may well be more us's that we'll never in the lifetime of the universe have a chance to meet, and we'll never know because the expansion of the universe is taking even their radio signals away from us too fast to reach us in time. (And even assuming future FTL travel, that simply moves the bar, it still doesn't actually remove it.) Assuming the universe is as big as scientists seem to believe, there's still a distance beyond which we will never be able to observe, and a far more populated region of our universe could begin just the other side of that line, and neither us nor them will ever know.
Now, does any of that make creationism impossible? Well, before the universe existed, what was there? If some entity was responsible for our existence, perhaps they simply chose a beginning that they knew would lead to the end they wanted. Perhaps without even knowing how, and they're looking down thinking, "wow, look at these weird little creatures I made". Or perhaps they did choose the one that will have us in it, with all that we are, and all that we will be. But no matter how much you play statistician, that question, along with whether in fact an external entity was responsible for any of this at all, is for the time being still the provenance of religion, and we have only our faith (or lack thereof) for answering the question of whether religion is even real at all, or just a creation of our own making intended to make us feel a little better, and/or behave a little better too.
All I know for sure, is that if God — in any of the forms imagined by mankind — is real, and He's aware that I exist, I hope He isn't too disappointed in me.
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