kevin.fonner.net
"Any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic."
Arthur C. Clarke, "Profiles of The Future", 1961 (Clarke's third law)

These insightful words are those of Arthur C. Clarke. They simply mean that any technology that is far enough beyond a persons understanding, then that person might perceive that technology as magical or supernatural in nature. If a man from the 15th century were shown something as common as a television, then he might believe it to be a magical window capable of showing the past, present, and even possible future of anywhere in the world and beyond. To that 15th century man, magic is real!

Why can't magic be real? How do you define magic? Is it something that is amazing and unexplainable? If that is the case then magic is all around us created by the engineers, scientist, and makers of our time.

Getting started on the mountain frame

May 10th, 2008


Here I am preparing to start building the mountain superstructure.


Here is another shot of me getting started.


I now have three of the twelve upright posts into place.


This isn’t a great photo because my wife took the photo from inside but it gives you a sense of scale for the mountain.


I finished up Saturday with a decent start on the framing of the mountain.

TWI Serial Bus is finally working for me

May 7th, 2008


Ok…. This was a big deal for me. For some reason it took me a while to get a TWI (I2c) interface up and running properly and it held me up from doing some blog posts. But it’s working now! Here I have two simple avr platforms up and running. The one on the left is the master and the one on the right is the slave. To control 300-500 LED lights I decided that it was a job for more then one microcontroller. So I will have a master LED controller and several slave LED controllers. The master will push the animation frames down the bus and each of the slave controllers will control a bank of shift registers connected to 64 LEDS.


Here is a close up of the Master Controller. Not really much different circuitry then before. I will be posting the code up here eventually. That is where most of the fun is! Don’t be fooled by the connector up to the top left. It’s not Ethernet. That’s actually a serial connection to my computer for debugging. I use Ethernet patch cables instead of serial cables often now because I can make my own cables then. Just slap a couple of custom RJ45-DSUB-9 adapters onto an ether cable and you have a serial cable. I picked that up from Make Magazine (Issue 01). Pretty Handy.


It’s great to be a geek!

Debugging the LED Controller

April 27th, 2008


I added a a serial output to my development board to help with debugging the chip. The tutorials at sparkfun were really helpful!