Stuffed my project up!!

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Its in but demo called off until tomorrow, went to the library to do some work and decided to come home and work. TYPICAL!!! I was actually early and ready to go, teacher however off with man flu! She is female but trust me its definitely man flu, annoying but works in my favor, the bloke I will have tomorrow is far more techy and loves gadgets, my teacher who is off wouldnt be impressed with a working scale model of the space station!

Once asked me what the point was of a LED cube!! What you mean whats the point? there is no point, its about making leds flash in a clever pattern. She just didnt get it and a 7x7 led cube with a cool animation got a B, while a light turning on when it got dark got an A, wouldnt mind but was a hacked shop purchased one, Oh the injustice

Specs the tech willson however is impressed with anything he dosnt understand, and that ranges from electric pencil sharpeners and up , plus he less likely to ask awkward questions like why my power indicating led dosnt work (one the minor fix's I didnt get done).

So rather than waste the entire day I might as well find something to do like............reading a large book
 
alec_t said:
Tell him he can't see it because it emits super-ultra-violet only .
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Nah then I would have to explain to specs the tech that light has different colours etc and waves blah blah blah, lets not confuse him, he is a design teacher not a tech teacher. He loves tech stuff hence his nickname, but as sharp as a paint brush.

He is really an art teacher that can draw squares, so he teaches design. Nice bloke and good fun but having a remotely technical discussion with him can induce cranial pain.
Ms Hays has a degree in engineering (she wont say which, I suspect by her build its civil) but is unimpressed with anything but bridges??? She is a hawk and even has eyes all around her head. Plus she has superman hearing, not much fun and nasty to get on the wrong side of. But also lazy, so the trick in her glass is to be ultra quiet and just get on with what you want.

Norris only had him twice, son of satan with a bad temper nough said.
 
JimB said:
Just say that it was working fine until he got hold of it.

JimB
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except I have to demo it first and do the presentation, its ok I will tell him the truth its an error light,whitch it is, except its meant to light to show no error, so I will just skip that little detail
 
smoke pellets add realism (and hide paint job), but have been dissalowed on grounds of safety. all will be revealed once its been marked.
 
You don't need pellets to let the magic smoke out of components .
 
Thanks everyone, its a major leap forward for me and the most ambitious thing I have undertaken. Funny how I have been such a snob against 'toys' like the R PI, but they really open up some amazing possibilities. Still a huge amount to learn about them though, for me I had to use matlab/simulink as well, the code would have been well beyond me, the other codes are python and C on the pics. Also that odd stuff on an arduino (still dont really get those).
 
Ok real honesty here, when I began I considered them toys and mainly for people who wanted a micro but didnt want to learn much about electronics. Nothing wrong with that, they were a quick easy way to get a one off job done with little work.

I preferred pics as it seemed you could get more done although there was a steeper learning curve. But pics seem to have stood still, I have used ARM and other micros and all including the arduino have better easier tools and larger libraries, also one of the things I think really holds back the pic today is attitude.
Since the day I sign on here I signed on microchip forum as well, while lately the forum there has improved a tiny amount its a horrible place. Rarely do microchip staff bother to answer questions or help people, the forum has maybe a dozen personalities that seem to answer every question, until very recently these answers were just about always RTFM to any noob who dared to ask a simple how do question.

This really put me off aged 10 to be constantly told go find the answer in the datasheet, no one would show or explain what the DS was saying. Worse than that, once I learnt to read the datsheet I discovered it was often wrong anyway! It has always seemed too much of an old boys club run by a few long time members.

In contrast another manufacturer website I am a moderator on has no end of staff on hand to answer questions, they go out of there way to help and often implement community suggestions. I also like the way long term members who are less than helpful are dealt with. If a newbie asks a simple question and someone simply replies use google or RTFM, within minuets you get 3-4 senior company staff step in and provide datasheet links and discuss with you what you are trying to do and they try there best to help.

This has lead to an overall culture of people who want to help, those who respond with RTFM are not punished and the remark is ignored, but the post seems to get alot of attention from the paid engineers.

Its a cool place to learn technical things, but its an engineering place. Its very good but lacks a soul at times, no lounge no banter its just work things. Comment on the weather in a post and its totally ignored, say your off on a holiday of a lifetime and...............nothing, zero replies. Do a project with there product and post it and they respond, thats kind of how I got to be a reviewer for them. But the products while good are a steep curve, incredible power and alot of innovation. But how often do you need bluetooth etc etc etc for a hobby project?

This is where I think the Arduino now bridges the gap, simple pre done libs and no end of plug in boards to do pretty much anything you want. Ok I dont see it as a production platform but its a good prototype or proof of concept tool, this is my first project and first time I have used Arduino or R PI.

The R PI intrigues me, I especially like the easy of internet control projects, this is another bug bear with MC, olimax had a webserver products using pics years ago. MC just about squashed it with some nonsense over copyright with some code use, they then failed to come forward and really embrace IOT. They took over HI Tech C, I used the origanal HI tech C and IDE. MC have butchered it, also the whole mplab X is a joke. After all these years it really should be better than it is.

I will use pics for while still, I like soc and dip packages for ease, I like the docs. But sooner or later if they continue on the current path I will swap over completely. As for the PI?

I honestly dont know what to make of it, my current project would not be possible without it, then again had I been unable to easily connect other micros to the PI I wouldnt have used it. The only other problem for me is the SD card boot only, I think there needs to be a way to boot from FRAM or usb stick or better yet HDD
 
What English problem? Nothing that a good secretary can't sort out. All I see here on ETO is some missed capitalization, punctuation, a few misspellings and some words that are informal. Good enough for here. Not good enough for a scientific journal.
 
If you look back (not even long ago), you will see the grammar police and spacing police giving me a really hard time.

I got told off about not using I, I always used i in a sentence. But I didnt bite I didnt get snarky, I was acutely aware I had a problem so instead I corrected things as they got pointed out. Some things I forgot and to be told a few times , but eventually I got from a solid wall of text to how I do it now. its not great but its way better than it was, what no one realizes is this change was from using forums NOT anything I was taught at school. Schools rarely correct grammar or spelling in any class except English, and in English its only corrected if you actually studying punctuation etc.

The reason why? Because so many people are not native English speaking it has been deemed wrong to correct poor English, I guess the idea being not to hurt anyone's feelings or be seen to be picking on people.

What the PC idiots dont understand is that myself and many non native English speakers would do better and appreciate it alot more if we were picked up on errors (with in reason) alot more so we could improve!! At the moment we are being held back because everyone is too afraid to upset us!!.

I am chronic dyslexic, actually the problem isnt just dyslexia. I read right to left, but I also see the letters back to front so my mind has to flip everything and then interpret it. Its incredibly difficult to explain and no one really knows why except it was some kind of damage before birth.
The upside is, just like all true dyslexic people I think and see in my mind things in 3D. I had this discussion with someone else recently who is dyslexic, and they didnt realize most people can only picture visions in there head in 2 D and true 3D like we can.

So forums teach me English and electronics , a secretary would be good as long as she is not allowed in the shed!!! But they could be a bit distracting!!

Oh and read the very very early posts, I could not read very well
 

Hi LG,

I found that your deliberations on English, dyslexia, and the teaching of English rang a familiar bell. I am pretty much like you and can't handle the order of letters, 'teh' looking the same as 'the' to me. When I was a kid I had terrible trouble reading even a page of text because of this, but slowly I could read OK. I could always write an essay but could not spell at all and had no idea about punctuation. English teaching was very poor and simply did not explain the basics. There was no structure to the lessons either. I ended up being able to write technical/factual stuff OK... after a lot of corrections revisions etc. Word processors and spell checkers, when they came out, were a God send to me.

One day though, after I had struggled with a section of a proposal for a week or so, I took it down to the technical publications department at work to have it incorporated in the overall proposal for official publication. An old hand there took a look at my stuff and very diplomatically asked if I like him to have a look at it. I said OK. Anyway, within an hour he had turned my disjointed, turgid, boring submission into simple, coherent and easy to scan prose that was also a third shorter. I thought he was just some kind of natural genius and was born with skills in English, just like some people can sing or dance and others can't. My wife, for example, can spell any word you throw at her, even if she has never seen it before.

But no, he explained that there is a set of simple rules, both micro and macro, that you can follow, just as in engineering, to simplify writing good English. With his help, I soon found out what the rules are and studied the whole business of writing, and not just technical stuff, but fiction too. Far from being a chore, as English grammar had been at school, I found it fascinating and no longer was writing a struggle, but enjoyable and interesting. I knew I had achieved something when I found an error in one of Charles Dickens' books.

This English problem seems to be a common characteristic with engineering types. I know of a few others on ETO who are the same. By the way, your posts on ETO are very clear and cocise. They also scan well, and I see that you break topics up into manageable chunks, which seems to be the optimum way for internet writing, even Wikipedia.
 
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My English lessons have come from being corrected on here.
A small example that is typical from 4 years ago, This is how I used to write EVERYTHING! Keep in mind some questions were extremely long and always written in a single solid block.

"i am in a project/competition for school. i have been put in the higher class but wont get any help from the teachers as i am not in there class so i asked and its ok to get help from here . the project/competition is to build a small robot/device that can detect/pickup six metal objects but also tell the difference between gold coloured disks and silver coloured disks. i have untill the end of june.i am doing ok so far on the planning but i have a few questions regarding the metal detecting side of things. i found a pic detector online but it uses the clock pins on a pic 12. i want to use a pic18. also having done some looking into things is it correct that i can use the CCP unit on a pic by counting pulses in a set time (timed by interupt) via inductor (i have some neat small surface mount ones) and when it goes over metal it will alter the number of pulses in the count?? my main question is i used an inductor to boost a led circuit by pulsing it so i am concerned about pulsing an inductor into a pic pin will the current damage the pic? also i would like to use a signal hgenerator and scope to see what frequency would be best but again i am worried i will damage dads scope or generator. will it damage it??? sorry if i not put enough information but i cant think of what else you need to know
thank you for reading this
Logan"


I noticed that one has the odd full stop, I used to randomly guess where to put them.
 
I knew about most of that. You improved a lot.

Take up Chinese https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Written_Chinese

Hey, I can write script forward, backward, and mirror image forward and backwards. The weird part, it effortless, if you don't think about it. All I have to do is start correctly. With practice, I make fewer mistakes. I got bored in glass one day. So, I could write "Happy Holidays" on the inside of a window with spray snow and it will turn out correctly when read from the outside.

I've been told I have some characteristics of Asberger's Syndrome, but not enough for a dx. Things that are important to me are not important to others: e.g. Shoveling a path across the 12" of snow on the grass for the mailman or shoveling snow in the curb for drainage reasons. Why? I've seen what can happen under the right conditions. The storm drains handle melting snow too. Reasons seem to be wrong to other people. e.g. The boss wants to make an impression by checking off things that are done. I, on the other hand, want to have want to have the next unstarted phase of the project started. The stuff that I know will work without complications, I leave to last. In reality, I should have set the boss take the fall for any problems.
 

In spite of the lack of punctuation in places, that piece you wrote is perfectly clear and fairly easy to read. Incidentally, all you need to know about punctuation, both UK and US is contained in one short book, which I would highly recommend to anyone interested in writing: https://www.electro-tech-online.com/articles/books-articles-data.758/ Item (4.2) 'Penguin Guide to Punctuation. I wish we had a copy at school. It would have cut across all the gibberish we were taught about punctuation.
 
spec said:
I am pretty much like you and can't handle the order of letters, 'teh' looking the same as 'the' to me.
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You still do that here. No biggie.

Dyslexic has to be weird. I was one of those left-hand babies forced to be right-handed. The real term is what is your dominant hand? You should learn early to use both hands equally without favoritism. I use whatever hand is convenient, if a left handed-person is eating next to me, I'll eat left-handed. What's the big deal. just no elbow bumping.
 
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