Guy and his Traveling Macbook

So a couple of days ago my Adafruit Experiment Kit for Arduino (ARDX) arrived, and today I spent some time playing with it.

I went through the first couple of experiments but decided to go off the range a little with the second one. Instead of writing a whole bunch of code which goes through and sets individual pins, I decided to try using the Port Registers to set a whole bunch of pins at once. So, what I decided to do was make an 8-bit binary display. I had to use some Bit Math to take the lower 6 bits of the number and put them onto one port register, and the upper two onto the other port register. Thanks to Cosine Kitty for the info on Port Registers.

Here’s a video of my first pass at the experiment, with scrolling LEDs.

And here is the binary counter.

My next step will be to read bytes from the serial port and show them on the 8-bit display.

That’s all folks.

I have recently been fixing a support incident with a system of ours which processes data in the form of CSV files emailed to an exchange mailbox. Occasionally the producer of these CSVs doesn’t form them correctly and the whole thing packs up; the item stays in the mailbox, and somebody has to go digging to fix it, and get the whole thing up and running before the backlog of data to be processed gets rather large. This has brought to light two important points about data-processing in my mind:

1. No item should ever go “un-processed” – if it fails to go down the normal handling path, it should go down an error handling path – either way it should leave the main queue.
2. There must always be a mechanism for a human to intervene, and correct (or choose to ignore) malformed data; this makes for nice error-handling path for point 1.