Right, so, what have I been up to lately?

I spent most of March in a cabin up near Whistler, sick with a flu, or both. I didn’t do as much skiing as I had hoped to, but a quiet cabin in the woods with a fireplace is not a bad place to laze around and get over a flu. I also brought a formidable array of computing hardware and spent a lot of my relaxation time writing code. Some of this was actual day-job work – I brought along the dev boards for my current project – but a fair bit of it was Radian work. In particular, I made solid progress on the two indexed-container objects, map and array.

Most of my time back in Seattle has gone into the ALTSpace project. We have a very substantial sewing workspace, a reasonably well-equipped machine shop, and a rudimentary electronics workbench. There’s a lot of sorting and organizing left to do, and we haven’t even started on the welding room, but it’s coming together. We still don’t have Internet access there yet, but someone who knew what he was talking about took a look at our telecom panel yesterday and figured out what needs to happen next.

I’m still picking away at the next Rhythm Robot prototype. I have finished the layout for the control panel board, which is by far the most complex electronic object I have ever attempted to build, and have actually printed and assembled the MIDI & power daughterboard. I have not yet had time to test the MIDI interface yet but the power regulator works exactly as it is supposed to. The logic board, based on the STM32 Discovery, still needs a fair bit of LED multiplexing circuitry, but I don’t need to finish that in order to make progress on the main control panel and the rest of the hardware needed to make this project go.