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Dec. 10th, 2008 12:21 amTurned in my penultimate QFT set today; one more to go. The last one is due the morning after Carols, and it looks like a beast; at this point I'm not planning on sleeping next Monday.
I'm pretty darned exhausted right now and even though I'm not nearly ready for my fast camera time tomorrow, I think I'm going to bed. It'll just mean a late night tomorrow, although there's so much going on tomorrow (including a practice quals talk for a labmate, the famous "molecular gastronomy" chef Ferran Adria touring our lab, and an unexpected meeting with a thesis committee member) that I expect a rather late evening if I'm to get anything done experimentally.
I had fun getting a nice stable 40 kHz signal out of an Arduino microcontroller board with almost no effort. Obviously it's gross overkill, but we had a bunch of them around and they're really easy to program and use for general digital prototyping. Of course you can get a 40 kHz signal out of a variety of analog oscillators, such as a '555, but the Arduino needs no external components. I think one of the starter kits would make a great Christmas present for a kid who liked the idea of tinkering with electronics, but alas no one in my family fits that description.
I'm pretty darned exhausted right now and even though I'm not nearly ready for my fast camera time tomorrow, I think I'm going to bed. It'll just mean a late night tomorrow, although there's so much going on tomorrow (including a practice quals talk for a labmate, the famous "molecular gastronomy" chef Ferran Adria touring our lab, and an unexpected meeting with a thesis committee member) that I expect a rather late evening if I'm to get anything done experimentally.
I had fun getting a nice stable 40 kHz signal out of an Arduino microcontroller board with almost no effort. Obviously it's gross overkill, but we had a bunch of them around and they're really easy to program and use for general digital prototyping. Of course you can get a 40 kHz signal out of a variety of analog oscillators, such as a '555, but the Arduino needs no external components. I think one of the starter kits would make a great Christmas present for a kid who liked the idea of tinkering with electronics, but alas no one in my family fits that description.
