More pictures of the vendors and their wares in Tokyo. This place was just great. If you are ever even near Tokyo, you have to make a trek to Akihabara. You know you are in for a treat when you get out of the subway and the sign says Electric Town.
My fascination is with LEDs, so that's what I took pictures of. But this place has everything. From components to complete systems. You name your interest, and its there. I remember seeing lots of small and medium-sized LCD screens ready for projects. Now those same screens are in mini keychain photo-albums. This place is a Makers paradise.
And then the cat with the honey said, "Yo, anyone else want a hit of this?"
This is another picture from Jonathan's restaurant in Tokyo. We stopped by for dinner. I don't remember what we ordered, but, dude, the bowl said "Sweet Herbage."
And the bunny said, "Dude, I thought you were a bear."
This one still leaves me mystified. It goes on to say "Do not use except in an emergency." For me, either you prefer to take the stairs or you don't. Why couldn't the sign say "Do not use unless you really like stairs." Or, more logically, "Emergency use only". 87 Steps. Maybe they were thinking "You must be this tall for this ride." I don't know.
Could I am in the mood for the taking the stairs be considered an emergency? It was for me, although I forgot to count the steps.
My son and I visited Tokyo about two years ago. We stayed at the Tokyu Stay in Yotsuya. Not only did the room have a balcony, a bathroom, and a washer and dryer, but, for $88 a night, it also came with breakfast for two! In the morning we took our coupons to the Jonathan's restaurant next door where we could have either an American breakfast (pancakes, perfect for my son), or a Japanese breakfast (grilled salmon, great for me). There was also a "drink station" (for lack of a better word), where you could get tea, coffee, juice, or soda. It took me a day or two to notice the rather odd name of this soda. I mean, it wasn't until I actually tried to say the name that I realized, well, that I couldn't. Seriously, how do you ask for a glass of this?
Earlier this year we visited a friend's impeccable home and found that their guest bathroom was completely, I mean completely mirrored, well, except for the floor. It was wild. It was like having unlimited tickets to the fun house. I wish I had brought a laser pointer, maybe a couple of them, in different colors. Oh, and a smoke machine. I did have a flashlight and had some fun with that. Seriously, when do you get a chance to be in a completely mirrored room?
Then there are the sci-fi/fantasy/horror/mystery possibilities. Like wouldn't it be cool to imagine if someone or something showed up a few "reflections away", like they were in another room. I remember reading a science fiction short story about a guy who lived in a tesseract, a four-dimensional cube. That's what this bathroom reminds me of.
This is the only picture I managed to take that didn't have me in it. See the complete picture.
For the Crossbar project, I had these design goals:
To have a main routine which would load frame data and update the display with this data until it was time to load the next frame
To be able to think of an animation as a single entity, like a movie clip. This meant that I had to have a single routine to access all the data for one animation. This would allow me to easily rearrange the animations.
To be able to specify different speeds, repeat counts, and coding styles for the different animations.
To be able to access all the animation data using a single call and some variables (animation index, frame number, etc)
To not have to specify sizes or counts for any list
Overall I wanted the flexibility to modify, add, or resequence animations without having to touch the main loop, and I wanted all of the control and logic to be centrally located.
These goals resulted in a routine called AnimationDispatch. Here is the routine from Crossbar (with most of the animations removed for brevity).
A few years ago, when I finally got around to learning PIC programming, I decided to I wanted to create something that would run LED animations on a small 4x4 matrix. I liked the idea of the small 4x4 size because I was starting with a PIC 16F628A. This chip can not directly control the 16 lines necessary for an 8x8 matrix (unless you get fancy). Also the 4x4 arrangement just seemed easier to work with in terms of coming up with different patterns. And the patterns would require less memory. One frame on a 4x4 matrix is 16bits or just 2 bytes, but on an 8x8 matrix, a frame would require 8 bytes.
I also knew that I did not want to leave this on my workbench. Instead, I wanted it somewhere else in the house. Somewhere where I could see it often and where anyone visiting might notice it. To me this meant that it couldn't just be on a PC board or a breadboard (where most of my projects are). I got the idea of building a small frame with horizontal and vertical bars. These bars would be the rows and colors of the matrix, and I would solder an LED at the intersection of each one. This has worked reasonable well. The problem, I found, is that steel is not the best metal for this since it has rusted slightly and has trouble holding onto the solder. But still, it has been running for about five years. Originally it was in the dining room, but, since we moved about two years ago, it has been in the kitchen, on a small shelf. Most people don't comment on it, a few ask about it, and one thought it was reading her mind.
Once I had it had it built, I then spent a lot of time coming up with as many different animations as I could think of. This was really fun. The video shows almost all of them. Some of the animations are described in the code frame-by-frame, as you might imagine. But for others, I added code that would allow me just to list the LEDs by number that would light up in sequence. These path-style animations saved a lot of memory because instead of needing two bytes to describe a frame, I only needed half a byte to specify the next LED in the path. There are also some animations described procedurally (for lack of a better term). For these animations, each step is described as an action, such as invert frame or invert center. This method was my original plan, but I found that it was not as interesting as I envisioned, and the code for all of the procedures took up too much memory. I will talk in detail about the theory behind each of these animation styles in a later post.
One of the things you might notice in the picture of the back is the strange choice of transistors. This is what happens when you don't know what you are doing. I hope since then I've learned a little more about the difference between PNP and NPN.
Here are pictures of the front, back, and some detail. I also learned that there is a big difference between thinking of building a small square frame and actually building a frame that is square.
Also visit TheVaporTrail website and the Crossbar project page, where you can download the code and some Eagle schematics,
We were travelling through Germany last summer when I saw this sign. With a name like that, I couldn't resist. 1km later we drove through a tiny town and now having the privilege of saying we've been to, well, you know.
This is another one that would make a good t-shirt.
Akihabara is an electronics heaven for hackers, builders, makers, you name it. They sell everything. It goes on for blocks. This picture (and the the big picture) is just one small part of one small seller. There are hundreds of sellers. Anything you can think of you can find. I can't wait to go back.
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