Starting Monday I am on the night shift at work. I’ll be working from Midnight to 8:30AM. I’m not sure how long this will last. I think it’s temporary to cover for someone else going on vacation. However all of our shifts may change in the near future when my manager redoes all the hours.
Right now I’m going to bed. ZZZZZZ Well I’ll try anyway.
I just got back from Lunch with an old friend/teacher Dale Mastny along with some other friends that know him from high school. (Dave, Diane, Ken, and John). We went to Islands. We told lots of interesting stories and caught up on what we’ve all been up to these days. We got to see Mastny’s shiney red Corvette. He’s had it for a while, ever since he retired. It was a very pleasant get together. We should do it again some time. But for now, PLEASE no more restaurants! I’m totally sick of burgers for now. LOL.
Last night I went out with a large group of friends to The Cheesecake Factory. It was GOOOOD!!!. We went there to celebrate 3 people’s birthdays which fall within January; Dave, JJ, and Lizzy. The food was great as usual. Our waitress was really good too. She yelled at JJ when she was trying to take orders and he was talking loudly, “Hey JJ!! It’s my turn to talk!” I twas hilarious. We ran the bill up to $490.15!!! WOW. We collected and paid with an even $500 in cold hard cash. :-O Afterward we went back to the condo to hang out.
On this past Monday, which was Martin Luther King, Jr. Day, we went to the San Diego Wild Animal Park. It was my parents, myself, Mark, and Heather from Mark’s church. It wasn’t too busy considering it was a holiday. I think the cold weather had something to do with it. We dressed warmly. I think it’s better to be doing that amount of walking in the cold than on a really hot day. The night before we had freezing temperatures so some of the plants in the park were frost bitten and loosing their leaves. Things of interest that we saw were the lions, the tram tour, the Bonsai garden, and more. The Lions were really great because they were all lounging right against the glass window. We could get about 2 inches away from them. The elephants were less cooperative as the big one didn’t want to do her routine during the elephant show. Instead she stole a pitchfork from behind a gate and tried to break it. LOL. All in all it was a pretty fun time. 
Since forever I have always wanted my own Oscilloscope. The problem is all the good ones are really really REALLY expensive. Plus they are generally large beastly bulky boxes.
Background: A while back I bought a lighting dimmer pack on eBay. It has 4 channels that are controlled by a protocol known as DMX-512. DMX is a lighting standard used primarily in theatrical grade lighting systems. It is also used for moving lights, lights with colors, rotating lithos, and smoke machines. Basically it can control up to 512 devices using 8-bits of data per device. i.e. 0 to 255. In my dimmer’s case it has 4 channels and the values of 0 to 255 represent brightness of each channel. I’d like to use it to control the lights in my room via my AMX system.
Here’s the problem, AMX don’t speak DMX. DMX is a RS-485 communication. Using info about DMX I found online, I tried programming a PIC microcontroller to talk DMX along with a RS-485 transceiver chip, but it didn’t work too well. My results were always off the wall and crazy random stuff would happen. I needed to see what the data I was sending looked like. I needed a DSO (Digital Storage Oscilloscope).
I searched for days looking for the right one. You know what? All the cheap ones suck and all the good ones cost at least $800. There are a LOT of DSO’s on eBay from sellers in China. DO NOT buy those things. They are horrible and I hear the software is lacking basic features all other DSO’s have. Finally I found a rather nice one from a company called USB Instruments. They make a couple DSO’s, the Stingray and the Swordfish. I believe that Grant on Mythbusters has a Stingray that I’ve seen him using before. I bought the Swordfish. It is a pen-like design with one input and 5MHz of bandwidth. Plenty for my needs. Of course being that it is USB, the interface is all software. But it’s quite fast. I am impressed with the speed. The other big advantage is I can log data over a period of time and then go back and analyze it. You can’t do that with a normal o-scope.
Now that I could see the actual 1’s and 0’s flying out of my PIC16F628 chip, I was able to successfully write a simple program that can speak DMX! It’s working real well too. Now I just have to fix it up to take serial commands from my AMX system and then translate them to DMX. This means that I could have the lights in my room turn off at certain times of the day, ramp up and down slowly for a cool effect, and even turn on in the morning when my alarm clock goes off.
Here’s the PicBasic Pro file and the hex file in case anybody out there wants to see them.
DMX.bas
DMX.HEX
Well it’s now 2007. Here’s hoping it goes well. For me, a lot of bad things happened in 2006 but a lot of good things happened too. I went to a party tonight with a large group of friends. It was close to my house, near SWC. We ate chocolate fondue, carne asada, nachos, and toasted marshmallows. Scott brought his Wii controllers, which gave us 4 controllers to use on Joe’s new Wii. It’s much more fun when you don’t have to pass around the Wiimotes. We all watched the ball fall at midnight on TV. I had a great time and so did everybody else. The party ended around 3:00AM. Here’s some pictures.
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