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• Timer overflow wierdness

  AKA • 05/11/2017 at 20:00 • 0 comments

  ...just noticed a strange behavior in my long-running "noise barnacle"

• LED reach their final form

  AKA • 04/19/2016 at 14:17 • 0 comments

  My lil 8-element NeoPixel Stick was great for prototyping, but I had always envisioned a more durational, attractive end result. Similarly, it's useful in debugging to map color linearly to noise intensity, but in the real application (which is to answer: was the dog barking while I was away?), we only need to know discrete noise events, not their intensity.

  So the final LED arrangement is here, in the new photos uploaded to this project: a 60-element NeoPixel ring that is normally all-red; when there is a bark event, a white pixel shows up.

  Now, when you get back home, you can read it like a clock: starting from the top (noon), any white pixels you see are that many minutes into the past. So for example, in this image (excuse the squished perspective) Frank was barking 5 and 6 minutes ago, and he barked 52 and 48 minutes ago.

  Of course, in practice it's immaterial if it was 52 or 53 minutes ago, but I think it's useful to give the user a relative sense of the spacing of the barks, as they're pretty easy to interpret narratively.

  This project is almost complete - the last step is to fabricate a suitable enclosure for the electronics, and to find a diffusing material for the clock face. One last factor to tweak is the gain on the mic - it works for me where it's set now, but I'd like the Feather Wing I'm making to be a little easier to adjust. To that end, I've ordered a MAX 9814 auto-gain amp, and will be spinning up a board to test that out soon.

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