One of the perks of bench testing your newfangled autostart project is that you can start to see patterns of use that may lead to trouble. The other is that when you hook up a multi-meter to the relays with the diode audio turned on, you can listen to the …
Fool's Mate Friday?
Fool's Mate Friday is going to take a little detour, as I work on learning a new programming language.
If you have followed my blog at all, you will notice that I've made a bit of a shift away from Android. When I was working with Android, I was heavily …
Video to Gif Command Line Conversion
This is really just a side note for myself. I tend to do something only once in a blue moon, and then consequently forget how to do that again later. So, I'm writing this one down for my own future reference. Hopefully you will find it useful too.
Of course …
Fool's Mate Friday: Bobby Fischer Teaches Chess
While looking at a few old chess programs for some ideas about my current programming lull, I stumbled across a rather useful old DOS program: Bobby Fischer Teaches Chess. Of course, I knew it originally was a book, but I did not know that it was later turned into a …
BlueFruit Project: Stage 1 Relays!

Blinking lights! Yes, the first prototype of the first stage relay setup for my home made autostart is assembled. As you know, a small 3 to 5 vdc BlueFruit Feather can't crank an engine starter. That's just too much current to flow through such a small board. To make this …
Fool's Mate Friday: LaserChess
Okay, so this may seem a bit off topic, but I was exploring old chess games for some inspiration. While this didn't inspire me that much, it certainly was interesting to play Laser Chess, a DOS game circa 1994.

The premise of the game is simple. There are 18 pieces …
Moving from GitHub to GitLab!

I'm really not a conspiracy theorist. I don't truly believe that Microsoft embodies all things evil. But after the announcement of GitHub's purchase by Microsoft, I still decided to move away from GitHub and copy all my repositories over to GitLab.
I had several choices when making the move from …
BlueFruit Project: Time Out!
Zip created at /tmp/arduino_build_587243/sketch_dec29a.ino.zip
Using library Bluefruit52Lib at version 0.7.5 in folder: /home/alaskalinuxuser/.arduino15/packages/adafruit/hardware/nrf52/0.7.5/libraries/Bluefruit52Lib
Using library nffs at version 1.0.0 in folder: /home/alaskalinuxuser/.arduino15/packages/adafruit/hardware/nrf52/0.7.5 …
Fool's Mate Friday: Where to, Governor?
Today's update is pretty basic. Just cleaning up and filling in some blanks on my JustChess app. While I wont bore you with the whole commit, you are welcome to check it out.

Basically, I just added an about and settings page. Both pages are pretty basic, but the settings …
BlueFruit Project: Analog and Digital Detection (Code Name ADD)
From the post last week, you can see that I ran into a snag with the BlueFruit Feather board. It should be able to read the analog inputs separate from one another, but for some odd reason, taking a 3.3vdc reading on A0 would return 3.3vdc on A0 …