Northwest Washington state. (Between Seattle & Canada)

Yo! It's Aaron, the 'next island over' guy. :slight_smile:

Yeah, lemme check on the Saturday thing, but my guess is that'll work. (With kids, there's always the question of: "What will I have to trade the wife for a few hours off?" :)))

Assuming I can escape, I'll bring along my current breadboarded project, which is an Arduino Mega 2560-based player for old arcade video game music, based on a couple of Yamaha single-chip synth ICs. It's not much to look at, but it's mildly amusing to listen to. Most of the work has been on the PC side, devising ways to rip the music from the games and compress it into something that can fit into the Arduino's flash. I know I could just go to SD, but as a former data compression engineer, I'm enjoying the challenge of fitting as much into the MCU as possible. Right now I've got almost 9 minutes of music (not counting looping) stuffed into the 2560's flash, but I'm not giving up until I've doubled that! :slight_smile:

Hope to see you guys soon!
-Aaron

You know, if you need some help in the Arduino s-ware end for playing that music..

Might be fun.

-jim lee

jimLee:
You know, if you need some help in the Arduino s-ware end for playing that music..

Might be fun.

The software side is ok for now. What I'm struggling with is a reason for doing any of this! :smiley: (Actually, there's a slightly amusing backstory that I'll share when we catch up.)

A machinist buddy of mine (From Whidbey island) wants to join us. But he may be off fishing. If he gets rained out, he says he'll be there. And certainly next time.

-jim lee

Jim, had you settled on a time? I would be rounding that to the nearest ferry time, of course. (Except for the Big Gap at 11am-1pm, the ferries are pretty regular on Sat.)

hi jaholmes

We start about 12 noon till ??? So stop in when you can. Check the active users group for updates.

Sounds good. See you guys then-ish. :slight_smile:

Sorry, was in bit-land for the last few days.

Yeah, anytime after 12, I'll bring tacos from Agave for everyone.

-jim lee

Great to meet you guys! I'll try to redeem more spouse-cred next time so that I can stick around a bit longer, ha-ha!

Hey guys! Thanks for coming by!

I was able to finish putting the doorbell together this morning. I spent some time putting together a writeup of creating the silly thing.

I added in some more screen hints after watching you playing with the prototype. Things like "Click to edit." and "Click to mute."

-jim lee

Here's the link :The doorbell page.

-jim lee

Jim I love your door bell. Looks a lot better in the case than out of the case. Not sure why your are having problems with the door bell light. Not sure which way the door bell light is wired. For now can't you run the power through an analog pin? We'll get together next time and talk about it.

Indeed, that looks pretty awesome, Jim. It's really great to be able to catch up in person and see what others are doing with this stuff. Those enclosures really "finish" a project, too. By comparison, most of my projects are naked rats-nests! I need to figure out how to get past that stage.

And on that note: I shared your buddy's injection tooling site with my coworker, who was thrilled at the prospect of finding some local help for his project. He's expressed interest in stopping by the next get-together. He's an electronics enthusiast but not an Arduino guy--yet. But moreover, he's a 3D printing and laser enthusiast.

JA, if we can get your buddy & Mitch here, that would be fantastic! We may want to have more than one meeting / month. Or, we can do random meetings, depending on what we're all into at the time.

As for the light : What happens is the light draws power from the pull-up resistor to ground to do its blinky thing. On my teensy it pulls the pull-up low enough to trigger the doorbell. I'm not really happy about letting one of the Teensy's neurons out there on a wire into the wide world, but I can only do so much at a time. I'm hoping that for this one it'll be fine.

Ran into a really strange issue yesterday and last night. Every hour so two it would go off. SOmetimes it would shut itself down too. Weird! Like a ghost was testing it. I've rewritten my button debounce/filter code and hope this'll solve the issue? (Fingers crossed)

-jim lee

I certainly hope you guys are making some progress on your projects for next time.

-jim lee

jimLee:
I certainly hope you guys are making some progress on your projects for next time.

Ha! Well... Sort of. That is, if "madly acquiring parts" counts as "some progress." :slight_smile:

I've decided that my next adventure is going to be replicating--and then enhancing--the functionality of my breadboarded rat's nest on actual Capcom arcade hardware. I believe I mentioned that I'd found some games that used the synth as well as the PCM chip (which I don't have) for music? Well, as I've continued to rip music, I've found more and more of those--probably half of the Capcom CPS1 library! Poo!! I wasn't prepared for that at all. The PCM chip on those boards is an odd beast, with its own private bus and a wacky 4-bit data format.

So, I had this funny idea a while back: What about just taking the actual arcade motherboard, piggybacking the Z80 audio CPU with the Arduino, and bus-mastering the Z80 bus to take over control of all the audio hardware. I've spent about a week's worth of nights studying the hardware, and I believe I have a workable plan. And it'll be cool! Best of all, I think I can do it with only a few minimal modifications to the motherboard and without removing any components--which seemed like the only polite thing to do, as these boards are sort of collectible anymore.

So I ordered a Street Fighter II board off eBay (it's a CPS1 title) and should have it next week. It's remotely possible that I might have something working with it by the next time we catch up, but at the very least I'll bring the disassembled boardset along and can describe my ridiculous plan of attack. :slight_smile:

OK I'm thinking we try to standardize on 1st Sat / month. That means this Sat Afternoon. If this works out and we want it to happen, we can make it 1st & 3rd. But for now, we'll shoot for first.

I have a few that may want to join up.

We'll see..

You guys?

-jim

Alas! I leave for Arizona on Saturday. It's the kids' Spring Break, and we decided (for once) to actually do something. :slight_smile:

But, generally speaking, I think "first Saturday" is as good an idea as any.

Sorry I just saw the date change. I'll try to make the next one. I marked this thread to let me know when there is a new post. Do you want me to update the post for Active user groups to show that we are meeting on the first Saturday of the month?

Yeah, that would be a good idea. I'm going to make it 1st & 3rd and see how it goes. That'll give people some schedule flexibility and be able to skip meeetings that don't fit.

I better mark this thread to notify me as well..

-jim lee