Past Life
My family and i would refer to the weather we're having outside by saying "it's stone cold steve austin". This is a wrestler. How we know that is a mystery. I hate how cold it is. It's causing my lips to get chapped and my skin to dry out. It does give me an excuse not to go for a run though....i guess i'm only fooling myself with that one.
Lately i've been giving alot of thought to my past. Mainly friends i used to have. When i was 8 my family moved from Tipperary Town to Clonmel. This isn't a huge leap on the map but for an 8 year old it was a big deal. When you're in primary school, it's like you're friends with the whole class and then you generally end up going to the same secondary school so you know the same people for almost your whole life. When we moved to Clonmel,i tried to keep in contact with the people from tipp but this was before texting, facebook etc so the only method of communication was letters or phone calls.
I have kept in contact with NO people from either of these primary schools. No one in my class in Clonmel ended up going to Rockwell so we all just naturally drifted apart. Rockwell was great and i still keep in contact with all my friends from there. At the end of 3rd year though i willingly moved to Yeats College in Waterford to achieve "academic excellence". I had a good group of friends but once again, once 6th year was over we all moved on.
This means that out of 4 schools i have gone to in my life, i have only kept in contact with people from 1. Sometimes i wonder what happened to people i used to know. Like sometimes it really nags at me to find out. Unfortunately the people i desperately want to know about seem to have no record online that i can google.
Well, i've been really veering off the topic of this blog which is electronics. So i'm going to throw in some info here at the end *TURN AWAY NOW*
I'm still working on my Keypad decoder because i'm also trying to figure out the IR beam circuit at the same time. I should probably focus on them one at a time. I have the schematic ready for the IR transmitter and reciever. Those aren't a problem. The problem is the wireless transmission. Let me explain: When someone trips the beams, this will set a Flip Flop which will be an input to some processing unit. The processing unit will transmit data (probably just a 1) over some device and it will be picked up by the robot. The robot will send back an acknowledge signal which will reset the Flip Flop.
This doesn't sound too bad. An 8051 could do the processing and a simple radio transciever could send and recieve signals right?...Apparently not! It is impossible to find a simple RF transciever. I was originally looking at quad flat pack chips, but then i'd need to get an evaluation kit etc so it's like an FYP on its own. Then we saw some bluetooth modules which could work if they weren't so expensive. Finally i was looking into wireless RS-232 modules which essentially work over bluetooth anyway so these were even more expensive. On the off chance that someone is reading this and can help, please do!
I'm gonna go. I need to get up early. EEPROMS wont program themselves.....lame
Lately i've been giving alot of thought to my past. Mainly friends i used to have. When i was 8 my family moved from Tipperary Town to Clonmel. This isn't a huge leap on the map but for an 8 year old it was a big deal. When you're in primary school, it's like you're friends with the whole class and then you generally end up going to the same secondary school so you know the same people for almost your whole life. When we moved to Clonmel,i tried to keep in contact with the people from tipp but this was before texting, facebook etc so the only method of communication was letters or phone calls.
I have kept in contact with NO people from either of these primary schools. No one in my class in Clonmel ended up going to Rockwell so we all just naturally drifted apart. Rockwell was great and i still keep in contact with all my friends from there. At the end of 3rd year though i willingly moved to Yeats College in Waterford to achieve "academic excellence". I had a good group of friends but once again, once 6th year was over we all moved on.
This means that out of 4 schools i have gone to in my life, i have only kept in contact with people from 1. Sometimes i wonder what happened to people i used to know. Like sometimes it really nags at me to find out. Unfortunately the people i desperately want to know about seem to have no record online that i can google.
Well, i've been really veering off the topic of this blog which is electronics. So i'm going to throw in some info here at the end *TURN AWAY NOW*
I'm still working on my Keypad decoder because i'm also trying to figure out the IR beam circuit at the same time. I should probably focus on them one at a time. I have the schematic ready for the IR transmitter and reciever. Those aren't a problem. The problem is the wireless transmission. Let me explain: When someone trips the beams, this will set a Flip Flop which will be an input to some processing unit. The processing unit will transmit data (probably just a 1) over some device and it will be picked up by the robot. The robot will send back an acknowledge signal which will reset the Flip Flop.
This doesn't sound too bad. An 8051 could do the processing and a simple radio transciever could send and recieve signals right?...Apparently not! It is impossible to find a simple RF transciever. I was originally looking at quad flat pack chips, but then i'd need to get an evaluation kit etc so it's like an FYP on its own. Then we saw some bluetooth modules which could work if they weren't so expensive. Finally i was looking into wireless RS-232 modules which essentially work over bluetooth anyway so these were even more expensive. On the off chance that someone is reading this and can help, please do!
I'm gonna go. I need to get up early. EEPROMS wont program themselves.....lame
