We have contact! Eleven hours later and sticking wires into slots, crossing fingers, and hoping nothing melts has developed into making updates to a basic 2.5 program, crossing fingers, compiling, and hoping nothing melts.

But we do have basic stamp contact:

Okay, so it may not look all that sexy, and perhaps its just cognitive dissonance kicking in (Groucho Marx: "I would never join a club that would have me as a member" or I worked hard for this so it must be good), but when it is spitting out "NODATA," thats because I've connected my switch to send serial data to Christo. And when it's showing "66" in there that's because Christo is sending serial data to me.

Here's how we did it, I think:

You can also download that diagram and code as a pdf, because I know firsthand how frustrating it is to find code with no explanation of wiring, and then blurry wiring photos on a board that doesn't look like yours. This is on a Board of Ed, by the way. If you're OEM, maybe someone else has a clue.

So, now that I have read Rachelle's blog I realise I have been writing to impress the teachers rather than talk to the students. Not quite sure which is the goal, especially since most of my readers are neither.

Who would have thought Dylan would turn out to be so right, Blog as Wiki (as in self-reflective personal notes) indeed. By the way Dylan, time for a bloody post, eh, and are you sending that shape?

And back to stamps, i just realised I used the wrong color wires in a couple places: Use consistent colors of wires when possible; for example, use green or black for ground connections, red for power connections, white or blue for data connections, and so forth. This will make your troubleshooting much easier.

So, I had thought this serial thing would take 2 hours, and then I could sand my plaster, cut my squares, and do my reading so tomorrow could be spent at the apple orchard with Shelly and at Brown with Freaky Boy, but it looks like I'll have to make up those 9 hours instead.

Ah, but we did succeed in producing "66...67...67...68...68...69..." with $200 of circuitry attached to $8000 of mac (not to mention the pc we had to keep running downstairs to wipe the crashed stamps on) so it was well worth it.

Come to think of it, for this plaster thing I spent four hours carefully cutting sanding wood that was to be covered with fiber glass and plaster in the final product, so I guess anally-retentive attention to layering futility is something I enjoy.

Reminds me of that factoid about the point of pyramids being that the more useless something was in this life the more usefull it would be in the next.

Oh, I should point out that if Christo hadn't shown up Bo and I would both have fried boards and a headache from staying up too late. As it is we both have working boards and a headache from staying up too late. So cheers to Christo and his elucidating smoke-breaks. Ya know, I used to code actionscript much better when I smoked...