I have made this RGB LED tie. One of my friends and me had the idea at 2 am and now it has come to reality :D

It runs on an Arduino nano, 8 rgb leds and is powered by a 9V battery.

I have prom tomorrow ('abschlussball' in german) I probably won't wear it during the official part but definitely at the party after prom.

The current animation is a bit too fast (I was listening to hardstyle while coding it) for the music they will play tomorrow at the party so I still have to make a slower one.

Tell me what you think about it :P

So when everyone is posting their setup. Here is mine with two 34" monitors (curved) and some LEDs because no lamp did fit on the desk anymore :D

I hope it works now because it didn't upload the image the last two attempts...

I want to stop charging my e-scooter at around 85% because this will increase the battery life. To avoid always having to pull the plug at the right level, I made a stop circuit that goes between charging brick and e-scooter.

There's no processor involved, just a CMOS 555 used as inverting Schmitt Trigger which controls a power mosfet. Also two status LEDs and a start switch. The poti adjusts the cut-off level. Worked on first try, with only manual voltage and tolerance calculations beforehand!

My server is finished!

Just installed some pink LEDs as backlights

Radio Shack store closed near my house. Had a huge fire sale. Electric circuit components were 90% off.
My wife thought I'd gone insane when I got home with two huge bags full of LEDs, resistors, switches, IR sensors, photocells, capacitors, bridge rectifiers, a spare breadboard, a pair of helping hands, etc.
My only regret is that I didn't catch the fire sale in time to grab all their Arduinos.

I don't mind if you down vote my answers on stack-overflow. But unless you leave a better answer or a comment explaining why, you are a fucking troll and an asshole.

I MEAN, YOU SHOULD TAKE A BIG STEP BACK AND LITERALLY FUCK YOUR OWN FACE!!!!

You aren't helping me or others learn from our mistakes by showing us the better way.

Received my new mechanical keyboard from Amazon today. It feels so much better than our standard company Dell keyboard. And it looks so great. Also it has nice LEDs with several modes. Love it

This moment when your new router has 8 GB RAM and has blinks RGB LEDs.

LED! Please, embedded programmers: STOP blinking LEDs, if you don't require immediate attention!!

That phone that would blink through the night charging, I had to put a blanket on it D:<<

Just thought I'd share my current project: Taking an old ISA sound card I got off eBay and wiring it up to an Arduino to control its OPL3 synth from a MIDI keyboard. I have it mostly working now.

No intention to play audio samples, so I've not bothered with any of the DMA stuff - just MIDI (MPU-401 UART) and OPL3.

It has involved learning the pinout of the ISA bus connectors, figuring out which ones are actually used for this card, ignoring the standards a little (hello, amplifier chip that is wired up to the +12V line but which still happily works at +5V...)

Most of the wires going to it are for each bit of the 16-bit address and 8-bit data. Using a couple of shift registers for the address, and a universal shift register for the data. Wrote some fairly primitive ISA bus read/write code, but it was really slow. Eventually found out about SPI and re-wrote the code to use that and it became very fast. Had trouble with some timings, fixed those.

The card is an ISA Plug and Play card, meaning before I could use it I had to tell it what resources to use. Linux driver code and some reverse-engineering of the official Windows/DOS drivers got me past this stage.

Wired up IRQ 5 to an Arduino interrupt to deal with incoming MIDI data, with a routine that buffers it. Ran into trouble with the interrupt happening during I/O and needing to do some I/O inside the handler and had to set a flag to decide whether to disable/re-enable interrupts during I/O.

It looks like total chaos, but the various wires going across the breadboard are mainly to make it easier to deal with the 16-bit address and 8-bit data lines. The LEDs were initially used to check what addresses/data were being sent, but now only one of them is connected and indicates when the interrupt handler is executing.

There's still a lot to do after that though - MIDI and OPL3 are two completely different things so I had to write some code to manage the different "channels" of the OPL3 chip. I have it playing multiple notes at the same time but need to make it able to control the various settings over MIDI. Eventually I might add some physical controls to it and get a PCB made.

The fun part is, I only vaguely know what I'm doing with the electronics side of this. I didn't know what a "shift register" was before this project, nor anything about the workings of the ISA bus. I knew a bit about MIDI (both the protocol and generally how the MPU-401 UART works) along with the operation of a sound card from a driver/software perspective, but everything else is pretty new to me.

As a useful little extra, I made some "fake" components that I can build the software against on a PC, to run some tests before uploading it to the Arduino (mostly just prints out the addresses it is going to try and write to).

Hello everyone.
I've seen people doing story/rant to introduce themselves, and I never done that, probably because I'm terrible at doing so, and the more people their is, the more complicated it gets for me. 😥
Usually I try to blend in, and be the same color as the wall. But I want to try something different, so bear with me as I go through this painful process. 😶

So here I am, a lonely dev, who only have friends through a screen, living in a dark room only lit by green leds (tho sometimes it turn red/pink), lost in a small street of Paris. I usually avoid posting on social media, but here on devRant, I feel alright, somehow, it feels like home... 🤗

Started developing at 14 with html and php, then css and js (with the later still being a mystery to me). 🤔
I never really had a real job. Had 3 month as an intern into a human size web agency, and despite the recommandation they gave, I didn't like the job... Dropped from school and self learned everything I know today. Did a certain amount of personal projects, but no publication for lack of confidence. As of today, I'm 28. 🙂

Then a year and half ago, I changed to c# with unity3D, and I had a ton of fun since. 😄
Learned cg effect, texturing, 3d, a bit of animation. I'm working on a project of indi game with two people that are my only social interaction outside of my family, and now devRant. I don't mind being lonely tho. 😯

But this community is awesome, so I'm glad I stumbled across that sad face on the play store. 😄

Also it's 7:30am, I didn't sleep because of this post, I'm tired, and yes I'm an idiot.

Debugging SPI using LEDs...

This is just the worst

BEEP-BEEP
Every now and then, periodically
BEEP-BEEP
and then quiet. Get into working mode, concentrate again, a...
BEEP-BEEP

wtf is that.. Took down my smoke alarm, prolly the battery is getting low. Put it next to me, waiting...
BEEP-BEEP
nope, it's gotta be smth else. How can I hunt it down when I can't even tell which direction it's coming from?!? I know. Play smart. Measure the period.
BEEP-BEEP
it's been 3 minutes 5 seconds since the last BEEP-fucking-BEEP. Now I can plan my time ahead. Go to one room, wait fo..
BEEP-BEEP
Nope, it's not there. Carry on with all the other rooms, waiting for that annoying beeping.
BEEP-BEEP
I think I at least know the room. Good, narowed it down.
BEEP-BEEP

this is getting really annoying. I've been playing with this nonsense for an hour already. Alright, it's in my kid's room. The PC is off, toys are off. What could it be....? Binary search the f
BEEP-BEEP
uck out of it! aight, I first try to identify from which part of the room it's coming from. Stand in the middle and tu
BEEP-BEEP
ahh, right, it's behind me then. Fine. That's the PC corner. But it's off, it can't be making sounds. Esp when it has no speakers plugged in - it's got only Bluetooth speakers which haven't been turned on for what, a year already? but then w
BEEP-BEEP
hat could it be... Sounds like it's indeed coming from the PC corner. Checking all the LEDs -- all are off, nothing's turned on. Move the speakers away, try digging around to see if the kiddo didn't leave his toys behind the
BEEP-BEEP
PC. Wait, the sound has moved behind me... And I've only moved my BT speakers. Which are turned off. That's odd... could it be? Put one to one ear and another one to another and wait for the remaining 15 seconds
BEEP-(you are a fucking idiot)-BEEP
whispers in my left ear.

Turns out, some BT speakers can make low-battery sounds even when they are turned off.

When you order a bezillion tiny things at small prices to avoid toll on one large package, and you have no fucking clue if everything has arrived.

Arduino stuffs, LEDs, resistors, stuffs like that wherever its cheap for those wondering.

Well here's my new setup.

My desk wasn't big enough width wise, so instead of buying another one, I just cut some wood to be longer. Gotta improvise 🤷🏻‍♂️🤷🏻‍♂️

Just got the monitor today. Next item is a mechanical keyboard.

I'll post one with the lights off so the RGB LEDs are a bit more visible.

This is a story of suffering and despair.

I'm working on a build system for our firmware. Nothing major, just a cmake script to build everything and give me an elf file.

I'm fairly new to cmake at that point, and so it's not abundantly clear to me how the `addDirectory` command works.

Now those of you with experience in cmake will say:
"Hold on there champ, this is not a cmake command, the real thing is add_subdirectory()"

Well, that is not what chatGPT told me. I still trusted the fucking thing at this point, it explained that it was in fact a command, and that it added all subsequent source files from a given folder. When I asked it to provide me with sources, it gave me a dead link in a cmake dot com subdomain.

I spent FUCKING HOURS trying to understand why I couldn't find that shitty command, I looked through that shitty page they call documentation through and through, I fucking checked previous and nightly versions, the command was nowhere to be found.

Until I found an old as time post in stackOverflow...
Someone had made a macro with that name, that did what GPT had described...

On the positive side, I know cmake now. I also don't use this fucking deep Learning piece of shit. Unless you write simple JS or blinking LEDs with Arduino it codes like a Junior, high on every kind of glue on the market.

Years ago at school I recreated the UNIX logon screen. With this, I collected login credentials and then displayed a message that the dish gets formatted now. To make it more realistic I had a progress bar and generated random file access in the disk, so the LEDs flashed. Loved it and even the sysadmin could see the fun (and educational background :P)

I used to collect rubber ducks back in college. I was absolutely crazy about it and tried getting my hands on almost all different types available like the Punk duck, the Pirate duck, the Weed duck....and so on.

I met this girl who was into the same thing and we ended up banding together to create a sort of webpage where we'd write crazy and hilarious origin stories for each of these ducks. We'd go to great lengths to create ridiculous comic book style encounters between them and had a lot of fun doing it.

We dated for a while but it didn't last.

Computer won't boot when I launched it this morning. Checked the post LEDs on the mobo and it's reading 00. It's not even reaching POST. Ideas?

As a uni student not yet into heavy projects yet @DiNozzo97 and I made a mock smart house out of MDF, put controllable rgb LEDs in each room, lockable doors (demonstrated with servos), an openable garage (also servos), and thermistors taking an average temperature of all the rooms with an air con (PC fan). All of which was controllable with a website openable anywhere, run on a Pi. Oh and we integrated a doorbell that linked to twillio that sent you a text, if you replied with a positive response the door would unlock!

I just finished running my first Arduino program, I am perfectly able to switch the led on and off.
Should I add it to the CV!!!
Or should I build the whole traffic light three leds first?!?
I am confused....

Oh so you have a merge conflict this weekend? The only time of the week I try not to think of ripping your nob off, tying a noose around your neck with it and drowning you in a well full of piranhas? Right, right...

How about you take that dick that you've been trying to locate since you were 5 and practice choking on it every day till you die just so you have enough experience to suck demon dongs in hell for eterniity! I seriously hope you die of cancer you fucking wankstain!

How about you go home and keep disappointing that whore of a wife of yours, you know that stinking pile of shit that you stick your dick in every two weeks?

Friend got me in to mechanical keyboards... Now I want to buy every keycap. My wallet is not happy with this life choice.

Hey guys, my gf and I want to do something with the Arduino we got. We are getting a CS degree, so programming is not a problem, but we have quite basic knowledge of electronics.

What could be a cool simple (but not too introductory) project we could do?

The arduino came with a bunch of sensors (ultrasonic distance sensor, humidity, ...) some input (joystick, RFID reader/writer, buttons) and some outputs (LCD display, 8x8 LED matrix, bunch of color and RGB leds).

Writing a small program for my Pi, which has to have a gui, process rfid information and do some stuff with motors and leds.

Unfortunately I don't know c++, so I have to write this all in python.

Gui's in python are the ugliest pieces of shit ever. Even fucking c# winforms are prettier than them.

Currently using PyQt5 as it is the less ugly of the bunch but man, you'd think python would have a lot more ui options considering the love it receives...

Fruit Machines... Kind of a dev rant, I mean, they have software running them now, but my gripe is the hardware (I think).

Any of you that frequent pubs and use fruit machines notice that many of the LEDs are "broken" / "non functioning" lately? I mean it's rare I see one that doesn't have lights that are out, rendering the entire machine useless, yet it still takes your money.

Intentionally made to break? Or are LEDs really that difficult to get right? Or maybe it's software determining which ones to appear "broken" and there is a way reset it?

It's a rant none the less...

Even my office has a dark theme. Needs more LEDs.

Try to finish some of the projects I've started in 2018. Right now I have a todo list text file, along with multiple written lists (the written ones are more focused on a single project normally).

-Finish the startpage I've been doing off and on for at least a month now. I ended up making a lot of it command based (just need to write the scripts for the commands..). I had a little config menu but I just got tired of it and the text box is autofocus anyways, so I figured I'd make it command focused.

-Nice little root safety script as I call it. I've made very stupid mistakes as root before. I once made a typo and ran "chmod --recursive 644 /" while half asleep. I believe I was trying to run that on the current directory I was in, but as you know, the . and / are right next to each other. Basically the script would see what you're doing and echo "you're about to do x, are you sure that's what you want to do?". Something I know I could knock out in a day, but I've been putting it off for at least a year now.

-Compiling notification. I saw something similar once a few years ago, and it was so fucking cool. I remember it being a Mac, and it had a notification that would basically tell you how many files and shit you had left to compile if you were building something. Kinda want to build something for polybar.

-FUCKING RUBBER DUCK DEBUGGING TO THE EXTREME! This one was inspired by a comment someone made once months ago. Might have been here, or reddit, or in real life, not sure. Basically a big ass fucking rubber duck with LEDs in it that will like glow red if your code wouldn't compile (I think Visual Studio has like an automatic error detecting thing in there?? Maybe something similar if I can figure that out). Honestly not sure how the fuck I'd do this one, but I love the idea and I really want to fucking do it

There's more shit. These are just the main ones I want to attempt sometime in the near future.

Under pressure for a big feature that had to be merged into develop like one month ago. But I couldn't because of issues I discover every single fucking day.

Today's issue is that a Cucumber test fails. I try reproducing it on my machine, it fails with a different error. Apparently I need to download some 10GB database file from some company server.

Alright, let's download it. But it's damn too slow. Well, let's have lunch in the meantime.

I come back, the download timed out at basically the same point I left it at.

I don't wanna try again. Not without trying to improve things. Download speed is ridiculous. Switching from Wi-Fi to Ethernet definitely helps, I thought.

The cable doesn't work. The port LEDs are both off. Is that cable even connected to something? So I follow that damn cable throughout my colleagues' desks. I'm now doing things without even remembering why.

I finally find the other end. It is plugged to the wall. I try another plug, but that fucking LED is still off. A colleague tells me: not all the sockets are actually connected to the switch, you have to call IT to have yours patched. Stay calm, stay caaaaalm...

A small lamp turns on in my head. Maybe something in my laptop is broken. So I try with a colleague's ethernet. That fucking LED is still off. A-ha.

Turns out, the shitty macbook adapter has this Ethernet port that DOESN'T work out of the box. It needs a driver to even realize there's a port. I look for it, I find it. I finally have wired connection. It's like having drinking water again.

I turn off WiFi, I re-try downloading that fucking database.

Nope, it's still stupidly slow. The bottleneck was in the dumbfuck internal server.

FUCK.

At least I have Ethernet now.

I just wanted to develop a cool webapp-controlled lighting for my bar.

Next things I know, there is electronics scattered everywhere, 2 multimeters to find what the fck is wrong with a PSU not outputting 1/100 of the current it's supposed to, said PSU opened on my desk, and I'm trying to find a capacitor online because there isn't any fcking electronics store selling spare parts anymore in my city.

Context:
- PSU means Power Supply Unit, in this case a computer one.
- PSU was given by a friend and is out of warranty
- the total consumption for all LEDs is 24A @ 5V consumption. A refurbished PSU is ideal for that
- that PSU is rated 2A @ 5V on the stand-by, which is perfect to power a Raspberry Pi. The issue is that there is a sharp voltage drop as soon as you try to use more than 20mA.

Am I the only that looks miserable because of its desk setup while rest of devs post their fancy screens with leds around everything and stuff?

Back in 2005, I had quite a few bits of music I was working on (just as a hobby). A lot of these had not been finished, but I'd sent excerpts in medium-quality MP3 format to a friend. I had an external backup drive - a regular hard drive in an USB enclosure. After a while, this drive started making unpleasant whining sounds so I sent it off for replacement.

During that time I made the foolish decision to try and plug a floppy drive in while the PC was powered on. Something touched the bottom of the hard drive and the power went off. I powered it back on again and heard a fizzing sound, there were some flashes from the hard drive and a burning smell. Yep, the disk was dead - and my backup drive was gone.

I'm still not entirely sure what happened, my best guess is that I had an exposed piece of wire from one of my hacky case mods (I had a thing for blue LEDs) which touched the circuitry of the hard drive. Almost every project, piece of software I'd created, every photo I'd taken, and most unfinished music I'd made up until that point - gone. I was pretty devastated about it. I only had a handful of things survived which I'd burned onto CD previously.

I managed to get some excerpts back from my friend, and re-created my favourite pieces of music based on those. I've moved on to other projects and write much better code now, so mostly I am no longer bothered. I do wish I could re-listen to some of the music I had made back then though.

Needless to say, I no longer fiddle around with the innards of my computers while they are on, store everything on mirrored drives and also ensure I always have a backup somewhere (and am working on remote backups and having several days of backups...)

I never want that to happen again

I really want to set up led tail lights for vehicles, the programming is simple but I don't know the hardware at all

In romania's parlament, the opposition lit their phone's flashlights as the street's protesters did every evening within public square.
One of majority's members (leds were headed toward them) said that carriers should provide detailed bills with costs and the senators who lighted up their leds must be charged with spending and abusing public funds because flashlights consume monthly carrier subscription.

Anybody has a good recommendation for a laptop for mostly full stack web development?
I think I should look for following features:

- minimum 16G ram
- Althought is 2021, just in case, I add: usb C to connect to a dock with two screens and SSD
- I'll run several docker containers at once
- time to time I make non-exhaustive work on c++
- good screen dpi
- I use linux
- portable. No need for the lighter in the market but easy to carry in a bag. Good battery.
- not too expensive

I can save on:
- I don't need the latest processor, just a good one
- I'm not a gamer. I not need the latest GPU. However, some GPU is appreciated. I don't need colorful leds neither.

Do you have any recommendations on laptops and/or features to search for/avoid?

More stars in the universe or LEDs on earth? Screen pixels do not count.

Edit: what if we added pixels?

Hey people!

I need your brains!

I have this project, maybe you can help me with some ideea on how to implement it.

So, I need to read a lot of rfids. A lot. 100+ (It should work with any number of readers).
Next to the reader should be some leds to indicate a status.

Think of it as a matrix or readers. it should support x * y rows / columns

So, let's call it a node (the reader plus the leds).

Now, I have no ideea on how to link all those nodes to a raspberry pi.

For few it would be kinda easy, but when it goes to 100, I don't really know how to link all those together.

I was thinking about a cheap arduino to read the rfid and deal with the leds.

But I don't know how to link (in a bidirectional method) 100 arduinos to a rpi.

So, if you have any ideeas, that would be great.

Thanks!

!dev

Hello! Do you have any idea how I change the connector of a ps/2 keyboard to USB? I've tried the following schematics that make sense but no success. When I plug in the keyboard the LEDs light up for about half a second and then turn off and the keyboard doesn't work.

i'm new on here and just was wondering why they don't date or give the timing of rants as i was looking at some of the site. Not that it's important but speaking of dates....I think we've been in this shutdown LONG ENOUGH and this is the 11th of Apr. and they're adding on more time still when at first we were to get this over with by Apr. 3 now the end of April and now even out here where i live in So. Cal. universal Studios announced (i guess) they're shutting through end of May? Oh yeh-is that a Bright Airy future outlook to say that this virus is just going to wipe more out; keep wearing them masks and obey the stay at home rules and now you got this Hydroxy...you know that one that appears to be a positive drug to "work" to actually look safe enough to try or administer, how about giving that to the people that may want it instead of we've seen some bitter bulking at that very Hydroxy...look at the 1 governor or whomever threaten to strip the license right out of that person for bringing it up! Woooo instead ya got Mr Gates not even a physician talking all these rules of forced vaccines (again??) oh yeh NOT ME! This is now a politicized coronavirus and i watched a video and I believe it!!! The test conducted at the beginning of all this was tested incorrectly and it goes on and on and now we're in this lockdown as if there's power in them numbers keeping this thing going going gone to the biggest numbers where not enough medical equipment's cried out, lines out the A__ and then finding the opposite when people have followed up on all these leads of all over the Country where all this overflood of viral is running. Don't tell me i don't have the facts, because wth does at this juncture or at this very present night to where this is sickening. Yes, there's been patients or people Human Beings that have contracted it but let's just get some real information that i just have to know to what it is thus far isn't correct. And we need to get going, get your livilihood (spell check that word) GOING and LESS FEAR because from the people that want to run all this, they look power hungry to keep it going like the one guy said 'we don't have a choice' when it comes to this will play out 12 to 18 months. OH? YOU MAY HAVE LOSER CHOICE but WE DON'T!!! And it ain't playing out neither the 18 or 12...you know what they want it to run into the election process is what they want. Plus the idea to lock us down huh? And the day by days going by are going to only allow more freedoms to l-o-s-e!

I hate windows 10 home version that suks and they always give the same 8 to 10 ways to make it faster and it never does any good. I turn this computer on and it's not a bad computer of a couple years old and is slower than a turtle and all it does is the same routine. It takes so long to boot up and if you try to hurry it it will make it that much slower. Then the bloatware then look who started Bill Gates and now is some farmer, some vax expert. Oh yeh cheer him on and give me comment no you should not. If you like him that's your business. Keep it that way cause his windows business is BULLLLLLLLLLLLLL