![]() ![]() The rest of that week was spent on polish. Even though there were some things which I did have to rewrite, the whole thing only took me exactly one week. Rows were being erased and funky things happened when they fell, but I fixed all that. ![]() On the third night, the map data was born and pieces now obeyed the laws of physics resting where they lay. The next night, they were spinning and moving left/right with my breadboard 74HC165 load-register'ed push-buttons. The first night, I defined the (because of copyright issues with a certain famous video game classic from Russia, I will decline from using this project's working title for this article) Falling Blocks pieces as a class which could rotate and calculate where each of their squares were as they fell and pieces began dropping on my dot-matrix game screen. So, last week, a brand new Max7219 4x daisy-chained dot-matrix (8x8x4) arrived in the mail and it was reason enough to put down my art project for a few hours a day during the evening to play with my Arduino. There was an LCD1604 'Runner' game where you ran around in a maze shooting bad-guys, a Simon-Says and little else besides as I've been busy with C# projects and, most recently, and actual Art Project which was taking up way too much of my time. I've built a robotic arm which was a lot harder to build the moving parts for than it was to code but turned out to be no fun at all because those SG-90 Micro-Servo motors are way too weak to do anything with but I went out and bought the bigger, better, badder MG995s so that'll rock soon enough. There are endless possibilities when you have an Arduino, or two or three. I finally have a few essentials like a regulated power-supply, a reliable multi-meter and a decent soldering iron. but I persisted and eventually built a few simple projects. Despite some frustrating instances after I had completed the on-line course, watched a few instructional YouTube videos and read several Arduino Language Reference pages, and I was sure I knew what I was doing, I still got smoking sparks where buzzers and gyroscopic LEDs should have been. So mostly I just sit and wait for the next mail delivery and my Arduino bits do eventually get here. So, I went to my local electronics dealer here in Moncton, New Brunswick, Canada, but he charges 5x the price I pay on-line. And then there was a Canadian Pacific railway blockade that further impeded my tiny nuggets of joy from reaching their happy home before we all got hit with the Corona Virus. ![]() It took a few agonizing months for slow boats from China to eventually get here. I've bought a lot of on-line Arduino 'kindling' since then. I took an on-line beginner's class with Udemy and sparks flew. But lo and behold, there it was, right there in the broken plastic box I got in the mail along with all the other widgets that pale in comparison to the Arduino Uno. I didn't even know what I had ordered, not realizing Arduino was a MicroController, I thought I was going to get a bunch of transistors, diodes and LEDs. I had never done anything 'electronic'-cky since my second year of Computer Engineering over 23 years ago until I ordered an Arduino Starter-Kit late last fall and eagerly anticipated its arrival.
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