Prototyping
I agreed to a create-something-handmade swap with a couple of friends on Facebook. One is an English teacher so I decided to make something I've been thinking about for a while: a small box which displays random words. I like the idea of an object that's different every time you look at it.
So I got a small 16x2 LCD and started coding and wiring my Arduino project. I liked the idea of it being standalone (run off batteries) so I added an LDR (Light Dependent Resistor) so it could go into power-saving sleep when the surroundings went dark. I found it difficult to reliably and consistently measure the changes in current draw resulting from my experiments, so I'm unsure how well that worked. And I've given them away now.
The ATmega328 has only around 32k program & memory so I needed some heroic measures to squeeze in a decent number of words. I used Huffman coding to compress a list of real words (a subset of the Grandiloquent Dictionary, used with permission). I also used Markov chains to generate (a nealy infinite?) number of random pseudo-words.
See the set.
Prototyping
I agreed to a create-something-handmade swap with a couple of friends on Facebook. One is an English teacher so I decided to make something I've been thinking about for a while: a small box which displays random words. I like the idea of an object that's different every time you look at it.
So I got a small 16x2 LCD and started coding and wiring my Arduino project. I liked the idea of it being standalone (run off batteries) so I added an LDR (Light Dependent Resistor) so it could go into power-saving sleep when the surroundings went dark. I found it difficult to reliably and consistently measure the changes in current draw resulting from my experiments, so I'm unsure how well that worked. And I've given them away now.
The ATmega328 has only around 32k program & memory so I needed some heroic measures to squeeze in a decent number of words. I used Huffman coding to compress a list of real words (a subset of the Grandiloquent Dictionary, used with permission). I also used Markov chains to generate (a nealy infinite?) number of random pseudo-words.
See the set.