Another slow hot day… not much happened…  and that was very nice. I spent the morning puttering around the house.   I did manage to finish off booking our India reservations which is very exciting. Thanks to frequent flyer miles, Diane and Gabe are flying completely around the world for 85 dollars each… not bad. It’s cool having the travel booked, we now get to switch into that planning part of a trip which is fun.. where to stay, what to see.. etc.  I’m already wondering how I’ll manage to blog in some of the places we’re going.. we’ll see. It never pays too much to worry about the future.

 Gabe seemed to be the only one un-phased by the heat.. He was out running around, swimming and jumping on the tramp with his friend Jack. Gabe’s been on a spray painting kick the last few days. He’s got a good touch with those cans.. everything is getting a multi-color rasta treatment. Diane and I are worried that if we stand still too long we’ll wake up red yellow and green. Today’s canvas was the mailbox.  Gabe and Jack chose a more modern pink with polka-dots motif.. Looks good with the house. I really like it.. It’ll make our house easier to find. As in   ” Ohhhhh.  You mean  that  funky old schoolhouse with the pink and polka dot mailbox !”

 

As Gabe exercised his color-eye outside, I was trying to figure out some of the color LED ribbon stuff that my friend Hua-Pin bought for me in Shanghai. I have about 10 meters of this stuff now.. It’s the same thing I made my rainbow headband out of.

I’m trying to reverse engineer the control signals so I can program my own color sequences .  The company says it’s a secret so they don’t document the inputs. I’ve been staring at it on an oscilloscope for about a week now and It’s proving much harder than I thought to figure out… There’s a whole series of serial commands controlling the color of each light, the timing, the sequence, etc…   They also managed to erase the markings on many  of the components to make It hard to figure out. I managed to find one of the chips that still had some markings on it. It’s an HL1606S whatever that is (any info appreciated)… It’s still the best clue I have.

It’s not a common chip.. It’s made  by a company in the Chinese city of Wuxi in Jiangsu  Province..  There does appear to be any English language documentation on it. I spent a few hours this morning combing through Chinese web sites with a web site translation site looking for clues . It’s like playing detective.. I love how bad the automatic translation is… Ie This

 

Becomes this

Diane and I had been tlaking about India all day so we were jonesing pretty bad for Indian food so we went out to eat at the Indian place next to Radio Bean.. it was a great training exercise for our trip.. Yum !  On the way home.. movie store gas station., and grocery store.. where I found the blood pressure machine.. The machine confirmed what I already knew.. I was having a laid back day..

The heats finally broken..  I can stand to be in my own skin again.. I think I’m going to go find Diane and watch a movie now.

G’nite all.. g’nite Sam

-me