A microblogging experiment. More info to follow.
For my portfolio blog, see sarah.alroe.dk
Friends of the microblog:
Background music from some yt video on DIY guitar pickups reminded me…
Way to go sniping myself with figuring out a neat way to do bandcamp embeds. Turns out you can getRemote the url of what you want to embed and then likely find relevant embed links and data in the meta tags using findRESubmatch. Don’t forget to safeURL it!
If you don’t mind the loss of interactivity you could get rid of the iframe entirely by extracting the track info and album cover to host locally… Later.
It was becomming necessary, so I added rudimentary pagination using HUGOs inbuilt solution. This means replyTos don’t currently count, which might need fixing at some point…
Also I should probably add some little js thing to collapse long reply chains with some readmore buttons.
I found a couple of ikea frekvens LED matrix cubes from that teenage engineering collab in a thrift store in Vienna. They were cheap and I’d heard about people modding them. Plugged in, they provide possibly the most dissapointing lightshow I’ve seen:
Whatever electronics they’ve got in there, it’s doing a very simple job: Show a static frame of a pre-baked five frame looping animation. Monitor a microphone and progress the animation each time a loud sound occurs. Check two buttons on the back to turn the LEDs on or off, and switch between a few different animation sets.
That’s it. Nothing dynamic, nothing exciting. Why not make it just a bit more exciting?
A few existing projects:
I think my general goals for modding are something like:
So basically, I think I’m trying to prove what kind of product the cubes could be if the TE software engineers had done a proper job…
Scans and sketch of the original circuit:
Cleaner sketch to follow…
The MCU on the controllerboard has the markings 89F112 000, which appears to be the CMS89F112 from Cmsemicon.
It’s listed on jlc, for an estimated unit price of 0.3 USD. Hard to beat.
The datasheet is in chineese, but looks to have
A very capable little device. 144 bytes of RAM is not a lot, a bitfield for the LED matrix would take up 32 bytes, almost a quarter of memory. Still, that is absolutely enough for more complex or interesting effects on the matrix, like iterative or dynamic animations. My claim still stands: TE’s embedded developers dropped the ball on this one.
Complete RE of the original Frekvens controller and LED matrix board.
So anyways I started blasting redesigning.
