SparkleChicken Heavy Industries

Sorry it has taken a while for me to post anything. With work, school, and the holidays, the last few months have been busy. I’m in the middle of a two week break between terms, and trying to make the most of it! First off, there has been another platform change for the Strike and […]

In my quest to get the Strike and Dipper up to snuff, I found a program to automatically determine the magnetic declination from any location on Earth, the World Magnetic Model from NOAA.  It is really lightweight, if you’re working on a PC or SoC, but the geoid information alone is 4 MB.  So I […]

This post was originally published on June 25, 2018 at https://sparklechicken.net/channel/jakessbc   I forgot to mention this earlier, but I made a non-connected version the the lamp with a spare Arduino Uno that I had kicking around and sent it to my Dad for Father’s Day.  He’s a Denver Broncos fan so it oscillates from blue […]

This post was originally published on May 18, 2018 at https://sparklechicken.net/channel/jakessbc   It’s alive! The only thing left to be done on the code for this incarnation is to move the code for the button that writes to the SD card to an interrupt.  The button only works sporadically right now, but an ISR should fix […]

This post was originally published on April 14, 2018 at https://sparklechicken.net/channel/jakessbc   Well, it’s been a while since I did any updates to the page.  That said, I’ve made some changes to the unit and my workflow. The biggest news is that I’m finally learning git!  I’m JakeSparkleChicken on GitHub, and have been moving all of my […]

This post was originally published on December 29, 2017 at https://sparklechicken.net/channel/jakessbc Well, I bricked my Metro Express M0 board.  I was trying to install the CircuitPython package on it, and it did not go according to plan.  Yet another change of plans! I’ve had a Beaglebone Black kicking around for a while, patiently waiting for me to […]

This post was originally published on November 20, 2017 at https://sparklechicken.net/channel/jakessbc   The Strike and Dipper is dead. Long live the Strike and Dipper! I have been beating my head against the Metro M0 Express for three weeks now, trying to bend it to my will. The SoftwareSerial library doesn’t work on it, but it […]

This post was originally published on October 25, 2017 at https://sparklechicken.net/channel/jakessbc   Last week, the GPS sensor and SD card breakout finally arrived.  They both work beautifully…as long as you don’t use the SD card reader with anything else.  The combination of SD.h and SPI.h uses 50% of the Arduino Uno’s space for global variables right off […]

This post was originally published on September 26, 2017 at https://sparklechicken.net/channel/jakessbc   So I don’t have the GPS sensor or the SD card reader yet, but I know which ones I’m picking up.  I’m trying my hand at getting a custom PCB made for this one, since I’m planning on actually creating a few pseudo-production model […]

This post was originally published on September 22, 2017 at https://sparklechicken.net/channel/jakessbc   I know what you’re thinking. What happened to Part III? Well, Part III was a trash fire. So I scrapped most of the hardware design and the program and pretty much started from scratch. In the process, I swapped in a better display […]