Matt’s Blog

My latest phase has been to play around with electronics, mainly digital electronics with microcontrollers. I know that this is just yet another phase that I’m going through and no doubt some day soon I will drop it to lie dormant for any number of years, but for now at least it is giving me some fun.

Last night’s task was to rip apart a Fantazein clock… I’d really love to modify one of these things so that I could connect it to a computer and display custom messages - maybe stock quotes, news headlines and who knows what else. This is a bit of a daunting task for someone with only a small amount of electronics know-how like myself though! Whilst googling for information on modifying this clock I did come across T.J.Bordelon’s website. TJ wrote the firmware for one of the versions of the clock and after emailing him he has given me some good information to set me off in the right direction. He’s an incredibly impressive guy, some of the projects on his website are just nuts, such as trying to get an object into space! I also came across a project with some info on connecting a JStamp (some sort of Java based microcontroller?) to a Fantazein clock. This JStamp Fantazein project isn’t exactly what I want to do, but not far off and may well give me some help and ideas along the way…

I made some progress on one of my other electronics projects last night too which is to create an auto-scorer for a table football game. I was able to write (or steal from other of my projects) about half of the code neeeded for the microcontroller so that’s ready to have a circuit built now and some testing done - hopefully I’ll get going with that this weekend if I get the chance…

I’ve never been too interested in setting up one of these blogs, mainly because I’m pretty sure that I won’t keep it up… And how many blogs do I read where I come across that phrase “Well I haven’t blogged for a while” or some variation of it… But I’ll nevertheless give it a go and see what comes of it, though I think you’ll be lucky to see an entry here every week or even every month! I don’t mean to be so pessimistic, just being honest!