I’ve finally got around to replacing my mini breadboard and bunch of dupont cables with a proper ISP breakout board. Its got a ZIF slot to make it easy to insert/remove the chips, and a couple of DIP switches the switch the location of the reset and GND pins between 8-pin ATtiny85’s and 28-pin ATmega328p’s. Just connect a 6-pin USBASP and “make ispload”. Building it was a bit of a disaster – first I’d soldered all the wires before realising the veroboard is a horizontal type not vertical (or vice versa) and then I forgot my USBASP 10-to-6-pin adaptor had female headers on it, so I had to desolder the female headers I had put on my board and replace with male pins.

I filmed a video in portrait mode on my camera which for some odd reason actually saves the file as a landscape movie but sideways! So I tried all of the Linux video editors I could think of – Pitivi, OpenShot, Kino, Kdenlive, Cinerella…. None of them could rotate a video without cropping it and downgrading the quality. I also wanted to remove the audio and scale it down. Good old ffmpeg to the rescue!

I got a couple of great translucent lamps from the car boot sale for £2 that would diffuse RGB LED’s – or a strip of them – really nicely, so I’m going to make a couple of mood lamps. The first one is going to be basic and just use the 44 key IR remote and LED controller that came with my 5050 LED strip kit. These are just analogue strips not posh WS2182B digital addressable ones.

I’ve been playing with the rewritten RF24 and RF24Network librariy forks and am impressed. The RF24Network library is a much more reliable way of using multiple nodes than just using the same channel/pipe and hoping you won’t get timing conflicts with RF24 e.g. I’d find the data from 2 nodes would merge! Also hardware SPI finally works on the Raspberry Pi. I’ve updated my weather station scripts, I now have the RPi as the master receiving node0 (with a new 17dBm antenna!

Been a while since I did some shopping and year end is approaching, why give it all to the taxman? So I’m purchasing some more nRF24L01+ kit, I’m going to make a bunch of RF24Network devices to dot around – some inside with 5v mains power and new temperature sensors and some outside with larger antenna’s. I was going to buy some SI24R01’s which are supposed to be more powerful Taiwanese ripoffs of the nRF24L01+, but I couldn’t get the pricepoint.