Holocron Hold-up

I got the code for the "quiet" mode working nicely at last. The best way I could figure out to impose a slow color shift on top of a (relatively) faster "sleep mode" pulse was to divide the red and green additive values by the value of the base blue. Which meant working in fractions, which meant I had to use float values, which meant I sucked up nearly all the program memory.

(Which meant the key command line became an unwieldy "strip.setPixelColor(whichPixel, gamma[int((redVal/100)*blueVal)], gamma[int((greenVal/100)*blueVal)], gamma[int(blueVal)]);")

But while I was attempting something a little more streamlined I managed to overwrite the bootloader (it's unfortunately easy to do on the Trinket, due to the ATtiny85 not having a protected memory partition).

So I need to attach a bunch of wires and go inside with my USBtiny ISP instead.

With luck, omitting the bootloader will spare me enough flash memory that I can do something nice for the "Jedi Detected" lighting routine. Seems a shame to have four digitally controlled RGB's and only drive them in unison. But it may have to be something simple when all is said and done. Subtle fades and bits of "analog" randomness really add a lot of extra lines to code.

Five people at the RPF have expressed interest in at least one M40 Grenade, so I'm preparing to go back to the lathe and run off three or four, then officially offer them for sale. The drilling part was painful enough I've got ahead and dropped a few bucks at McMaster-Carr -- heavy-duty chip-clearing high speed steel -- but I couldn't bring myself to spend for TiN coating, much less high carbon steel.

The Instructable for this fetched me a new class, at least. Which is good, because I used up my last free class and then some scheduling the Milling Machine SBU for this week.

The rest of the week is going to be installing speakers and inspecting cable at another theater. Oh; and I may change the light bulb in a lighthouse.