Part of my Halloween costume requires an micro controller to display a pattern on a led light strip. The light strip and the Arduino Uno micro controller I got to control it arrived today. In the span of about an hour I was able to:
- Borrow a USB A to B cable from my room mate as apparently I don’t own one.
- Find and follow this guide to working Arduino on Gentoo
- Install 16GB more ram while I was rebooting after making the kernel changes required in that guide, for a total of 23.50 Gigabytes of ram on the development system, which is also brand new.
- Build the circuit for the basic blink code
- Build and upload the basic blink code, which did require two totally hacky symbolic links before it would work.
- Realize that the uno includes an led on the board so I didn’t need to build the circuit and realize that it came pre-loaded with the basic blink code so that I can’t actually tell if I did anything yet.
- Change the blink code to use port 12 and be faster to prove I’m actually in control.
- Success!
Tomorrow or this weekend I hope to learn to how to talk to the led strip. Then I need to go get a fez of some kind. Oh and a Halloween party to attend in the costume, that would be a good thing to find as well.