i must be bored?

i went to the "maker faire" over the weekend and saw a couple of cool things. more importantly, though, one day after i'd gotten started learning "the basics" of resistors and batteries and diodes, i got a glimpse of the big picture: microcontrollers!

for some reason, all these years, I have not been doing things with microcontrollers. why not? I'm a lapsed C programmer, and if I may toot my own horn, I'm actually a rather good C programmer. at least, I was, back before I switched to python. now I have my doubts. still, looking at some of the online code samples for microcontrollers, the stuff is rather simplistic. sure, maybe it's harder for more complex stuff, but... maybe not.

my main sack has a microcontroller already, and though he's the man for electronics, he doesn't really know how to program, and for some odd reason, hid the fact that he wanted some help until we were at the faire. so there's that avenue to pursue, and also, i've been looking over the much-hyped "arduino" (they were all over at the faire) and getting a bit jazzed about that.

i already have bits and pieces of a project in mind: a webpage controllable LED matrix to sit on my desk and display inane messages entered by random visitors to my visitorless website. originally, i wanted an LED matrix that would display a snow pattern coalescing into the word BEER. i can combine both, I reckon.

the funny thing is that I've spent several futile hours of frustrated hacking trying to get an LED to flash on my breadboard. it still doesn't work. i've got several more days of reading before it's got a chance of working. but I am pretty confident that were i to order an ethernet-enabled microcontroller and a pre-fab LED matrix, I could have my above project up and running in less than a week.

and then, maybe something useful!