Hmm. Sixteen months. My how time flies when you aren’t posting to a blog.

Life happens and my involvement in designing things that flashed LEDs wavered with my inability to get a working prototype for the Sawyer Star, a 64-LED array/matrix that is to be driven by Arduino. I was more than familiar in a general sense with this Open Source microprocessor platform, based on the ATMega 8 family (168s and 328s of late) and it was clear there was a huge community behind it.

After a few months of fiddling around with a board I had bought, I decided to investigate the Rainbowduino, a spinoff of the Arduino that is designed specifically to handle large numbers of LEDs. I bought one of those boards and played with it off and on for a few months. I finally decided that it was too powerful (and too expensive) for my needs.

After a wide variety of false starts on circuit designs, I went back to my inspiration for the Sawyer Star — David Thorpe’s “Animated Christmas Star Project” — and reviewed his design. It is dead simple: an 18F2620 controller PIC from Microchip Technology, some resistors, a ULN2803 Darlington transistor array and a traditional five-volt power supply.

Why not, I wondered, just substitute an Arduino for the PIC?

Which got me back on track, got me back working with microprocessors and — ultimately — interested in this blog again.

I had moved this web site (along with a dozen others) over to an Apple Mac Mini last year (another reason focus was lost here) and during the transition lost the ability for permalinks to work the right way and also lost the ability to upload images. I fixed those problems this morning.

Further, there was a written but unpublished post here, which I will fix up shortly and get up for you to see just how far I got down the wrong road last year.

You’ll be seeing more stuff here soon, I’m sure.