Once Again, a Conglomeration

Here we are again, a bunch of little things, not quite enough to post about, or at least I dont think there is, but too much to be left unsaid. So let me say it and we'll deal with the fallout later. 

The first thing is that I've decided to delve into the world of embedded programming...at least kinda. The story starts 3(4?) years ago when my wife saw a painting that someone had woven Christmas lights through to "illuminate" the scene. She had painted several different advent wreaths and had asked if we could do something like that for her paintings. Of course I said yes, and planned to use a RaspberryPi a battery, and several LED to light the individual "candles" of the wreath. After some digging, I realised that a RaspberryPi wouldn't run a month off a single battery without major work. For that year I decided that we would just use cheap fake candles to do the job. So I bought a pack of the tealight led candles, cut the flame part off and glued the base to the back of the canvas. It worked well for that first year, then the project got set down.....and now several years later, I'm forcing myself to pick it back up.

After stumbling on a blog post about how a dude got an Arduino to theoretically run a month on a single battery. I decided that I was going to follow his example, but really just wing it and see what I get. So I've ordered the Arduino Pro Mini 3.3v, a larger Li-on battery, a sparkfun battery babysitter, and the things i think i'll need to interface with the Arduino. I went with a larger battery for a couple of reasons; first, I'm going to be doing more then Idling, which costs power. Second, I need to power 4 LEDs over the course of that same month. Third, I also bought a "nicety" device, which is the battery babysitter. Not because I want to actually use the baby sitter for its intended purposes, but because I wanted a way to charge the battery without disassembling the whole circuit. The downside is that is another power draw on the battery. So I'm not actually sure if the layout i have planned will last a month or 3 days, but I have to start somewhere or this project wont go anywhere.

The second thing that I'm thinking about, slash working on, is a system to auto transcribe Discord voice conversations. I'm hoping that I can utilise the Craig.chat bot to record the sessions of a DnD group that I'm involved in, then use OpenAI's whisper to transcribe the session. That way I have a log of what happened in the last session to look back on. I don't really need it, but I want to see if i can do it anyway.

Finally, I recently went back to my mothers house to do some network upgrades, and well there, she told me to take several PC game boxes from my high school era that had been left behind. I obliged, and decided that I would rip the game disks, and then "archive" them in a CD/DVD binder case, and discard the boxes. That way we still have the original disks if we need them, but don't have the clutter of the boxes. So I've started on that project, which is going slower then I anticipated, mostly because the discs are not is good shape. The games were......"well loved", and the discs show the usage, so currently about half the disks failed with read issues. I haven't spent any time trying to clean/restore the discs yet, as I am focused on getting through the pull first. Once I get through the pile,  Then I'll go back through and work on cleaning, restoring, troubleshooting the discs. 

That's what I'm working on, and I admit, this post is really just an incoherent mess of projects, but that's kinda the point of this blog isn't it? A blog to myself? I think sometimes I forget that.