Bread Board Wristwatch (2017)(ingep.net)
ingep.net
Bread Board Wristwatch (2017)
https://ingep.net/breadboardwatch/
4 comments
I got started with AVRs too! It was just before Arduino became well known, so by coincidence I got started with ASM instead of anything C.
I still force myself to take a break from work once in a while and hack together something with hand-optimized assembly. I'm afraid that if I don't do it at least once a year, I will have lost something wonderful and essential. Like forgetting how to write poetry because I spend all day writing manuals for IKEA furniture.
The AVR datasheets are also a joy. I'm liking the Attiny10 a lot these days.
I still force myself to take a break from work once in a while and hack together something with hand-optimized assembly. I'm afraid that if I don't do it at least once a year, I will have lost something wonderful and essential. Like forgetting how to write poetry because I spend all day writing manuals for IKEA furniture.
The AVR datasheets are also a joy. I'm liking the Attiny10 a lot these days.
I made a version of this and it was great fun: https://blog.jgc.org/2022/12/the-rogers-watch-retro-display-...
The components and wiring on the board might be too fragile for everyday use but potting it with clear/slightly colored epoxy might solve this problem? In that case it might be a good idea to solder the contacts rather than only plugging in - otherwise epoxy could get between the wires and bread board contacts and cause the circuit to fail.
Then at some point I got too busy with work (and a kid) so I stopped messing around with them.
I didn’t realize how helpful learning low level I/O design and implementation was to my current job (control systems) until much later on. I’m pretty confident my hobbying helped me understand design decisions for the software that we worked in for my day job. Types, and more importantly type casting, was relatively ubiquitous in MCU programming. The software we used in my day job casted all types implicitly. So many times when we found a bug in that software it was due to some casting issue. Granted I was implementing “code” in that platform, but not a software engineer, so it was funny having relatively deep technical conversations with the software engineers when we had to engage them.