Nerd time!

As mentioned yesterday, I worked on connecting the programmable led stripe I ordered to a Raspberry Pi computer. That bit was done remarkably quick so I started working on creating a piece of server software and an extension that would allow my children (and later on perhaps the rest of the children in school as well) to program the led stripe using the Scratch programming language. Today, I managed to get things up and running and a large portion of the evening has been spent playing with it to see what's possible. I'm quite impressed with what it can do. The bits of software I made need to be tidied up now and after that I plan to share it with the rest of the world.

The code you're seeing in the foreground is making the leds 'run' from left to right, with a fading effect thrown in for good measure. You can see the leds in the background at the top of the image. The idea was to create a 'KITT scanner', based on the 80s TV series 'Knight Rider'. For reference, see this video on Youtube. Probably not worth watching the full ten hours, but it will give you an idea what I was after. You're probably not interested in all this geek talk anyway, but hey this is my journal and it happens to be what I've been doing today :-).