New Space! (and fun with code)

Administrative/Logistic

Things have not been a complete stand-still in the (ugh...) 7 weeks since my last blog posting. What with the Festivus activities, cold weather, and burn-out-ness-y stuff, the last couple weeks haven't seen much activity on the wall.

However, that being said, things have happened.
Tonight, for example, I signed a lease and moved into a work space in Northeast, in the same building that the art show was in. I got me a wonderful 323 sq. ft. basement work area for all my dirty work.
I moved in my new table saw that I got for Festivus (yay), a bunch of woodworking tools, scrap wood & acrylic. I've got a lot to move in, including all my electronics stuff, and some shelving (most of which I will probably be making).
I will take and post some pictures once things look a little better.

Coding

I've also been working on some coding, in a much better sense than the C I had been working on before. I have been using Python & wx (a cross-platform graphics API akin to Tk, DirectX, or Quartz) to do a simulator/emulator/interface to the processor and wall.
Basically, I ported line-for-line the C code on the processor into Python, mainly to make sure I had to do as little debugging as possible. Once I got that working, I started refactoring the way the procedures worked, to make it more OO and maintainable.
The code isn't completely converted yet, but once I get it relatively stable, I will post what I've got for others to play around with.
I have also added one major thing I didn't have time to do (or probably EEPROM storage) for the art show: scrolling text. I made 2 different fonts, one of which only supports about 25 letters, digits, & punctuation, and the other supports the full alphabet, all 10 digits, and 10 punctuation characters. The problem with this font, however, is that the resolution of the wall only allows for about 2 characters displayed at any given time. The smaller font shows about 2.5 characters at once, as a comparison.

I'll be spending a bunch of time in the next week or two just acclimating myself and my work stuff to the new space, so expect at least a little progress!