I got my artsy itch out of my system, I’ve spent the day creating some music, but I can’t record it because, once again, I’ve lost track of my portable Zoom H8 digital recorder and my notebook to log what I’ve done to create the piece.

I also did some prep work on some paintings I want to do instead of waiting for nightfall when there are fewer bugs to get stuck in the paint. Yeah, I paint out-of-doors. It was a lovely, not too warm day.

But the real work will be to make progress coding the Brainfuck app that I want to run on my newest acquisition, 2 Brainfuinos. Supposedly I’ll be able to run Arduino type apps on the Brainfuino. It’s a little tedious coding Brainfuck apps, but if I can get something useful to run, my creative urges will be satisfied. Because the Brainfuino doesn’t have the exact pin layout as the Arduino Uno, using commercially available hats is out if the question. Well, off to cook some dinner, then get diwn to business.

I didn’t really get into in the last post, but the Brainfuino implements the brainfuck language in a FPGA platform emulating an Arduino Uno (sort of). Here’s a picture of what I received in the mail:

The instructions I received are somewhat minimalist, two sides of a single sheet of paper.

The terminal you use to interface with the Brainfuino is recommended on Winblows to be PuTTY, but since I interface with a Rapsberry Pi, two programs seem to be the options available. Both are installed with apt get and the programs are minicom and gtkterm. I’ve used GTKTerm and it seems to do the trick.

Some of the instructions are non-starters because you must dismantle the case to access the reset button, and I don’t have a 2mm hex key handy, that I know of.

I haven’t done much programming on the Brainfuino, as I’m still developing the software and it’s easier to develop using the tool at monocalc.com: https://monocalc.com/tool/programming/brainfuck_interpreter. More info is available about brainfuck, just use your browser. Here’s DuckDuckGo’s web page on brainfuck:

Oh, and I don’t think you’re going to find out too much about the Brainfuino, DuckDuckGo’s page is here:

I’ll look up the web info in my browser tabs and post it here, or you can use the email addresses in the docs above. The web site for the current build of the Brainfuino is https://lectronz.com/products/brainfuinov1-1.

I heard about the Brainfuino from a post Thalia made on the fediverse. My handle on the fediverse is @jaypeach53. Yeah, not a tech site, but on the fediverse you can talk to the whole fediverse from any instance.

As the github site (https://github.com/kuashio/bf) says:

This product is intended as anything around brainfuck and esoteric programming languages: A joke. An elaborate joke. A geek toy.

I don’t really consider it to be a toy. Arduinos are limited devices, them being microcontrollers, not the run-of-the-mill CPUs. And they can have their uses. Dozens of devices around your home are controlled by microcontrollers. One example off the top of my head is the brain of the sprinkler controller.

I used to program in assembler, so brainfuck as a language really isn’t that foreign. So using what’s essentially an assembly language is just reawakening a dormant memory. Yeah, it’s far different than coding in a language that does much handholding, but you get used to it.

Well, after a few months, I got some time to work on the 2 Odroid XU-4 that I bought. They have a choice of Linux or Android operating systems which you can install. I chose : Ubuntu 18.04.

The documentation only has instructions for installing on Windows or Mac. But I looked on the internet for instructions to use the dd command in Linux to flash the OS onto the SD card.

More to come…

Here’s an updated downloads page for the XU-4

Looks like it’s time to update the OS.

The last few posts were just sitting in my drafts folder, so I cleaned them up and posted them as is. Probably a few years old at least.

I’ve slowly been setting up a music server to preserve my music files. The iMac I’ve currently to serving up my music was bought back in 2016, and while I’ve only had two problems with it, I’m wary of depending on it. One problem is that for some reason, the iTunes app running on Mac OS 10.4 stopped working and got replaced with the Music app. The Music app, while much improved by Apple from when it first came out, is not anywhere as full-featured as iTunes was. One thing I really miss was the remote control app, amusingly called Remote. As far as I can tell, there’s no replacement.

On the Raspberry Pi 4, I’ve installed an app called mpd. It’s a music server that, as far as I can tell, is the most full-featured one available. Hopefully it can serve the Apple format files that make up most of the 24,000 tracks that I’ve acquired. I hope that if everything works as planned, I’ll also add to my phone client software that interacts with mpd so that I can control mpd remotely.

I’ve also bought a HiFiBerry DAC+ ADC to connect to my stereo system and enable input, too.

As an extra added bonus, I’ve also bought a Zigbee control hat to replace the Philips light controller I bought several years ago. The Philips TOS is really obnoxious and I refuse to agree to the new terms.

I sort of got lazy in my quest to replace iTunes with something open source. I tried the mpd software on a Raspberry Pi 4, but mpd doesn’t seem to want to talk to my msic stored on an SD card. So I settled on VLC, which at least talks to the SD card. VLC doesn’t really act as a music player, so I’m left with selecting a bunch of albums and dragging them to the VLC window. It suits my purpose for now, but I’d really like to be able to set up playlists, something that’s not possible in VLC.

Another thing is the transfer of the music files from my iMac to the SD card. For some reason, not all files got cleanly transferred to the SD card, and most of the old files were missing, so I need to find a ripping program I can use on the Pi to re-rip those music disks. But it isn’t a high priority.

Time to start digging into and solving the mpd problem.

It’s about time to check out text editors for my programming needs. Vi has been my go-to editor since the late 80s, and Emacs for certain tasks like Lisp coding, but other editors have sprung up since then. I’ve played with IDEs like NetBeans, Eclipse and the JetBrain products, but never got real comfortable with them, as I tend to make small apps for which these tools are overkill.

One language that I’ve looked at recommended VSCode or Sublime Text as the tools best suited for development of app in that language. I tend to shy away from Microsoft products because M$ is such a shitty company, so I guess I’ll be downloading Sublime Text.

Any tips or tricks for new users?

Happy New Years. That’s all.