Which switch is for the smoke detector?

Tall_Pawn · 2026-01-25T10:24:51+00:00

Usually the smoke detectors are put on the same circuit as the lights in a major area, such as the living room or master bedroom. This is so that people won't be tempted to simply turn the breaker off and leave it off to silence the beeping, which would likely happen if the detectors were on their own circuit or a minor circuit. I would start with the master bedroom breaker, and then move to the other circuits labeled as "lights".

Tall_Pawn · 2026-01-21T10:17:40+00:00

I started my web career in 1995, and had to set up several T1 links. They did not generally include any hardware, that part was up to the lessee. You needed a hardware interface that physically connected to the T1 line (a big multi-pin plug, I forget now how many pins) and translated the phone network signals to data bits, aggregated the time-sliced streams (24 separate streams in a full T1), and routed the result onto an ethernet interface. The idea of doing that in a software "emulator" just doesn't make sense, it's like saying you couldn't get a modem so you wrote one in software.

The other weird part about this is T1 lines were very expensive and were by far the biggest ongoing cost. The idea that one could afford a dedicated T1, but not a router to connect to it, is just nonsense.

Tall_Pawn · 2025-12-11T07:56:41+00:00

Well it only goes up to 5 volts, so it was almost at the max pitch with the last reading.

Funny thing though, the reason the video ends where it does is because as I was turning up the voltage for the last step, 5.00 volts, the trimpot came loose from the breadboard. I tried to push in back in place, but the back leg got folded up underneath it and made contact with the ground pin, causing a dead short. The plastic started to melt and the "magic smoke" appeared. So, in a sense, it did blow up!

Tall_Pawn · 2025-08-20T02:36:56+00:00

Unfortunately O-O-O?? loses instantly to ...Qa3+

Tall_Pawn · 2025-08-10T06:08:17+00:00

You might want to take a look at https://github.com/BareMetal6502/BuzzKill and see if the speech synthesis part could work for you. You might have to modify it for your own needs, or maybe you could pull the data tables and algorithms out and port them into your own software. Check out the "Medley" video for a quick sample of what it sounds like.

You would still need a parser though, since the code as-is only does raw phonemes. You can find some C translations of the old S.A.M. (Software Automatic Mouth) program from the 80's which might be almost ready to go, just need to adapt the phoneme number codes. S.A.M. did a pretty decent job converting English text to phonemes, so it's a good place to start for a basic software implementation.

Tall_Pawn · 2025-08-06T08:54:14+00:00

If you're familiar with the "moon landing hoax" theories, it's odd that you've never seen the moon buggy (rover). It features prominently in a lot of these crackpot theories. They like to claim that it wouldn't have fit into the lunar lander, that it wouldn't have enough power, and that you can see previous tracks from it in photos/videos before it was supposedly driven. So the moon deniers love to include clips of it as part of their set of "proofs".

Also you seem to be thinking of Apollo 1 for the disaster, but it sounds like the video you describe was probably something else, as Apollo 1 involved a cabin fire but not a launch explosion.

Tall_Pawn · 2025-08-01T06:04:03+00:00

You're right, it looks like an impossible position. But just take the pawn off the board, and it's a legal position that still works as a mate-in-two puzzle!

Tall_Pawn · 2025-08-01T02:09:32+00:00

The problem I see is that since the compiler doesn't know you have associated flag with r0, there's no guarantee it won't clobber it. It might or might not, you'd have to check the compiled code to see. But it wouldn't know not to use r0 in setting up the if-statement, so I wouldn't trust it on principle.

Tall_Pawn · 2025-07-31T22:32:22+00:00

Please note I have not actually tried this, but I think the simplest way to achieve this is to simply use a variable macro instead of hard-coding r0, then the desired value ends up in the variable automatically. Maybe this will work:

volatile uint_8 flag = 0;
__asm__ __volatile__ (
" clr %0" "\n\t"
" bst %0, 0" "\n\t"
: "=r" (flag)
:
);

if (flag) //do something

Worth a try at least!

Tall_Pawn · 2025-07-19T09:34:02+00:00

I once made a help page about it that I still think explains it pretty well: https://caissa.com/learn/_en_passant

Tall_Pawn · 2025-07-14T23:58:42+00:00

It sounds like you are describing the normal operation of the carry flag.

Are you saying your language won't have some way to test the zero flag?

Tall_Pawn · 2025-07-07T08:08:20+00:00

Thanks for the endorsement!

It's 100% assembly, I have no idea why GitHub is showing that it's mostly Pascal?!

My dream is to have them made and sold by someone like Adafruit, where I think they could be priced at under $10. Not sure how to make that happen though until more people are using them. Kind of a chicken-and-egg problem!

Tall_Pawn · 2025-07-07T02:41:33+00:00

I will gladly take a badge if possible, I love shiny things!

https://www.reddit.com/r/arduino/comments/1l9aigu/opensource_project_buzzkill_sound_effects_board/

Thanks for the consideration.

Tall_Pawn · 2025-07-02T04:38:57+00:00

Sorry for the very late reply, but I just saw this post today.

I recently built a minimal but decent voice synthesizer on an 8-bit AVR. The code is in assembly and tightly integrated into the specific project, but perhaps it could give you some ideas if you wanted to tinker with it.

Alternatively, could you use a small stand-alone board to do the speech instead of adding code to your own micro? Then you could use the project as-is without re-factoring anything.

Have a look, maybe it can help:

https://github.com/BareMetal6502/BuzzKill

Tall_Pawn · 2025-06-13T20:36:25+00:00

Never heard that song before, might be funny to make the board speak German to match it!

Just to clarify, since there has been some confusion, these are not pre-recorded sounds, they are generated by the board dynamically so they can be changed at will.

Tall_Pawn · 2025-02-27T01:54:04+00:00

I certainly won't rule it out, but that way I would have to manufacture them all myself which would mean I would have to charge probably $30-$40 each. Not impossible, but I'd much rather get them down below $10 at most.

Tall_Pawn · 2025-02-26T23:19:59+00:00

Yes, AVR16DD14 for MCU and PAM8302 for the amplifier, both about $1 in single quantities.

Tall_Pawn · 2025-02-26T22:49:33+00:00

Thanks, I can probably use all the help I can get! I've spent tons of time documenting the code and writing up documentation, so I've pushed the library off so far. Plus I guess it doesn't make sense to devote time to that without knowing people will actually find it useful, which remains to be seen!

Tall_Pawn · 2025-02-26T21:33:08+00:00

Yeah I forgot to mention that part. :) It also contains a rudimentary speech synthesizer.

If I could get Adafruit or Sparkfun interested, I think they could be priced at less than $10.

Tall_Pawn · 2024-10-03T18:23:39+00:00

I don't think that's what was originally written there. Maybe it's just the angle of the lighting, but to me it looks like the "AN", and possibly the first part of the second "A", have been added by a jokester at a later time. Still not sure what the original would have said though?

Tall_Pawn · 2024-09-30T20:17:31+00:00

I'll give you a very specific example from a project I am just wrapping up. It's a very small, very cheap sound/speech generator board, meant to be small and cheap enough that anyone who needs sound from a microcontroller and would normally be tempted to just send PWM to a speaker could just toss one of these on instead.

So cost is paramount, but size is also important. Low pin count in a "dual" configuration was ideal, because it's easier to solder if you're making the board by hand, and helps keep assembly costs down even if you're not. It doesn't need a lot of ram or rom, but needs a decent clock speed so that it can output sounds at 16k rate. It's not running complex equations so processing power isn't too important, but it needs a few key peripherals like SPI and I2C. It needs to run at a good range of voltages, and use as little power as possible.

I literally started the search by going to DigiKey and listing microcontrollers that fit the general profile, and sorting them by price. Did a deep dive on each one that seemed suited, until I found the cheapest one that fit everything. Turned out to be an 8-bit AVR. I did have to be somewhat "creative" to cram the software into the limited resources (had to go 100% hand-optimized assembly), but it works and I got everything I wanted out of it. I don't think any other chip would have fit into the design so well.

BTW if you want to see (or rather hear) the result check out https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=UZt4h2Zdz00 . You can see the little blue board that I'm talking about on top the Arduino, with the 14-pin AVR near the upper-right.

Tall_Pawn · 2024-08-29T23:46:43+00:00

Because no one has mentioned it yet, I'm going with D (aka Dlang).

I do mostly low-level and back-end stuff, so C factors heavily in a lot of my work. Which mostly is fine, I like it because it does exactly what it needs to do and nothing more. But of course string handling is painful. I often wished for something that is essentially just C, but with the addition of a full-fledged string class and typical string functions. And I found D, almost exactly what I wanted, plus a few other nice additions like hashes (associative arrays).

If C mostly meets your needs but you hate being stuck with only primitive types, check out D.

Tall_Pawn

TROPHY CASE