Quote:
Originally Posted by RickS
Hi M&T,
The Hubble palette shows a lot of subtle details not normally seen in RGB or HaRGB. The detail is amazing as usual Love it
Cheers,
Rick.
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Thanks, Rick. We are gently heartened.
Quote:
Originally Posted by Retrograde
Wow fabulous detail. I like the raspberry too which makes a change from the usual strawberry tones.
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Thanks, Pete! The possibility of a slightly warmer, less liver-and-cryovac beef colour scheme appeals to us.
* * *
Speaking of raspberry, our observatory uses a number of boards designed by me, using now unobtainable AtMega 40 pin DIL microcontrollers. I wanted to make a tiny change to the code for the one that orchestrates the two roof flaps, so they don't crash into each other.
The C compiler used to be free, but now they want $280 a year licence, still needs a lot of assembly language to actually do stuff, and it is a pain in the butt to use or to upload to the device using the AVR ISP and Atmel Studio. Think swinging from a chandelier under a waterfall on top of a ladder in the dark while singing God Save the Queen in E flat minor.
Also, we own the last 10 of these 40 pin DIL chips on the planet, and every single one of them has a particular pair of pins blown to bits ex factory, for our convenience. We dont want to try surface mounting a modern 100 pin chip. We wondered briefly about the Raspberry Pi, but got scared by the word Linux.
We've just bought an 82 MHz Arduino Due for about the cost of a BLT and avocado sandwich, found that you really can just plug it into your laptop with a USB A-B cable, and start programming it in C++ pretty much instantly for free. No learning curve. It seems (yet to be proven) that it can do 12 bit PWM at blazing speed without having to use assembly language. It can probably also even do quadrature decoding. And we can design our own 4 layer boards with things like motor controllers to just plug physically into the Arduino as a "shield". What fun! No more sitting around the fire on cold and cloudy winter nights wondering what to do.
Best,
Mike (and more cautiously, Trish).