I've just sent the gerbers into BatchPCB for my first run of TG Watchdog boards!

I found an awesome project for the kids. On picprojects.org.uk there is a mood lamp by Pete Griffiths.

On the last trip to Shenzhen, I asked my boss to get me a few handfulls of 10mm LEDs in colours. They will work great for this.

I've built it up on vero and programmed the chip with Pete's code. It works great! Even managed to get the ICSP to play nice.

I've finally found a use for these DPDT switches which I've had stashed for aaaaaaaages. They are DPDT, but one side is momentary. So they are ON, Centre OFF, MOMENTARY. I will incorporate one into the LED downlight display. I will also add a 40106 to the selection to help de-bounce for me. I tried a plain RC de-bounce, but I can never get them to work properly.

The customer will be able to switch the 'cycling' of the lamps from up 'Auto', to centre 'Stop' and also multiple presses on the momentary side they can manually select the lit lamp.

I am considering whether it's worth it putting an ammeter and volt meter on there.

Should be pretty cool.

The new CRO (er, DSO) is great! I am using it while I design a circuit to help promote our range of 12V hallogen replacement LED downlights. They look damn boring in white boxes. My idea is to have a strip of aluminium angle with 10 MR16 porcelain sockets fitted to it. Each lamp will have it's own transistor to turn it on, mounted next to the socket on the strip. The circuit will serve as a test bed for new lamps that we get. It will have a PWM based dimmer and a voltage control. Each down light will be lit for a second or two (adjustable) and then the one after, down the line.

This should add some interactivity for customers, as well as some animation to catch the eye. I think having all of them lit at once would not only be blinding, but just as boring as white boxes.

So far my design is going to incorporate two 555s, an LM350 and a handfull of 8A transistors in TO220s. To do the stepping between globes I am going to use a 4017 decade counter.

One of my side projects has kicked off at last after a bit of a rocky prototype phase - the pre-prototype (for nailing down micro controller code) is now in testing - hopefully we sell some. Having a real product that I custom engineered in a production environment at 30+ sites would be really cool.

Saturday and Sunday were very productive. Saturday I cleaned out the strip next to the driveway and swept the patio. The patio was covered in toys and sand because Liam had his little mate around and they made a mess.

Today I cleaned the side passage. Removed all the crap [All the house owners shit - tin, ute tray bits, tiles, wood scraps, window assemblies and blocks of concrete that I've pulled out of the yard]. That's taken me most of the day. I also cleared the side garden, trimmed the rose and the aloe looking spiky cactus looking plant as well. There is a crappy tree in the corner that I trimmed and removed the extra stumps around it - you can't get the mower next to it otherwise. I should have just trimmed it back a bit more - to about ground level.

Hopefully the rose at the front makes it, it produces nice fragrant red roses. The brickies that did the front fence next pushed it over. I think the trunk is broken, there are parts of the trunk that are also rotten. I put in a steel rod and its sitting on that now. I even found another rose in the garden at the side - there was just so much crap, plus before the wall, there was a low branch obscuring it. I think if the roses cark it, I'm going to disappear the garden and grow the grass up to the new brick wall. There isn't anything worth while growing in there any way - plus the tree in there has destroyed the concrete edging. Less maintenance == win.

The new fence is up at last! The brickies will be back soon (hopefully) to put a few courses of bricks under the colourbond fence. I'm very glad they're doing that, I can whiper-snip right up to the wall without damaging anything next door.