Today was all wacked out…. I meant to get up early and get to work…. I ended up going to bed about the time I should have been getting up. So, I woke up late which gave me very little time to do anything before my game. To make things worse, I didn’t have any sand. The only sand I had was the fine grit sand. I wasn’t about to use that to lay stone as it’s too damn expensive. So, I started on the stucco of the retaining wall…. and that’s what you see!

I poured a beam across the BBQ access door and laid the top step coming down from the fire pit. Those mothers are f’ing heavy! I nearly died 3 times while moving them from my garage to the pit. They are a pain in the ass to shape too! I had a good 1/2 score and was beating the shit out of with a rubber mallet…. no go. Finally got them as you can see.

Jann was here this weekend… so I put her ass to work while I sat up on the porch and shouted orders. That’s the way I should have done the pool! She wanted to learn how to stucco so she helped me put a coat up in the BBQ pit. We had left overs… so we grouted a bit of the flagstone too!

Laid some block for the outer wall… I went as far as I can. I need to find a small stainless steel (or brass if nothing else) access panel so that I can reach in and crank the gas valve. Once I get that I can close up the front wall. I also started laying flag stone down in the base of the pit…

I laid a few pieces of flag, stubbed some pipes, poured a concrete base where the bbq is to go, stucco’d the interior, and started to lay the outer wall. I also had to move the satellite dish since the new house was built to the South East of me. I couldn’t get the History channel anymore…

I just finished up the design of 3 new boards. I went ahead and made the pool controller PCB, a I2C relay board, and a RF transceiver with a RS232 connection. The pool controller consists of a EEPROM for VFD menu screens, RS485 transceiver for communications with the heater, RF transceiver for communications with the PC, push button interface, VFD interface and a real time clock. I also brought out the 8 analog inputs for temperature sense and that kind of junk. Finally, there is a terminal block bringing out the I2C data bus so that I can connect future peripherals. The I2C relay board is just that…. it takes commands via the I2C bus and switches the desired relay (up to 8 DPDT). I made the board so that it would except a N-type Hexfet too! The RF transceiver with the RS232 interface is to plug into the PC. It’s rather simple… the DTR/RTS lines control the TX/RX enable lines and the TD/RD lines are simply fed through a MAX232 transceiver to convert RS232 voltage levels to TTl level… and then on into the transceiver module. So, with a little work on the VB end of things this should work like a champ. Yeah, if I haven’t already mentioned it I have thrown out X-10 as a means for control. Basically….. it sucks ass. So, I have resorted to RF. I need to start laying out the boards for these. 2 WEEKS! That’s what I am giving myself to get this thing doing remote relay operations. The rest of the features can follow at the normal pace.

I spent about 6 straight hours trying to figure out how to interface to this VFD that I got off ebay. I got the thing super cheap because there really isn’t any good data out on how to interface to it. I did manage to find a pinout and command structure for the thing though. I went to town on the bread board and had it all wired up within a hour or so. I even had time to build that neat little ICD2 interface. Anyways, everything went surprisingly well on the coding end of things. I pretty much nailed it first shot! Now that I have proven the display I will create some re-usable functions to interface with this bad boy. I plan on using a couple more of these things. BTW, this VFD is not the same as the one above. It’s a 128×32 display… and not simply a character display. I can create annimations and all sorts of good stuff with this mofo. I think I’ll use the other one for something else.

I got a whole bunch of stuff done this weekend. I am all caught up elsewhere. So, I got some time to lay 6 more pieces of flagstone. The patio is pretty much covered at this point. Now I have to go back and cut all the “in-betweeners”. That should take some time.