Month: September 2008

For the third time running, I made a Mitochondrion bit, plugged it in, turned it on and it just worked*. It’s the QTouch board, though I should point out that I put it in there mainly coz it’s cool, not coz it’s necessary. But hey, the entire thing is unnecessary.

So, quiz for today:

What do you think the Mitochondrion actually is?

Prizes will be given at Fidels for answers that are:
1) The most accurate
2) The most physically impossible
3) The most WTF?
4) The most ‘I know I’m good but I’m not good enough to make one of those’
5) The most ‘damn, wish I’d though to do that instead’
6) Compatible with Rule 34
7) Requiring of advanced technology, but not actual magic

And I won’t be telling people which prize they’ve won.

* – where “it just worked” means it sort of worked, the sensitivity is about a zillionth of what it should be and needs to be, thus there’s at least one thing wrong with it. I can think of one thing, so far, but what’s the odds that what I think is wrong is actually what is wrong?

Carrying on the “I plugged it in and it just worked” theme, this is the test version of the power supply for the main processor of the Mitochondrion. This feeds a nice steady five Volts to the processor. It should solve the problem of the processor telling the rest to turn on, the rest turning on and sucking up all the power, the processor then dying coz everything else is turned on, and nothing gets turned off coz the processor is ded, and then you’re stuck until the batteries run down.

For the non-geeks, the clever part is the tiny chip on the little green board in the middle. For the geeks, it’s a MAX710 step-up, step-down DC-DC converter. 5V, 500 mA, damn high efficiency.

I plugged it in, it worked. The glare is the LED to prove it worked. It probably worked coz I’ve learnt to spend half an hour checking every little thing before plugging it in.

Of course, when I say it worked, I mean I plugged it in to a wall plug and it kicked out five Volts. I have yet to test its stiffness (quiet in the cheap seats, I mean how steady the output is when the input is bouncing around from three to six Volts in about a millisecond). But we’ll save that for another day.

When the final version is built, it’ll be 25 mm by 15 mm. That’s not bad for something kicking out 2.5 Watts.

The Gannt chart for the next step of the Mitochondrion has forty-seven steps. I’ve ticked off another seven this week, taking me up to twenty-one. This project planning thing is psychologically valuable, otherwise I’d be just looking at the Heap of Stuff to Do, and feeling intimidated by its seeming endlessness.

Yup, that’s the only bit of the Mitochondrion that’s made in NZ, by Rakon. It will make up 0.008%, by volume, of the Mitochondrion. It’s an oscillating crystal that harmonises the energies and synchronises unstructured intentions into a holistic coherent whole, man! </hippy> Actually, that’s what it is, and that’s what it does, resulting in the processor being overclocked four times, from really slow, to mildy slow.

I feel like I should add in some comment about economic development, and how we’d be much richer if we were selling these and not milk powder, but f’it, there’s no reason not to do both.