Hat!

I started work on Saturday on a hat based on the Rule 110 Cellular automaton. I had bought yarn for this particular hat two weeks ago, but I hadn't allotted time to work on it. As you can see, it's finished! Well, mostly. There's some dangling yarn that I hid behind my head for that picture, which I will need to weave into the underside of the hat.

I'm pretty happy with how it turned out, in terms of the design. I'll definitely be making more as gifts for people who I think might appreciate it. This iteration stays with me, though, for a couple of reasons: First, it's the first hat that I've made that I actually want to wear, and second, its dimensions and surface geometry are... non-standard. This is partially due to poor planning, and partially due to my lack of experience with fair-isle knitting (the preceding VT hat was my first attempt at that, and that was a lot less complex).

Apart from hats, I'm also thinking about knitting a blanket with squares from each of the 88 non-equivalent elementary cellular automata. To help design it, I'm learning to use GNU Octave, a free (as in freedom and beer) programming environment and language designed to be compatible with Matlab. Since downloading the manual 24 hours ago, I've learned enough to write a function that generates, based on a seed array, a matrix representing n generations of any of the 256 aforementioned elementary cellular automata. I hope to use this in combination with Matlab's/Octave's graphics capabilities to choose an ordering and a color scheme for this blanket.

I've also been learning some stuff I'll need for my alarm clock project. Thanks to Pete Soper and Drew Nelson of Splat Space, I've figured out the basics of a circuit to drive four 7-segment displays (that's 28 LEDs) using only the 12 pins on my Arduino (hint: four BJT transistors and a chip specifically designed for the task that Pete had lying around). Updates on this as I figure out other components (like the audio components necessary for the alarm, and the actual timekeeping function).

I'm still enjoying work, but I'm also glad it's temporary. Cubicle life doesn't agree with me. I miss everyone from home (everyone from everywhere, actually), and can't wait to see you all!

Posted via email from Ben Weinstein-Raun