To study something new you must have a goal. Studying without a goal is difficult. So after a while reading, reading and reading I came up with 2 ideas.
- 1 Building a Question and Answer application.
2 Building a tool to read the data of my TFA temperature/hygrometer
This is a little too complex project but I'll see how far I will come. A simple description: There are 2 stages. An edit stage by the question builder and an fill stage by a user. Someone can start with a text with a question and formulates answers. There must be minimal 2 answers, a standard and actual answer. However the list can contain e.g. 10 answers. The answer can be an answer on its own but the answers can also be used for a next answer. For example: Question 1 is a question about the size. There are 3 possible answers: "standard", "small", "large". The second questions depends on question 1. If question 1 is answered with "standard" the next answers are possible: "left" or "right". If the answer on question 1 was "large" the answers on question 2 are "up" or "down". These are just examples.
The interesting possibility I read is that BB us using RTF documents and therefore a lot is possible. I was thinking building text views with active position in the text. You write the question and when you come to the point of the answer you can insert a dropdown list of answers. In runtime a user can select a question at that point by a click on the listobject. The answers are depending on already answered question. So the question builder can select a previous question and answer and list the answers for that question and answer. You can also exclude previous answers from the answer list of the next question. Pretty simple. I also want to add dependent pictures to the text. Picture A is shown when the question is answered with "1" and picture B is shown when the question is answered with "2". Other options must be "tables".
Ad 2
I have a 16 year old datalogger and it is still working perfect with 5 external stations. I used it once for trimming the floor heating valves in my house. However it has a "serial" port. My new computer has no serial port anymore, only USB and the software of the logger was XP level. I asked 16 years ago TFA Dostmann for the communication protocol but they refused to reveal it. Now there are several hacks created by other tinkers. At that time I discovered that it used the serial COM RS-232/V24 and just only the handshake lines DTR/DSR (SPI-SCL), RTS/CTS (SPI-SDA) were used to read the device. There is logic inside the TFA that split/join the SCL/SDA signals of an AT24C256 memory. It was a bit banged SPI imitation and I wrote a tool in PureBasic (great language). Due to the fact that I have only USB now I have to use another option. Using an Arduino to read the memory chip with SPI and send it serial to my PC using BlackBox V24 at the receiver side. 1000 values from 5 sensors, temp, humidity and date.
Another project still on breadboard:
- Dust sensor
CO2 sensor
Hygrometer sensor
Pressure sensor
[Edit: some textual changes: I2C > SPI]