Great Stalin - banner of friendship of the peoples of the Soviet Union!

After reading about U.S. President Donald Trump’s “Number 1 fan”, Gene Huber, I was struck by the similarities between the adoration of Trump and that of Soviet leader, Josef Stalin. Throughout his tenure as General Secretary of the Communist Part of the Soviet Union, a cult of personality developed around Stalin. He was often called Великий Сталин (Great Stalin.) Propaganda posters depicted Stalin as a benevolent steward of the needs of the people.

“Спасибо любимому Сталину - за счастливое детство!”

(Thank you dear Stalin for a happy childhood.)

Rotary encoders are notoriously difficult to get right.

Although I haven’t used this new encoder class yet, it looks very interesting. From active Teensy forum user Theremingenieur, it allows initialization with upper and/or lower limits.

You can find the code in this thread.

While working on a project to automate environmental control in our greenhouse, I needed to implement a menu interface on a small OLED display. In this sub-project, meant to test the concept, I’ve used a Teensy 3.1, a small I2C-driven 0.96" monochrome OLED display and a rotary encoder.

Bill of materials:

• Teensy 3.1 - the Teensy 3.1 is no longer available, but you can easily find the compatible Teensy 3.2.
• 0.96" yellow/blue I2C OLED module - I used the version with the yellow band at the top so that it this area could act as the highlighted region of the display.
• Rotary encoder with push-button switch - I used this one from Adafruit, but there are many options.
• {% asset_link MC74HC14.pdf 74HC14 Schmitt Trigger inverter %} - to debounce the pushbutton.

Description

This project is a proof-of-concept for using a rotary encoder to manipulate an on-screen menu of options. A number of electronics design concepts are used here.

Carl Sagan’s “Baloney detection kit” is arguably more important now than ever. His 9 rules for critical thinking work for science and they can work to detect political baloney, too.

Arguments from authority carry little weight — “authorities” have made mistakes in the past. They will do so again in the future. Perhaps a better way to say it is that in science there are no authorities; at most, there are experts.

I use Syncthing^[No, there’s no iOS client. I’m OK with that.] to keep my laptop, desktop, and workshop computers in sync.^[Why don’t I just use Dropbox like everyone else? I trust peer-to-peer syncing because I’m in control. I don’t know what Dropbox is up to.] At least 99.9% of the time it works perfectly. Rarely, it seems to choke because of some edge case that I’ve never been able to sort out. But it never recovers on its own. Instead, it continues to report that a remote is 99% done syncing.

Recently I picked up a couple inexpensive 128x64 pixel OLED displays with an I2C interface. It turns out that displaying Russian text on these displays is not difficult. But it’s non-obvious. This is a brief description of how to make it work.

First, there’s a variety of these little displays and they’re all seemingly configured a little differently. I used this device for this test.

There are two options for libraries to simplify communicating with SSD1306 boards:

A textbook on programming the RPi in assembly language. This is brilliant.