[TriEmbed] September meeting notes

[Pete Soper]

Thanks to everybody for your patience as we dealt with rain and traffic, 
wonky door signs and hurried setup. There was the usual time pressure to 
cram as much information and sharing as possible into a two hour meeting 
while preserving interaction.

Thanks to the folks who helped make this meeting happen:
    NCSU students, faculty and staff who enable us to meet in an ideal venue
    Paul MacDougal, for a superb presentation
    Charlie West, for untiring technical support
    Glen Smith, for making the video camera recording happen with zero 
avoidable mistakes

We'll get the slides for Paul's talk about interrupts up on the web 
site, along with a gaggle of hyperlinks, such as the full Atmega 328P 
Datasheet 
<http://www.atmel.com/images/Atmel-8271-8-bit-AVR-Microcontroller-ATmega48A-48PA-88A-88PA-168A-168PA-328-328P_datasheet_Complete.pdf>. 


The prospects for a video record of the meeting are less certain (the 
"unavoidable mistakes" bite hard). After VLC crashed multiple times and 
we were relieved to have the video camera running as a backup, I was 
shattered by the discovery that there isn't enough contrast in a lot of 
the content. The slides cannot be read a lot of the time. I fully 
expected we wouldn't be able to make out Paul, let alone the blackboard 
behind him, until Trent turned the front lights on. But I really thought 
the capture of the projection screen was a non-issue. I was wrong. So, 
along with the terrible torture the AVI equipment visited on Paul, the 
frequent stops and starts for the sake of dumping the camera files (to 
avoid the camera dumping at an arbitrary point when its 20 minute limit 
was reached) may have just been additional noise in the system. There is 
an outside chance a magic software wand can be passed across the mpeg-4 
files to fix the contrast. If you know about this subject please send me 
email ("reply" vs "reply/all" or "reply/list").

Next month there will be an "agenda outline" slide on the screen, and 
we'll be sure the "have a job/need a job" item is closer to the front.

And we didn't get a chance to talk about a theme for next month. I 
suggest we aim Scott's very popular idea to have a series of "lightning 
talks" related to switch debouncing at the November or December meeting. 
A hardware focus for October, starting with practical electronics 
worship tips by Fred Ebeling, is next in line and I hope we can 
contribute suggestions to focus that meeting.

There are many other comments to make, but I've run out of time for now 
so I'll leave it to the rest of you to chime in.

Regards,
Pete


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