Retired at 47 ...... what to do now ? Discussion thread

[GreyWoolfe]

I don't have CFS but I am mildly anemic and my B12 runs a bit low.  I supplement OTC iron and B12.  There was a point where B12 was low enough that I had to do a once a month injection for 6 months.  Luckily, stepdaughter who lives at home with granddaughter is a medical assistant.  She is also very good with needles, no pain at all.   I do feel it if I skip the supplements for a few days so I second Aurora.  Get checked, it is worth it.  I used to be non compliant about things like that but having a wife and stepdaughter who are medical assistants, it's not worth disobeying SWMBO.  It's easier to just do it than catch grief from 2 sides.

[SeanB]

I learned how to do both options with that needle......... As I used to get regular injections I had a lot of people practise on me, and when the new medic approached with that look of inflicting pain I would gently remind them of 3 things. 1- I will wake up, 2- your boss, who can be an absolute dragon lady if she so chooses, does like me, and 3- I know where you live. I never had to act on any of those. I learnt a lot from her.

I did see her give an injection, and from the yelp of pain from him I knew it hurt like the dickens. She was solicitous, like a wolf auditioning a herd of sheep, and asked if all was well. Then suggested that next time he does not drink like a fish the night before, as she had been to the same party. It hurts when you take that ampoule out of the fridge at 4C, and put it in with a large needle fast and without any site preparation aside from a swab wipe. Especially when you do 2 and balance the load by turning the other cheek. The B complex injection is great though. Really peps you up.

[GreyWoolfe]

In the cheeks?  Wow.  I stepdaughter gave me my injections in the upper arm.  She has a very good touch.  I never felt any of the injections, even as I was watching her put the needle in.  These were also small gauge needles, I think 18 or 20 gauge.  I didn't really even notice the cold temp of the liquid.

[janaf]

Common wood dove, very shy normally. This one was around a week old when it and it's sibling fell out the nest. Sibling did not survive, died next day, but this one did not, and eventually I stopped feeding and placed it in a box with food and water for a week, so that it started to eat for itself. I have woken up some mornings with it sitting on my head contentedly, and then I find the "present" on the pillow.

I feed it some cheap mixed soup grains, which are quite nice, and the milled wheat, lentils and dried peas are good for the bird. Growing up it was fed Pronutro cereal with milk, it was quite fond of that, very demanding of feeding. Baby box was the standard one I use for all birds, a polystyrene foam pack that originally held KFC...

You should look up "My Life as a Turkey" / Joe Hutto! Highly recommended!

[SeanB]

In the cheeks?  Wow.  I stepdaughter gave me my injections in the upper arm.  She has a very good touch.  I never felt any of the injections, even as I was watching her put the needle in.  These were also small gauge needles, I think 18 or 20 gauge.  I didn't really even notice the cold temp of the liquid.

Cheeks = Gluteus Maximus, otherwise known as the posterior. Where you do intramuscular injections, and need a larger muscle than your bicep because of the volume. Where the doctor/nurse puts the injectable porridge that is penicillin for severe infection. That always hurts.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gluteus_maximus_muscle

[GreyWoolfe]

I knew you meant the buttocks, as Forrest Gump would say.  I don't care for shots there, I much prefer the arm.  It doesn't seem to hurt near as much as the posterior.

[Michaela Joy]

@Aurora: I'm not sure if anyone has said it already, but as a fellow veteran (USAF), I just wanted to say Thank You for your service.
You were and are part of a special breed of people; those who sacrificed and served. Never forget that.

With that said, don't give up trying to find answers for what is ailing you. A positive mental attitude is your best ally right now. Another member here mentioned Lyme disease.
It's definitely worth looking into. In the USA, it's rampant; two of my siblings and three of my friends have it, all with varying degrees of pain and fatigue.

The answers that you seek are within you. Love yourself, pamper yourself, try new things (within the bounds of your own limits) And most importantly, enjoy every second of life.

In New York City, we had a Disk Jockey named Harry Harrison (WCBS FM - R.I.P.)

He used to open his show with a line, which, to Me, rings true.

"Every day should be unwrapped like a precious gift."

Warmest Regards,
:MJ

[Fraser]

Minor update from me.....

No change in CFS at the moment but on the technical front.......

1. I have recently bought another FLIR PM series thermal camera as the price was too low to resist. I will give it my usual service and tidy up any rough edges from use. Lovely bit of kit though.

2. I had a splurge on Microscopes over the last few weeks as well. I now have a decent stereo zoom on a boom mount plus a new video microscope with C mount for my professional Panasonic 3CCD camera. I bought some other very nice microscopes but will not bore you with details/pictures unless there is interest.

3.  A Gendex Oralix 65S Dental X-Ray machine is also awaiting my attention and experimentation but that will have to wait as my Faxitron Cabinet X-Ray is meeting all my present needs and more 

3. On the interesting reading front I have purchased The Art of Electronics Issue 2 (used) and the new Issue 3. It seemed a good idea to have both. I also purchased and excellent book on PCB reverse engineering from fellow EEVBlog member Ng Keng Tiong. Finally I tracked down a used copy of the Modern Electronic Circuits Reference Manual. I always had a copy on my bench in my early days at work and found it useful. Plenty of great reading material to relax with over the summer

4. Now a potentially contentious purchase. I learned to program the MC6502, MC6809 and Z80 processors when at school and Maritime College in the 1980's. Assembly language and Basic were the order of the day but I did do some hard core 8 bit machine code programming as well. That was long ago and the brain has addled somewhat over the intervening years. In order to wake up the dormant brain cells (if there are any left) I have decided to start with microcontrollers at the the simplest level, namely with an Arduino starter kit. I am aware of the arguments for an against the Arduino and RPi but need to start somewhere and this seemed a gentle intro to such  I shall likely move onto RPi if the application demands such but PIC is in my sights when I have mastered the Arduino and its ATMega family of chips.  For me it is more a case of coding to achieve a desired result rather than coding for the fun of it alone.  Once I move onto the PIC chips I will feel that I have the required tools to achieve results in a decent time frame. We shall see  If I can't master the simple world of the Arduino, I will know not to bother with PIC programming 

Well that is all for now. I wish you all a very good summer of fun and frolics with electronics and computing.

Fraser

[bookaboo]

Good to hear positive updates from you. I don't see anything wrong with starting out with an Arduino. I've never actually even touched one and until recently most of my programming work was modding and amending ASM for PIC55 and PIC54 so I'm int he "old school" micro camp, despite that I've never understood the hate and I'm sure you will use it as a quick springboard into interesting projects.

[Fraser]

Well I have held off on the Arduino idea. Having read more about the product I am not certain that it is what I need. I am now leaning towards learning to program PIC chips instead as they are closer to my past experience than the Arduino 'Sketches'

Any recommendations on which PIC dev tool to buy ?.....Pickit 2 or 3 seem the obvious candidates.Dave didn't like the Pickit 3 though. I will do some searching on teh forum as I feel sure this will have been covered before.

Best Wishes

Fraser

[bookaboo]

I've been using the "Real Ice" which I'm fairly happy with except for it's occasional reluctance to start in the mornings (plug in USB and plug out again every time!!!). That may be a bit above budget and spec for hobby use, I have no experience with PICKIT3 except to say that it works for updating code in the field, I have no practical experience using it as a debugger.

When making the jump to C I did find this dev board really useful, there's plenty to play with out of the box and you can hack on your own add ons, it also has various PIM headers for different devices. I've been using the 24F range which is packed full of features and peripherals, it's pretty easy to migrate from 12x and 16x PICs as many of the registers are similar.
You may find something more specific to a particular application but this is the one I like:
http://uk.farnell.com/microchip/dm240001/pic24-explorer-16-dev-board/dp/1146554
I believe these demo boards are all PICKIT3 compatible

This book is also pretty useful, luckily for me several of the chapters meshed with exactly the projects I was undertaking. It wouldn't be good as a general reference guide, it's more of a walk though various projects using the peripherals on the Explorer 16
http://www.amazon.co.uk/Programming-16-Bit-PIC-Microcontrollers-C/dp/1856178706
http://blog.flyingpic24.com/programming-16-bit/



The usual caveat applies that your choices may be application specific but I can only comment on what I've used. Likewise there may be options other than Microchip but I'll leave for others to comment on that also.

[ptricks]

Any recommendations on which PIC dev tool to buy ?.....Pickit 2 or 3 seem the obvious candidates.Dave didn't like the Pickit 3 though.

If I had the cash I would go for the easy PIC fusion board, has everything you could want.
http://www.mikroe.com/easypic-fusion/

Uses the Mikroe compiler that is very well supported and easy to  learn.


About what to do after semi-retirement , have you considered teaching electronics to senior citizens ?
I gave it a go and you wouldn't believe the excitement they had , learning something they thought they never could.

[rolycat]

There's a recent discussion of PIC programmers on the forum here.

I have a PICkit 2 and a 3. The 2 has some extra capabilities, but I find the 3 is a better choice for integration with MPLAB and complete chip support. Mostly it just works.

[bookaboo]

Forgot to mention that one major plus of buying Microchips higher end emulators and kit is that the customer support is incredibly good. I used to have an ICE2000, I damaged it and a daughter board through my own mistake. Despite coming clean to support about my error I received a service exchange unit the next day, after 8 years of use it failed again (not guilty this time) and I got another one free.

[Howardlong]

I would be a little wary of non-Microchip stuff for PIC, you will almost inevitably end up being drawn into a third party vendor's tools.

The PICkit 3 is OK, I think that the things that were lacking back when Dave did his piece have largely been addressed.

There were some problems with PICkit 3 on MPLAB X even as recently as about eight months ago to do with Eclipse/Java/USB, but these seem to have been addressed too now, just make sure you get an up-to-date MPLAB X.

You can also get several Microchip boards with debuggers already integrated onto them like the Microstick series.

[dadebonz]

I am disabled and collect ssd. I buy broken laptops, cellphones etc on ebay and craigslist fix them then resell them. I enjoy the art of trouble shooting and make a bit of cash to boot. Good luck.

[m100]

Do what you can now before you get too old to do it.

Thats all 

[Fraser]

Well I took the plunge into learning to program PIC chips....

I was going to buy the Microchip Pickdem (Pickit3) kit from Rapid at £105 but stumbled upon an ebay seller offering the earlier version Picdem containing the Pickit2 at £50. I went with the cheaper option as the only difference is the Pickit version

http://www.ebay.co.uk/itm/Picdem-Lab-Development-kit-with-PICkit-2-/331137221446?pt=LH_DefaultDomain_3&hash=item4d19510346

Then I stumbled upon an Ex university student selling his complete Pic programming course equipment on ebay. The set comprises a Pickit2, 2 populated development boards, several Pics and three books by Chuck Hellebuyck. On Amazon the books are around £25 each !

Auction contents:

Pickit 2 debugger
1x low pin count development board
1x 28 pin development board
2x 28 pin unpopulated development boards
3x 16F886 microcontrollers
1x 16f690 microcontroller
1x 16f1938 microcontroller
1x 18f26k22 microcontroller
1x USB cable
3 x Training books by Chuck Hellebuyck 

http://www.ebay.co.uk/itm/161670723709?_trksid=p2060353.m2749.l2649&ssPageName=STRK%3AMEBIDX%3AIT

At £50 I thought it good value.

So for £100 ($150) I have plenty of material to begin my expedition into Pic programming. I can buy the Pickit3 unit later if I have the need.

Wish me luck 

Fraser

[mikeselectricstuff]

I would be a little wary of non-Microchip stuff for PIC, you will almost inevitably end up being drawn into a third party vendor's tools.

And a potential issue is that when new chips come out ( and Microchip do that a LOT), third-party programmers may take a while to support it.

Amusing aside : Microchip themselves got bitten by this - for their factory programming service, they use a 3rd-party automated production programmer. When the PIC10F322 came out, it took something like a year before they could offer programming via their own service! (and the device was so cheap that third-party programming services cost more then the device)   

[mikeselectricstuff]

Oh and by the way, don't bother with the higher end 8-bit PICs - the 16 & 32 bit devices offer a lot more bang for the money, and many are available in DIP.
Also the free versions of the 16 & 32 bit Microchip compilers are a lot less sucky than the free 8-bit ones.

[Fraser]

@Mike

Thank you for all the advice, much appreciated 

I am looking forward to getting back into programming after all these years. Very different to working on a Z80 research machine and CBM PET 

Fraser

[Howardlong]

Oh and by the way, don't bother with the higher end 8-bit PICs - the 16 & 32 bit devices offer a lot more bang for the money, and many are available in DIP.
Also the free versions of the 16 & 32 bit Microchip compilers are a lot less sucky than the free 8-bit ones.

The same applies when going 32 bit, I moved to PIC32MX230F032B over PIC24FJ64GB002 about 2.5 years ago when I had to redesign a product due to non-availability of another device, the PIC32s were (and still are) slightly cheaper. Those low pin count PIC32MX1xx and 2xx are pretty much my goto MCUs these days for quick breadboarding, but I don't think the PICkit 2 supports anything in PIC32 other than the very earliest devices (PIC32MX3xx/4xx).

The 8 bit compiler does indeed have some interesting features, sometimes it just refuses to compile with a useless error, but it still amazes me what can be achieved even in those super low end 10F and 12F chips.

[rolycat]

Well I took the plunge into learning to program PIC chips....

I was going to buy the Microchip Pickdem (Pickit3) kit from Rapid at £105 but stumbled upon an ebay seller offering the earlier version Picdem containing the Pickit2 at £50. I went with the cheaper option as the only difference is the Pickit version

Then I stumbled upon an Ex university student selling his complete Pic programming course on ebay. The set comprises a Pickit2, 2 populated development boards, several Pics and three books by Chuck Hellebuyck. On Amazon the books are around £25 each !

At £50 I thought it good value.

So for £100 ($150) I have plenty of material to begin my expedition into Pic programming. I can buy the Pickit3 unit later if I have the need.

Wish me luck 

Fraser

Good luck!

If you do decide to get a PICkit 3, you don't need to pay anything like £100 for it.

CPC have the starter kit, including the PICkit 3 itself, a low pin count dev board, two 20-pin PIC chips (PIC16F1829 and PIC18F14K22) and a USB cable for £46.80 including VAT and delivery.

The PIC18F14K22 is a useful low pin count chip for learning/experimenting - it has 16K of program memory, UART, SPI and I2C peripherals, 12 channels of 10-bit A/D, 2 comparators and even a built-in 555 timer. It also operates at 5V and requires fewer support components than the 16-bit PICs. And it's cheap - typically well under £2 for single items in DIP.

[mikeselectricstuff]

The same applies when going 32 bit, I moved to PIC32MX230F032B over PIC24FJ64GB002 about 2.5 years ago when I had to redesign a product due to non-availability of another device, the PIC32s were (and still are) slightly cheaper. Those low pin count PIC32MX1xx and 2xx are pretty much my goto MCUs these days for quick breadboarding,

Yes, though if you don't need the power of the PIC32, the PIC24s have the advantage of more flexible pin mapping, which makes PCB layout very  easy.
I've only ever used the 32MX1xx PIC32s, and although they have some flexibility in pin mapping, if you're using a significant number of peripherals, you have to be very careful about juggling pin usage to ensure you can us them all (and what's up with non-mappable SCLK?).
The relatively new PIC32MX170F256 has an unusually large 64K RAM - I don't think there is anything else from anyone in a 28 pin package with that much RAM.
The really nice thing about the Pic24's, is that all you need to do is make sure that all peripherals use an RP pin and anything that needs a pullup uses a CN pin.
Also the 32MX1 pullups are broken, however you do have pulldowns as well.

[Howardlong]

Yes, you really need to sit in a quiet room for a while with the appropriate pages printed from the DS to figure out the pin remapping for the PIC32MX1xx/2xx for a given project.

I was not aware of the pull up problem. I am aware of a nasty problem when using either I2C module and its effects on other GPIO pins and dramatic increase in current draw unless you disable the slew rate control. The old errata versions only referred to I2C1 but it affects both I2C modules, and it refers to it as an I/O problem not as an I2C problem, and does not mention the excessive current draw. I note newer errata discuss the fault on both I2C modules, and also that later silicon has this fixed, including all 170/270 models. A shame the '170 and '270 aren't supported directly by the old MPLAB IDE, I still prefer it to MPLAB X despite its character traits, it's much faster for a start.