I’ve long been a believer in the 80/20 rule.  Not the way it’s usually thought of, where 80% of the results will accrue from 20% of the input.  But the view that says the last 20% is darned hard to earn.  In fact, I’ve often believed that each incremental movement forward had a strong probability of being significantly harder than the last incremental movement.  In economics, they call it diminishing returns – getting less and less result for the last bits of effort.

So, it’s never unexpected to me when there’s a set of crazy challenges at the tail end of a project.  In fact, I’ve grown to count that as an indicator of nearness of the finish line.  The weirder the curveballs coming my way, the closer I must be to glory.  Hey, if it’s a fantasy, at least it’s a fantasy that keeps me going instead of quitting.

In the last few weeks, I’ve been working diligently on a project for OSCON.  I had some early wins, but the going’s gotten really rough of late.  Once I finally got over my fear of cutting wires to patch in a digital signal, I discovered that signals through wires weren’t really going to get me there.  I found a lot of guidance on infrared signals interacting with Furbys and how to run infrared from Arduino, and then discovered that my version of Furby doesn’t have an infrared sensor.  That’s OK – I have experience driving Furbys with sound, based on my Women In Computing efforts.  Hmmm – not thinking that the piezo that comes with my startup kit is going to do quite what I want.  But Adafruit has a Wave shield… uh, I’d have to assemble it, which will require soldering.  And it’s not available in our area, meaning it _might_ get here sometime Monday.

OK, SparkFun builds an MP3 player – perfect – do a WAV to MP3 conversion using various tools online.  Not so fast – after dragging the family and trekking ’round the Beltway to get the part, it doesn’t work on my Arduino + SEEED Ethernet shield stack.  Just plain doesn’t fit / seat to do anything useful.  Worse, I then read that the MP3 player shield needs to take over exclusive use of certain pins, meaning it would likely cause issues even if it did seat correctly.  I foresee a trip back to Micro Center in my future…

Things got a bit better and a bit worse…  I fell back to an approach just using an SD card, but didn’t have a SD card reader.  That was what I originally went to Micro Center to get, but had decided the MP3 player was the more complete solution.  It would’ve been, if it had worked.  So, off I went to Radio Shack to get an SD shield from SEEED, on the hope that it works  more nicely with the SEEED Ethernet shield than did the SparkFun one.

Hurrah!  It fits!  I’m now fighting issues with serial ports coming and going, and even a Windows BSoD.  Code’s working intermittently.  Gonna be a long night.