Woke up today with a pounding sinus headache. That’ll teach me to think I can walk around outside in the springtime without any allergy meds. After a few hours of sleep, the pain was at least muted enough to function in a quiet environment. So, down to the basement I went to work with Furby.

Luckily for me (???!), Furby was quiet today. Too quiet. As in, couldn’t get it to come on at all quiet. Took a step back and futzed with LEDs again, now tied through the ribbon cable. Uh, finally got the LEDs to come through. But then they stayed on – wouldn’t power on/off at my signal. And then they went out.

That hardware thing: no real configuration management. I guess I could take a picture of my breadboard at a quasi working state, but even then, I’d need to zoom in fairly far to see where the pins practically connected. Several errors today just based on not being able to see where the pins aligned on the breakout board, or whether the pins were in the same row…

So, I retreated and wired in my Furby to a straight 5V + GND alignment. The power wire kept coming undone, so the Furby stayed off. When I finally got her on, none of my sound signals were getting picked up. I’d tried replacing components, completely redoing wiring, … nothing was coming together. At around midnight, I was adding up the problems (non-working power on/off, non-working Furby!), comparing it to the time spent today, and started down the path of ‘oh my gosh, what on earth am I going to say at the front of the room next week??!?! Should I find a way to bail out now?!’

I went to bed. Or tried to for a moment, anyway. And then decided to be stubborn and try to see whether a new set of speakers would send out sound differently – if I could get the Furby to react at all, I’d find another power on/off solution, and maybe I just needed a better set of speakers. Disconnected the ones from the family computer, tried to plug them in down here in my lair. No luck. The set upstairs expected to be powered from a bass which sits underneath the computer. The speakers themselves were big enough they’d be a pain to lug on the plane. No way was I lugging the bass, too…

Defeated. And then an idea.. what if I just needed to make the sound louder from my own speakers? There was no volume control on them, but maybe there was a way to control it programatically. Long story short: there is. And with a louder volume, Furby starts behaving. And the conference session was saved.

I still want to figure out a better power solution. But that’ll mean driving blinking things from GPIOs again, and that wasn’t working so well today. And then adding some sort of NPN (?) solution in the middle to let the GPIO interact with a 5V source, instead of the 3.3 it’s happy with. BUT, as of 3:30, I have a Furby responding, with an LCD display showing info. I _could_ give the talk just based on that… We’ll see!