Showing a 5+0 setup, 5 minutes main time with zero increment

At the end of this stupid year, ravaged by GovId-19 too, not just by covid-19, I put together a chess clock. Even though the number of people I can play with physically is really limited — obviously not everyone thinks, like me, that a calculated risk is worth a decent amount of freedom, poor old BF with who does or does not deserve what exactly — I just wanted to put together the clock, cause why not. Although it is a microsoft site, I published the project on github.

One thing a friend of mine noted: the lunch box… I find it one of the greatest challenges about home made gadgets to find the right box for them, without the 3d printer black magic. I also wanted this one to be transparent.

Another thing, more of a philosophical nature: the more I play around with arduinos, the more I realize how much effort went into the whole thing to be easy like a toy, instead of the PITA it could have been, to enable one to really create on top of an abstraction layer, in contrast with such mindfucks as that of  manually calculating the value of a register to attain a baudrate on some obscure microcontroller I ran into at work, because libraries, because bootstrapping, and because it’s the business logic we are focused on, not reinventing the wheels of bit counting. Really, it’s almost 2021.

(tovább…)