Recurse Center, 2014-07-16

Started pairing with Kyle on his idea of building a spectrum analyzer on the RaspberryPi using a LED Strip. Both of us were fairly new to the RPi, and we spent the morning, setting it up, and stepping through steps in this tutorial.
The tutorial, I felt, wasn’t very well written, and definitely not suitable for absolute beginners to start with.
The code didn’t seem to work for us, too. The project put together a bunch of libraries, in a way that someone who knew their way could follow along.
Dana helped us and explained many things, about differences between SPI/GPIO, and the precautions to take, helped us hook up stuff, etc. It was great to have her stepping in an helping every now and then!
While Kyle was pairing on an Alum, I worked through the Graph Theory chapter in the Think Complexity book, and read about the abrupt changes of characteristics in random graphs, that were very similar and related to the phenomenon in percolation theory that Nava explained.
Later in the day, I played around with the python-googlevoice API, that someone laboriously wrote after lot of careful html/xml parsing.
I spent the night, refactoring the code to display random data on the LEDStrip as a display of columns. And then also ended up cleaning up the setup scripts, and the way things need to be installed.