As I write this I am searching for some code I wrote last week that I wrote to do the SMS sending and receiving. I put it somewhere and now for the life of me I cannot work out where I put the file. I will have to try out Google Desktop Search since it should be able to solve this type of problem quickly. With this SMS thing I worked out a way to get around the power supply issue – I found 3.8V on the board that I can use. So simple.

I ended up buying the RideMax software to do the Disney thing. I think I have saved myself about a day of waiting between the parks. Using statistics to solve problems… Hmm… How radical. Finally a use for Maths.

I have just found the file I was looking for… I named it with a totally confusing filename in a location that was stupid. Since this was for SMS i called it SMS.SC, and placed it in the directory of the compiler.

I was just doing some work on another project, and found that I needed to do some more moths. I really needed SIN and COS functiions, but the device I am looking at using does not really have them. Nor does it really have Square Root… This is fine. I need to approximately work out if a point is within a certain circle. I worked out (taking 20 minutes) that a regular octagon will get the distance +- 4%. This is not bad. The 16 sided shape will do it to +- 1% but the maths gets worse than with an 8 shaped object. In software all I need to do is rip the corners off.

At a distance of 1km, a 4% error is only 40m, and in my particular application that is nothing. Perfect… Another use for maths. Well, it is also a use for Microsoft Excel since once I worked out what I needed to know I just used it. I did get some help from this page on antenna modelling. My EUREKA moment was working out that the best result for an 8 sided shape was when all the sides are the same length.