Ticking away the moments that make up a dull day…
I’m having a real problem with time at the moment. Playing around learning to programme PIC microcontrollers to do really interesting things like flash little lights has made me have to think about time in a different way, and it’s one that my brain is struggling with a bit!
These little chips chug along at about 1 million operations a second (can be a lot more or less, but that’s what I’m using at the moment), and the programs you write are made up of an instruction generally taking just one of those operating cycles. And you have to program to account for each individual cycle. A bit different to the normal PC coding I do!
The trouble comes from trying to deal with just how many things that the chips can and do do in the time that it takes for anything to be useful in the human world, like flashing a light at a speed that we can see, and what to do with that extra chip time.
So a lot of time is spent just doing nothing, at least when trying to work in human reference time frames. Seems like a real waste of time, but just a reminder how our view of the world is based on our perception of time.