So, about this whole Scotty Trindle business. Yeah, I dove into that one headfirst a while back. You hear whispers about things, you know? Some folks talking about this super-custom setup, the Scotty Trindle, that was supposed to be the bee’s knees for, well, for what I needed at the time. It wasn’t something you could just buy off a shelf, oh no. This was pure, unadulterated, make-it-yourself madness.
I decided, “Why not?” I had a particular problem I was trying to solve, something with tracking weird fluctuations in my workshop, and the usual gear just wasn’t cutting it, or was way too expensive. The Scotty Trindle, from the little I could piece together from old forum posts and garbled notes, sounded like it could be the answer. If I could just get it to work.
Getting Started with the Beast
First step was figuring out what the heck a Scotty Trindle even was. It was like a puzzle. Some kind of special sensor configuration, people said, hooked up to a very specific type of microcontroller that was, let’s just say, ‘vintage’. I started collecting the bits. An old processor board from a junk sale here, some weird analog-to-digital converters I had to order from halfway across the world there. The ‘Trindle’ part, especially, was a nightmare to source. I think the original was made of unobtanium.
I spent a good few evenings just sketching out how I thought it all connected. My workbench looked like a disaster zone. Wires everywhere. Little components I was terrified of losing. My cat thought it was a new playground, which didn’t help matters.
Then came the soldering. I’m okay with a soldering iron, but some of these connections were tiny, and the old diagrams I found were blurry, like they were faxed a dozen times. Lots of squinting, a few burnt fingers, and a fair amount of muttering under my breath, I can tell you that.
The “Fun” Part: Making it Go
Once it was all physically put together, or what I hoped was put together correctly, I had to breathe life into it. Software. That was a whole other can of worms. The original code, if you could call it that, was in some obscure dialect of a language I barely knew. And the tools to compile it? Ancient. I had to set up a virtual machine running an operating system that was probably old enough to vote.
I’d get it to compile, load it onto the Scotty Trindle, and… nothing. Or it would spit out absolute garbage. Just random numbers, or it would freeze. I’d spend hours, days even, just changing one line of code, trying to figure out what was upsetting it. It felt like trying to reason with a very stubborn donkey.
There were moments, tiny victories. Like when I finally got an LED to blink. You’d think I’d won the lottery. Then it would go back to being a brick. It was a real rollercoaster.
Why Did I Even Do This To Myself?
You’re probably wondering why I’d put myself through all this for a Scotty Trindle. It’s not like I didn’t have other things to do. Well, thing is, I was between contracts at the time. Work had dried up, pretty much completely. You know how it is. Suddenly you’ve got all this time on your hands, and your brain starts to go a bit stir-crazy. Rent doesn’t pay itself, and the worry gnaws at you.
This Scotty Trindle project, it was a distraction, sure. But it was also a challenge. Something to wrestle with. If I could just get this ridiculously complicated thing to bend to my will, it felt like I could still achieve something, you know? Keep the rust off my skills. Plus, I’m just plain pig-headed. Once I start something like this, I find it really hard to just give up, even when it’s clearly fighting me every step of the way.
So, The Scotty Trindle Today
Did I get it working? Yeah, eventually. Sort of. The Scotty Trindle in my workshop, it’s a temperamental beast. Sometimes it gives me readings that are astonishingly accurate, better than anything I could have bought. Other times, it just decides to take a nap, or tells me it’s -50 degrees in the middle of summer. It’s got… personality. Lots of it.
It’s not reliable enough for what I originally wanted, not really. But the process of building it, of wrestling with the Scotty Trindle, I learned a heck of a lot. More than I would have from just buying something. And sometimes, when it’s having a good day, it actually does its job. It’s a reminder of that weird period, a testament to stubbornness, I guess. Would I recommend building a Scotty Trindle? Probably not, unless you’ve got a lot of patience and a high tolerance for frustration. But hey, I did it.
