Marc's Public Blog

We got lucky and got an unusal early cold storm in January, which covered all the rocks and ice. I drove there on a tuesday afternoon before the storm hit, parked the car underground and waited for the storm and the lifts to open.

I made it in one shot (no recharging) and 11% left when I arrived. That was by far a best condition scenario: no headlights, no heat, no windshield wipers, and no snow to add rolling resistance. I know that it's not safe to attempt this in one shot if all the stars don't align, but on the plus side, there is now a supercharger in jackson (only 5mn detour), so it's much easier to charge if needed. That said, I only had to charge when I arrived at kirkwood.

Day #1, wednesday. Big dump, lots of wind, kirkwood only managed to open 6 (the only lift to the top) by 15:28 and promptly closed it at 16:00. Disappointing to say the least. The old kirkwood would have stayed open past 16:00 as a gesture of good faith. The new kirkwood, closed after 32mn:

Day #2, thursday. Another big dump. Thursday, they opened at 13:00 again (new dump). The "you had one job" twitter guy failed to tell anyone that anything opened. I just noticed it on the webcam and ran outside screaming "WTF?"
They closed at 15:00 sharp, because the road was closing at 15:30. They knew they were punishing every single person who paid you and KW to stay on site. They didn't care.
The old kirkwood turned away people for the lift if they didn't have logdging and kept them running until 16:00. The new KW closed for everyone.

Day #3, friday: the wall never opened. Again, it was probably hard to make safe, but I'm pretty sure they could have opened friday.

Johannes came to join me for a few hours:

Day #4, saturday. The wall didn't open until 10. Why? Nobody knows. And then it closed at 14:00 for reasons unknown.

by the weekend, people came, teslas filled the electric parking slots

there was a line by 07:30 already

Time to go to chair 4 that had just opened.

slight line to chair 4

probably first time of the year that the wave was rideable

fawn ridge

At the end of the time, I was able to retrieve my camera pouch I dropped off the lift:

So all in all the snow was fantastic, and kirkwood as a resort was beyond disappointing in multiple ways. I will seriously consider heavenly next time.

I hacked the capacitive touch SAO penguins to add obvious missing stuff :)

The 2nd board, I couldn't help but put a hole in it and install SPI screens:

started with one screen

then got the 2 original I2C screens to display blinking eyes and worked on the SPI screen

SPI is a bus that allows multiple devices, so I added 2 screens

getting the Arduino_GFX lib to support both screens was a bit challenging, but got it working

And here is the last result with everything working and running 5 different demos on 4 screens:

Please go [this page: FastLED_ArduinoGFX::TFT on top of Framebuffer::GFX for SPI TFTs like SSD1331 or ILI9341] for details on how this was built and how to use my TFT library with multiple TFTs|/perso/arduino/post_2022-01-02_FastLED_ArduinoGFX_TFT-on-top-of-Framebuffer_GFX-for-SPI-TFTs-like-SSD1331-or-ILI9341.html]: https://marc.merlins.org/perso/arduino/post_2022-01-02_FastLED_ArduinoGFX_TFT-on-top-of-Framebuffer_GFX-for-SPI-TFTs-like-SSD1331-or-ILI9341.html

This video has the badge I built for that conference, but never got to wear:

More details here: https://marc.merlins.org/perso/arduino/post_2022-01-02_FastLED_ArduinoGFX_TFT-on-top-of-Framebuffer_GFX-for-SPI-TFTs-like-SSD1331-or-ILI9341.html