Turtles, all the way down

I needed to know the latency of a projector. I used to have a photo-diode for this sort of thing but I left it in the United States. Despite having almost no experience in electronics, I decided to hack away anyway. Patience is not one of my virtues.

I found one of those “teach yourself electronics” books designed for teenagers, turned to the page where a simple photosensitive resistor circuit is shown, and replaced the buzzer with an audio connector. Without some help from a guy who is a little more soldering iron savvy than I am, I plugged the audio jack to the audio port of a PowerMac and recorded the waveform with Audacity (a simple recording and sound editing software). It actually worked. I’m so glad that it worked because I was almost proceeding blindly.