Chainduio

Chainduio: an interesting kickstarter project for powering using just CAT5. I like the aesthetics of the project web site, nice neutral colors, glow.

The Stig's cover is blown

Apparently the stig drives in Illinois in a modest Malibu. Seen at the Bristol Renaissance Festival last weekend (08/24/2014).

Skynet

A spoonful of imperial sugar

John Williams vs. Spoonful of sugar Walt Disney vs. John Phillip Sousa

Honda Insight 2014

So begins my foray into hybrid vehicles. I would have done it in 2004 if it seemed to make economical sense. It still really didn't until I looked at the Honda Insight base model. This no frills hybrid, hopefully will save some money in the long run by taking me from 3 gallons a day to 2. It wasn't until about 40 miles that I surpassed my highest-ever efficiency in my 2004 Mazda 6 - 31.98 mpg. By the time I reached my village it was up to ~ 37 mpg so far. I aim to keep this a low-frills car, though I might burn some custom mp3 cds and at least hook up my Samsung SIII as the nav system.

Forums

• Insight central forum

Wir müssen wissen — wir werden wissen!

Wir müssen wissen — wir werden wissen! versus ignoramus et ignorabimus

DS18B20 Temperature sensor

Ordered a DS18B20 temperature sensor on Amazon, thinking I could use this on the Arduino.

• DS18B20 Temperature Sensor
• 4.7K ohm resistor
• According to amazon, the output leads: red (VCC), yellow (DATA), black (GND).
• According to espruino, the values are red (vcc), white(data), black (ground) or red(vcc), yellow(data), green (ground).
• According to the real world, the output leads are red (VCC?), green (DATA?), and black (GND?).
• Find the 1 wire address
• hacktronics 1 wire tutorial
• one wire at pjrc
• Dallas temperature control library
• hobbytronics: briefest code example using dallas + onewire

Sadly it looks like either I cooked it or it is faulty. Could not get a reading, raw, or address-based response. Ordered some more from another dealer to compare.

Temp + LCD output gist

LCD Keypad shield for Arduino from DFRobot

For my birthday I received a LCD Keypad shield for Arduino from DFRobot.

• Push the button - works fine, so the LCD settings are:

  LiquidCrystal lcd(8, 9, 4, 5, 6, 7);           // select the pins used on the LCD panel
  

• LCD_Buttons.ino - worked right out of the box

STEM at the MN State Fair

Went to the MN State Fair, yesterday, August 21, 2014. It was STEM day so there were a lot of neat exhibits - robotics, a rocket group that had an Arduino wired up into their rocket. Kids could make a straw rocket, Sierpinski Triangles, play with robotics, get infrared photos of themselves, and chemistry students from the University of Minnesota put on a show. In addition to interesting stuff at the 4H building - www.makeymakey.com kits to power computer controllers.

Arduino Cake

Where the microchips could be made out of chocolate chips

Hail is...

If thunder could be explained in non-scientific terms as angels bowling, then hail is when the saints have ALS ice bucket challenges.

Massimo Banzi TED on Arduino

The Mundaneum

In the forum for my Internet History class, someone suggested this article from the Atlantic, featuring the Mundaneium, a planetwide network which seems to foretell the Internet.

From Otlet's Monde

Here is a 2012 presentation by the author. He also discusses Bush's Atlantic article:

GPSLogger - set up

Yesterday on the way to work I tried to run my GPSLogger, but discovered, nothing was saved, I had no results. On the way home, I made sure the USB was plugged into the higher voltage port on the Romoss, and reset the arduino a couple times after being plugged in. Then it worked OK. I wonder if the gibberish I sometimes get for the first few datapoints messes with the comparison strings, causes overflow (int, or a bad filename.

Shazbot

Arduino + GPS + SD Card -> GPSLogger

Tonight I tested out a pretty good version of a GPS datalogger. As mentioned in my previous post Arduino Storage + GPS, I have these components:

• Arduino Uno Rev 3
• Dexter Industries GPS Shield
• Seeedstudio SD Card Shield
• Polaroid 512 MB SD Card, formatted DOS_FAT_16.
• Sistema Klip It 6.7-Ounce Container - similar to this user's idea: jeffbookspace.blogspot.com, but I cut a whole in the site for the plug and a whole in the top for the GPS (triple stack does not fit, and I've learned from a burnt out strobe box that you don't force electronics into slightly smaller containers than they need).
• Romoss Ph40-s 10400mah Portable Rechargeable Charger

It checks the GPS on a 1 second delay, and if there is a change in latitude or longitude, it plots a new datapoint to the CSV file. Here is the latest source code for the project: GPSLogger.ino

For some reason the first few datapoints were messed up, but then it was pretty stable. Still not sure if that is the SD card warming up or the GPS. I ran the cleaned output through this site, gpsvisualizer.com which has a nice csv to google map plot, and came up with this for a quick walk tonight. Some of the datapoints were up to 5m off, but on the whole the vector and the trail were pretty accurate.

From a coding perspective the trickiest parts were fiddling with the conversion of output from DDMMYY to YYYYMMDD, extending the float or char arrays to Strings for simple output, and the use of the F() function to properly Serial-ize the labels, a question I learned the answer to from stackoverflow.com.

There are only 300b left however, so I'm not sure what data I can log with the remainder.