Ok, this is getting old. Waking up at 3:00 AM and not going back to sleep. Argh. The reason: Tate, one of our Greyhounds, goes out to relieve himself. He has been doing it at 5-ish, but lately that has become 3:00 AM. Alas, since he has a fecophilia vibe, he generally will turn around after defecating and wolf his own feces right down. Yuck. So, when I hear the swish/swish of the doggie door, I...
This project builds upon the flashing LED of the first project. If you were motivated, you could change the frequency of the flashing, by adjusting a constant in the program, a “delay” value that was used to turn on and off the power to the LED. This circuit instead brings in the concept of analog versus digital circuits, something that is worth explaining. In the digital realm, a signal is “on”...
It is Christmas day in the Beck/Anderson household. The day started well, I slept until almost 5:00 AM, not bad for me lately, some fresh coffee, and about 6:00, I was lobbied hard for a walk by Tate. Today, Garrett didn’t join us, so Tate got a 3.2 mile walk in. That should tire him out! Since the boys aren’t too kind to trees, we don’t do a lot of internal decorating, and we...
The Sparkfun Inventors Kit arrived, and I have to admit that it was better than I expected. Packaged in a nice box, it has plenty of goodies, and projects to play with. There are enough parts that I am sure I can go well beyond the scripted projects. Last night, I did the (really minor) assembly, but didn’t dive in. However, this morning, I dove right in, and did the first project. As one would...
I am sure I disappointed my dad growing up. He tried mightily to get me interested in electronics, even building many Heathkit projects with me. I remember an AM radio, and a few others, but for me it was boring, and as a pre-teen, I just didn’t get into it. He had a Heathkit oscilloscope, and had built our hi-fi system from Heathkits, among many others. We had a B&W TV that often...
My main computer since 2013, has been a rocking MacBook Air. It is the first generation of the system based on the Haswell chipset, and it has been awesome. It came with Mountain Lion (10.8), and has been upgraded thrice now, recently to El Capitan. When I got it, one of the huge benefits was the battery life. The data sheet said 12 hours, and it easily beat that. I often went several days...
A few years ago, I got a wild hair up my hind-side, and bought a Raspberry Pi to mess with. A small, fully functional computer, running a Linux variant, built around an ARM SoC, it was a pretty nifty bit of kit. I connected it to my monitor, wired up a keyboard and mouse, added a wifi USB dongle, and had some fun. Did a lot of learning to program Python on it. But then the move happened, it got...
Early on when I began to listen to streaming music, I got a Pandora account. Probably 2011 or 2012. At first, it was the only solution, and I listened, but I found that the depth of their catalog “felt” weak. Radio stations would repeat songs often, and it just fell off the radar. Spotify, and then the Google / Apple offerings came along, and I was satisfied. So I seriously...
Today is a sad day, but also a hopeful day. It is time to say goodbye to an old friend, my Fender Telecaster guitar. It is going to a good place, it will be under the tree for a friend’s high school aged son, who wants to learn to play guitar. Still, it is not without some reflection of my past, that is now going away. It isn’t particularly rare, or exciting. It started life as a new...
Today, at noon, we started our holiday shutdown, so I am off work for a whole week. I am going to do plenty of reading, maybe some bicycling, fawn over my boys, and in general relax. However, I have the itch to do a project. Since our little Oregon Scientific weather station is getting a little tired, and the replacements all seem to suck, I am going to make a little weather station. Plenty of...