Less like camping

You never realize how nice it is to wake up to a warm house, until you've woken up to a 60°F house every morning for three weeks straight. Actually, that's not so bad -- it's the temperature delta stepping out of the 110°F shower that really wakes you up.

Our new furnace is finally in. It's so shiny!

...especially compared to the old rusting junk bucket that had puked condensate all over itself.

You may have noticed it's also a magic furnace because the gas is not hooked up to it. Actually, the new gas line still has to be inspected so the furnace is running off the old line temporarily. We should switch to the new gas line next week when the roofers come and move the water heater chimney from the old water heater (in the house) to the new water heater (in the garage) that will run off the new gas line. Yes, it's complicated.

Knight rider

We're building a new chicken coop for Lemontree's hens, and we don't like getting up at the crack of dawn to go let them out of the coop every morning (if they're not locked up, literally with a padlock, racoons eat them). So, I'm making an automatic door.

If you're read this blog you may recall I've made other electronic devices like DRL/stop/turnsignal integrators for motorcycles and such. However this time we wanted more sophistication. Think about it -- a timer based solution will only open the door at the right time twice a year, because sunrise and sunset times (what chickens work off of) change every day. A light sensor could work, except our chickens like to wake up about 1/2 hour before dawn and go to bed about an hour after sunset.  Besides, a light sensor could be fooled by a cloudy day, full moon, or neighbor's motion lamp.

So how to we make a door open half an hour before sunrise, and close an hour after sunset no matter what? Well there's a mathematical equation to figure the sunrise/sunset times exactly, so we just have to calculate it every day. That requires... a computer.

Putting a computer in a chicken coop is silly (well, I guess the hens could Tweet using Twitter when they want out, but they have a hard time using a mouse without opposable thumbs). No, this is why microcontrollers were invented.

A microcontroller is about as powerful as state-of-the-art PCs in the early 80s. The one I selected, the Atmel Atmega328p, can run up to 20MHz. It's only got 2K (as in, 2,048 BYTES) of RAM, though, and 32K of program storage. The good news is, a chicken coop door program takes maybe 11K of program storage and maybe a few dozen bytes of RAM, so it's perfect. In fact I'll even be running it at a slower 8MHz to save power, which still takes only a fraction of a second to calculate sunrise/sunset times.

The kind folks at Arduino have written some nice developer software for the Atmega chips, so I don't have to learn a bunch of arcane incantations. In fact, I wrote a whole program last night. This isn't the chicken coop door program, it's just something I was playing around with. It uses a "shift register" chip -- it has 8 outputs, so you send it a series of bits (1s and 0s) and it sends them to it's 8 output pins in sequence.

Here's the program:

#include "SPI.h"

int dtime = 60;
byte direction = 0;

void setup() {               
  SPI.begin();
}

void loop() {

  SPI.transfer(B10000000);
  delay(dtime);
  SPI.transfer(B01000000);
  delay(dtime);
  SPI.transfer(B00100000);
  delay(dtime);
  SPI.transfer(B00010000);
  delay(dtime);
  SPI.transfer(B00001000);
  delay(dtime);
  SPI.transfer(B00000100);
  delay(dtime);
  SPI.transfer(B00000010);
  delay(dtime);
  SPI.transfer(B00000001);
  delay(dtime);
  SPI.transfer(B00000010);
  delay(dtime);
  SPI.transfer(B00000100);
  delay(dtime);
  SPI.transfer(B00001000);
  delay(dtime);
  SPI.transfer(B00010000);
  delay(dtime);
  SPI.transfer(B00100000);
  delay(dtime);
  SPI.transfer(B01000000);
  delay(dtime);
  if (direction == 0) {
    dtime = dtime -10;
    if (dtime < 1) {
      direction = 1;
    }
  }
  else {
    dtime = dtime + 10;
      if (dtime > 59) {
      direction = 0;
    }
  }
}

If you look at the position of the "1"s in the above SPI.Transfers, you can guess that I've just made a Knight Rider (or Battlestar Galactica Cylon) back-and-forth animation. If that's what you guessed, you're right! I also decided to make it speed up and slow down, just for fun.

(Those of you reading by email may have to go to the website to view it.)

We have serious Project Overload on the new house right now, we have a plumber coming Monday, the roofers coming in a week or two, gutters after that, furnace end of October (yes it's already cold and we're freezing), Windows mid-November, and we're in the process of painting right now. We also put up a bunch of new siding yesterday, and I got to use my new pneumatic palm nailer (those are a blast). New chicken coop and automatic door have to fit into the schedule somewhere. So, more on the door later.

Oh, I'm a lumberjack, and I'm OK

We haven't been updating this blog because we've been busy moving. We bought a foreclosure on one acre.

Among the other delights one finds in a foreclosed-upon house, we got a lovely letter from the wonderful people at our homeowners insurance company. It was their pleasure to inform us that they were cancelling our insurance due to a number of concerns, one of which was a tree touching the "detached garage" (our future automobile shop + wood shop + metal shop + craft room).

We had actually planned to remove the tree anyway (either someone with brain damage planted it 12 inches from the shop wall, or some imbecile failed to cut down a volunteer at the time when it would have taken 10 seconds with a lopping shear), but this moved up our timetable a bit.

Before:

 After:

Putting aside the looming threat of doom (losing insurance and thus losing the mortgage and thus losing the house), it was actually kind of fun. You know, the raw edge of danger knowing that the growling beast in your hands will just as happily zap your legs off as it will cut down trees made of solid wood, flavored with the standard male urge for destruction. And, of course, the hearty shouts of "timber!" interspersed with Tim Allen grunts and the whistling of Monty Python sketch songs.

Invent Idaho

It all started as part of a class assignment. Everybody in Jessica's 3rd-4th grade class had to make an invention to enter into the school's Invent Idaho competition. Though the children did some work on their invention journals in class, the bulk of the work was to be done at home under parent supervision. Now, don't get me wrong, I love to see my children create. I love for them to work on things at home. I just either want it to be stuff they can do by themselves or stuff I want to teach them. I am under the firm belief that if the children are doing a school project, the parts they bring home should be the parts they don't need adult help with. I want to teach my kids independence, and to me, a big part of that is allowing them to do things alone. I have a big problem with school projects that require a hovering parent. So, I wasn't too thrilled that for some reason, I was expected to help my daughter with her school project.

Jessica's idea was to build a device to clean chicken poop from the backyard. She calls it the Chicken Poo Be Gone. It is a spray nozzle attached to a scoop shovel. I encouraged her to work on it alone, and to her credit, she did a great deal, outlining the idea process in her Invention Journal, making a display board, and finally, making a model. The only thing I really helped with was building the actual working model. We went to the store to buy parts-- Walmart for a child size snow shovel and Home Depot for the spray nozzle parts. For the competition, all the parts had to add up to less than $20. Jessica really tried to put everything together. I encouraged her to try each part of building it. She tried to cut the snow shovel shorter, but wasn't strong enough, so I did it, and moved the handle down, and cut the pipe. She put plumber's tape on all the threads and glued the pipe together. Together, we built the Chicken Poo Be Gone.

Jessica won an award at the school competition, so that qualified her to go to the Regional Competition where she won second place in the category of working models 3rd&4th grades. Winning that award qualified her to enter the state competition. Jessica and I caught a ride with some of her classmates and traveled the 6 hour drive to beautiful Moscow, Idaho. Don't you just love the rolling hills?



Here she is posing in front of her display just after she set it up.

We walked around the campus at the University of Idaho, visiting the arboretum, and admiring the architecture and landscaping.






Saturday was the competition. Jessica stood by her invention and was interviewed first by a local newspaperman, then Senator John Goedde, and finally the MC of the event, a local radio-show host (sorry, I didn't catch the names of the media guys). Her she is being interviewed on mic:

One final picture. Jessica didn't win anything at the state competition, but it was fun just being part of the event. Also, maybe I shouldn't be so reticent to help my kids with projects, it did turn out to be an experience.

Turning things on my metal lathe

Here's a little video of me making some mirror extenders for my motorcycle. It's sped up 3X to keep it interesting.

More reef tank pics

Reef tank update

Moved the tank to it's final destination last week, my desk at work.




This is a closeup of the toadstool leather up top. There's a lot of detail in these guys that's hard to see without magnification.

The toadstool has also changed shape, it's stem is taller but the top is flatter.

Added a striped mushroom. These are one of my favorite corals, even though they are a "beginner" coral because they're hard to kill. Still look awesome.

If you scroll back to the old post and look at the warty mushroom, then look at this shot, you can see it's way bigger and way greener. It's tentacles have not only gotten longer, they have started to branch -- very cool. Most of the other corals have started to fill in too, especially the Green Star Polyps, blue cloves, and green zoanthids.

Also, if you look in the red circle, I have a baby! The spotted mushroom on the left is the parent. Over the course of about 3 days, it walked along the rock about 3/4" away and as it did, it tore off a piece of it's foot and left it behind. Over the last month or so, the piece has gone from a little blob to a bigger mushroom-shape and even has two stripes and some bumps like it's parent. Aw, so cute!

Saltwater Coral Reef Tank, take 3

Haven't been blogging much, been busy with two things of late: Fallout: New Vegas, and my third reef tank (the other two were torn down years ago). (I'll do a review of Fallout NV later.)

Those of you not familiar with the reefkeeping hobby, skip the following technical jargon and just scroll down to the pretty pictures below.

Equipment:
Dymax IQ3 acrylic tank
Display about 6"L x 6"W x 8"H
Display approx. 1.5g, 1.75g total volume
Custom Cree LED light in 2" x 1"aluminum channel, 2 RB XR-E and 1 CW XM-L, 1000mA dimmable BuckPuck
Dymax Robot LED hacked as rear chamber 'fuge light
Stock Dymax powerhead relocated to left rear chamber
Mini-Jet 404 in right rear chamber
Penn-Plax Silent-Air B11 automatic battery backup air pump, plumbed through partition wall to hide airline
Finnex HMO digital titanium heater, 50W
Azoo digital heater controller
Wal-Mart indoor/outdoor min/max thermometer, probe sealed with superglue
Twin-float switch, twin-relay DIY ATO in Radio Shack enclosure
Two Little Fishies Nano-Mag
Spritz bottle of RO/DI for cleaning acrylic
Kent hydrometer
API Master Saltwater test kit
DIY airline gravel vac

Aquascape:
Approx 2.5lb of Live Rock
1/2" of black Petco sand

CUC:
Blue-leg hermit A.K.A. Mr. Lazy
Astrea snail
Cerith snail
Small orange stomatella
Large white hitchhiker stomatella
Large black hitchhiker stomatella (freakin' awesome)
Two tiny hitchhiker asterina stars
Bunch of hitchhiker brittle stars
Bunch of hitchhiker bristle worms
At least one hitchhiker peanut worm (those guys creep me out! Bristleworms never bothered me)

Corals:
Green spotted 'shroom
Purple warty 'shroom
Unidentified tentacled green/brown striped 'shroom
Orange riccordia florida
Green riccordia florida (about to split)
Brown palys
Green zoas
Orange zoas
Eagle Eye zoas
Pulsing Xenia
Green Star Polyps
Blue clove polyps
Toadstool leather
Several hitchhiker aiptasias (all nuked with Lye now [I hope])

Refugium:
Chaeto
Carbon (as required, not all the time)
Filter floss (as required, not all the time)

Food:
Hikari small fish pellets, 3 per day most days
Coral Frenzy on order

Maintenance:
1/2 gallon water change per week w/ IO Reef Crystals
Maintain 1.025SG w/ RO/DI
Maintain 80-82°F (hopefully once I move it to the office, I can reduce this to 78-80°F)



Right side


Left side


Top down



Scale shot with U.S. Quarter:


Blue Cloves


Eagle eye zoas


Green zoas and unindentified tentacled 'shroom



Orange zoas


GSP


Riccordia florida


Speckled 'shroom


Warty 'shroom


Xenia


Toadstool:


It's a nice day outside, so I'll explain the hobby in this blog some other time.