Stomping in Clown Shoes

I have recently had the luxury of not running my current commuter car into the ground with overuse and lack of repair.  It is/was a 2001 Volvo S60, which currently has 86K miles on it.  I’ve driven it 76K miles in 10 years.  It’s been far better than any car I’ve owned or used before with respect to reliability and ease of use.

However…

It’s getting old.  It’s at an age where things start to break with increasing frequency, and I’m just not sure if I want to deal with that, as I’m getting old too.  2001 was one of the last purely European design years for Volvo, I knew Ford was getting their hands into it soon.  I knew I didn’t want a gasoline-only powered car again, but I wasn’t sure if the world had gotten anything else to work yet.

There was a lot of talk about Chevrolet’s Volt.  I anticipated a glorified golf cart.  I was wrong, and the more I found out about it, the more I liked it.

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Italian canned anchovies
Mario ‘party stuffer’ pitted empty olives
Hendrick’s Gin

Dump the olives in a big bowl and pour off the water.  Open the anchovies and pour off the liquid. Optionally, chop the anchovies two or three times.  Grasp an olive in one hand, and an anchovy in the other, and shove the fish into the olives.  Put the olives back in the jar.

Put a big slanty triangular martini glass into the freezer.  Pour the cheapest possible white vermouth over ice, shake once, pour off most/all of the vermouth (to taste).  Pour in Hendricks, cap and shake hard (gin is evil, beat it up) for 30 seconds (hum Jeopardy!).  Strain into cold glass.  Add two or three olives on a toothpick.  Let melt slightly, when the temperature is correct for drinking, both the olive and anchovy oils with become translucent in droplets floating on top. Femtoscopic microcosms will be evolving in your hand, so hold carefully and sip slowly.  May cause hallucinations, convulsions, conniption fits, death, out of body experiences, kundalini enlightenment, elephantiasis of the genitals, and/or intoxication.

Send bitcoins here:

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I’ve become a fan of bitcoins.  They make sense to me.

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Here are some pics of a Zenith console TV converted to a home theatre (HTPC) machine.

I don’t watch much TV. As a computer developer, I watch plenty of video monitor without needing non-interactive push-feed broadcast television. I think that maybe some of us remember when TV was actually paid for by advertising and broadcast directly to you for FREE. Paying for cable or satellite, and then STILL having commercials is just a bit too much for me. It’s not that good, I can’t interact with it. The biggest problem I have with TV programming is the sheer amount of fabricated malarkey… politicians that spout baldfaced lies (“non-factual statements”), fantasy garbage under the premise of “science fiction”, and “News” programs on television about television characters on television programs. The half-life of my “Willing Suspension of Disbelief” is about 10 nanoseconds, which is slightly further than I can barf at the speed of light.  So most of my personal video to eyeball input is pre-selected recordings playback.  I get a couple hours of live “TEEVEE” a week in the pub, but that’s mostly it.

I’ve never paid for a “TV” with a tube. I did own a television receiver, I have a couple actually. One of them I won in a raffle when I was pretty young, it is not in use as it is a model well-known to spontaneously catch fire and burn down houses (however it does work very well and was used many years).  I’ve purchased plenty of computer monitors and a few tuner cards to watch TV on them.

The one in my living room was a Zenith console.

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I have acquired a 40 watt infrared CO2 laser engraver.  Here are some pictures and notes on how it works.

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The original Grow Light project is reportedly working very well.  It’s encouraging enough that I’ve gone ahead and designed and ordered the parts for another one.  This time, I’ll use a new driver chip that can handle the full amperage that the Led Engin LZ1 5-watt LEDs can use.

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I’m making a 315MHz radio.  It will feature an Atmel microcontroller, a Texas Instruments ISM band radio, a client USB connector, a flash memory chip, 4 optoisolated transistor outputs, and a JTAG programming interface.

This radio will be a small platform for home automation attempts.  The obvious first task for it will be to control the wall switch dimmer for the Bright Lights project, but this dimmer interface (Maxim Dallastat and D flip-flop) I’m going to use elsewhere as well.  I have so, so much work to do before I can begin to actually consider practical purposes.  I have to set up communications standards, program the mesh networking, generate encryption keys, program encryption algorithms, program boot protocols.

Here is the board

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Here’s a test probe for adjusting LED lamps with a CAT4101 driver. It uses pogo pins on the end of a stick that connects the LED module to an ampmeter and voltmeter. It also has a LED voltage indicator on board. I haven’t yet found a workable ampmeter indicator circuit, and since regular hardware meters work that end of things so much better anyway, I probably won’t try.

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Grow lights are growing (meh heh) in popularity, at least partially due to people growing pot legally for medicinal use. There are grow lights for sale online, some of them look pretty good. Some of them look pretty bad.

This grow light is similar to the Butterfly Sconce, but has many more LEDs, uses LEDs which are tuned for chlorophyll reception, and the dimmer circuit is replaced with a soft-start circuit so the lamp starts up slowly over a few seconds.  Just in case anyone reading this hates plants and wants to kill them, you can also load this up with normal white light LEDs to use while repairing chain saws, or maybe even ultra-violet LEDs for use in destroying our little friends by giving them sunburns.

LEDEngin makes their LZ1 package in many colors, including a 465nm blue and a 665nm ‘deep red’. The LEDs have different voltage drops, and balancing them will be a little tricky. These LEDs run as three times the current of the Cree XP-G’s, but they also put out a lot of light doing that.

NASA experiments and others posting about this subject on the innerwebs are using many more red than blue LEDs, sometimes as much as an 8/1 ratio.  This project will attempt to use 7 LedEngin LZ1 LEDs per string in four strings, each parallel driven by CAT4101 drivers.

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12-NOV-2010

This is an LED lamp design for a big honking array of pluggable modules.  There will be one control module for supplying power and signal, and then a number of LED modules can be plugged alongside.  The object is to make a system that can have replaceable modules, and can be expanded by adding more modules and using a bigger power supply.

I’m sticking to the formula so far, Cree XP-G (or XP-C, or XP-E) LEDs, CAT4101 drivers, hardware PWM, and plenty of ESD protection.

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