Pick a square and Alex will read it
if you know the answer, you get the money
but if you screw the bonus round
they’ll stand you up and hose you down

• 16 ounces of premium automotive grade ethylene glycol antifreeze

• 6 ounces of Redline’s “Water Wetter” (half a bottle)

and top off with

• a gallon of distilled water (about 3 quarts/liters needed)

A plastic windshield washer gallon jug works well.  You will need to replace the coolant every couple of years or you might get algae.  I’m currently using “Zerex”, but if your system is in an area with poor ventilation or in a house with children, you might consider using propylene glycol based “green” (green as in environment, not the color) antifreeze instead, it’s less toxic.

My own system is about 4 1/2 years old now, and has been used on two different motherboards/CPU sets:

• Zalman Reserator 1 (blue) with integrated Eheim 300 pump, comes with very nice blue silicone tubing, but I didn’t use the Zalman water block
• 2 Danger Den “Maze 4″ copper water blocks with Lucite tops and 3/8″ outlets, custom mounted to two Slot ‘F’ AMD Opterons with strips of brass sheet metal
• ThermalTake “Aquarius” A1983 VGA water block, nickel plated with 1/4″ side outlets, this is very thin and fits between PCI cards
• Black Ice Xtreme II radiator with 3/8″ outlets (the Zalman Reserator passive cooling isn’t enough for two CPUs and a GPU)
• 2 ball-bearing fans for the radiator (120mm), and additional chassis fans for motherboard passive components (definitely needed for a Tyan S2927)
• A 4-circuit fan speed controller.  This is an unintelligent device, merely a set of 12 volt active transistor rheostats.
• A “Digital Doc 5” fan speed controller and temperature sensor, this needs no interface to the computer (translation: works with Linux)
• A few polypropylene T’s and L’s in the tubing.
• “Arctic Silver 5” heat compound

Needless to say, my system is less than easily portable.  I consider this an “anti-theft” feature.

The two separate fan speed controllers require a bit of explanation.  I made a custom cable for the radiator fans, with two separate voltage feeds and diodes to keep the two units from parasitically vampiring power from each other.  The rheostat lets me set a minimum fan speed, which is basically enough to keep the fans running at a minimum of noise.  However the “Digital Doc 5″ unit monitors the temperature of various parts of the system, including the double radiator.  If that temperature goes over 96 degrees Fahrenheit, it kicks in it’s voltage, boosting the fan to full speed.  The system runs pretty quietly, but if it gets a little warm, the fans automatically spin up to higher speed.  I run the BOINC application, and so 4 cores of 2 Opteron 2218′s are going 100% all the time, and I’ve never had a *problem.

* News Flash! Problem!

04-JUL-2010 There was an “oh, shoot!” moment when a very small leak suddenly went gusher.  A small but noticeable amount of coolant had leaked from the bottom of the Zalman Reserator, and on investigation, the plastic hose fitting out of the bottom of the aluminum tank body snapped right off.  I believe it was clearly the source of the leak, as the inside of the fracture was stained.  The inlet also showed fracture evidence.  They lasted about 5 years?  Or was it 6?

Anyway… on the 4th of July 2010 (a big patriotic holiday here in the United States of America) and a Sunday, the Loew’s superstore is open and had brass 1/4 ” pipe to 3/8 ” hose barbs.  I discussed a sarcastic tone of sympathy with a gentleman who was helpful in the plumbing aisle, he would have rather been home playing World of Warcraft and appreciated that I needed this plumbing to fix my computer.

The coolant is wiped up, the table is wiped down, the brass fittings went into the tank threads with teflon plumber’s tape, and it’s working fine.  O’Reilly’s automotive store had more Water Wetter.  I’m slightly curious to know if I’ll see any electrochemical weirdness with the brass screwed into aluminium in glycol, but that wouldn’t seem to be as dramatic as a cleanly severed line pouring coolant onto the desk.  As I was actually placing an old cake pan under the tank when trying to figure out the source of the leak, it could have been much, much worse than it was.

I suggest replacing the plastic fittings on the bottom of Zalman Reserator cooling pumps with brass fittings if the unit is used more than a few years.

This leak began without much provocation, the unit hadn’t been moved in months.  The strain on the plastic fittings was never really that much, but it seems apparent that the constant vibration of the pump was enough to cause stress fractures over a long period of time.  I can’t blame Zalman for this, but an upscale model might replace these fittings with something a little stronger.

I salute to James’s Hand-Made Potsticker Recipe, the recipe here is pretty much my implementation of the Liu Family recipe.  It’s an excellent web page and obviously has deep wonderful family roots, something I value greatly here at Caveman Recipes Inc.  I’ve also taken a few tips from allrecipes.com who had a egg noodle dough which was typical of other sites.

Shopping list:
2 lbs ground pork *
1 large napa cabbage *
small bunch ( 6 – 8 ) green onions *
large handful of cilantro *
large eggs ( need 3 – 4 )
several large cloves of garlic **
palm-sized chunk of ginger root **
all-purpose flour ( 6 cups )
brown Chinese oyster sauce **
sesame oil **
soy
salt
black pepper
cayenne pepper

* near substitute okay
** important, do not omit

Ready, Go:

• Into the second largest mixing bowl, chop the napa cabbage, salt heavily, add some water, stir, and let sit at least 15 minutes (to let it give up it’s water).
• Chop the onions, cilantro, garlic, ginger, and add with the pork into the largest mixing bowl.
• Squeeze as much water as possible from the chopped napa with your hands (tight little fist sized cabbage balls) and add to the mix.
• Punch a crater in the center of the ‘pemmican’ and add:
  • 2 Tablespoons oyster sauce
  • 1 Tablespoon sesame oil
  • 2 teaspoons salt
  • 1 teaspoon black pepper
  • 1/4 teaspoon cayenne pepper
• Mix well and refrigerate.
• Wash the salty cabbage juice out of the second largest bowl and dry with towel.  Take a break here.  Check again to make sure you put the meat in the refrigerator.

Break. Do not drink too much coffee when working with dough.

• Sift 6 cups of flour with 1 1/2 teaspoons salt into the dry bowl (you didn’t dry it, did you, lazy bum)
• Beat three eggs with a cup of warm water and add to the flour.
• Mix, add water one teaspoon at a time until a workable dough is formed.
• Knead for 5 minutes.

Break time.

• The dough should be very stiff but workable and elastic.  You can use a pin, but it’s tough work.  Roll out the dough as thinly as possible.   Alternately use a pasta sheet machine.
• Add a spoonful (or two) of filling.  I’m using a big cookie cutter with a crimper insert, so I lay another sheet of dough over the top, but you can cut the dough and fold it over.
• Cut the dough and crimp the edges.
• Stack them on a plate and freeze.  Turn them over a few times while freezing so they don’t stick to the plate or each other.

Cooking

These are full of raw pork, so cooking is important.  They can be steamed, baked, boiled, fried, and probably a few other ways I haven’t thought of.  See James’s recipe for the best way.

Dipping Sauce

• Sesame oil
• rice vinegar
• minced ginger
• cilantro or green onion
• Soy

Still experimenting with the sauce, but these are the common ingredients.

I’m not really sure I’m going to save any money with this.  I’m spending a lot for a very nice lamp, but economically, I’m not sure the energy and light bulb savings will be worth it.  But then again, that’s not the only reason to do anything.

This lamp will replace the aging standard fixture in the ceiling of my study in a house built in 1965.  This existing fixture is made for two Edison base light bulbs, and switched at the wall near the entry door.  Bo-rrring.

The idea is to stop the 120V wiring at the switch.  There I’ll put in a small DC power supply and a circuit inside the wall box with a special wall plate for the switches mounted on the PC board.  A three wire cable (ground, 24 volts DC, and a 0 – 5 volt square wave) will connect to the overhead fixture.  The lamp will be made of 6 pentagonal printed circuit boards connected together on the edges like the lower half of a dodecahedron (12 sided solid).  Each board will have 5 Cree XLamp MX-6 high-brightness LEDs, 6500 Kelvin (cool white color), for a total of 30 LEDs.

I selected the Cree XLamp MX-6′s for a couple of reasons… they have similar or better light output at 300mA as other LEDs that use a lot more amperage.   They are touted by Cree to have a nice long life with good reliability, retaining 70% of their luminosity after high-temperature age testing, which Cree seems to be taking very seriously even if there aren’t any international standards for it yet.  And… they are generally a dollar cheaper per LED.  That’s obviously not my biggest concern, but it’s a factor.  In reality, this board should support almost any LED with a minor change to the SMD pads.  I tried to limit costs where possible, but I didn’t skimp on the quality.

Here is the schematic for the dimmer board.  It features a triangle wave generator for the PWM signal, and uses a “Dallastat” digital potentiometer for 64-step up/down dimming.  There’s an adjustable hysteresis so that “all the way down” is really 0% and “all the way up” is really 100%.  A MAX6816 debouncer chip and a ‘D’ flip-flop are used to create an on/off signal, and these are  ‘and’ed with the PWM and buffered with an op-amp for the lamp on/off control output.

I used Paul Falstad’s circuit simulator to work out the component values for the triangle wave generator.  Here is the data to ‘import’ (in extremely small text so as not to bore everyone else) if you’re interested:

The dimmer printed circuit board is 1.25 x 2.5 inches, small enough to fit inside the single-gang electrical wall switch box.  The pushbutton on/off switch and the up/down dimmer rocker switch mount on the board, but the pushbutton switch is a whole centimeter shorter, and so it rides on a short riser board held up with standoffs.  The four square ground pads at the corners will use 2 cm standoffs to mount to a specially cut wall plate.  There’s also an interface for digital control of up/down/on/off through a home automation mechanism.  Here is a gerber-generated drawing of the dimmer board:

Anybody who’s spent a few days in Michigan in February knows I’ll be popping big static sparks off this switch, so there’s plenty of ESD diodes and varistors.

The uncredited protagonist of the lamp printed circuit board is a constant current driver called the CAT4101.  It’s very easy to use, takes the higher voltage needed to drive a string of LEDs, and features a PWM/Enable input.

This sucker is gonna generate some heat.  As many of the parts as I could get are operational up to 125 degrees centigrade… however all of the fun components start to derate over 70 degrees.  The back side of the board has been cleared for room for a TO-3 transistor style heat sink, with mounting holes.  I specifically selected a heat sink with prongs on it that I could bend, as all the heat sinks pointing into the center of a polyhedron might poke each other… and I admit that I didn’t want to actually do the solid modeling or math involved in worrying about that.  The CAT4101 LED driver will need to handle about 5 watts, so it has it’s own tin-plated surface mount ‘D2PAK’ heat sink, which I really hope will be enough.  The lamp boards can be daisy-chained together by two connectors on the back of each, up to the amperage of the power supply.  The PWM signal from the dimmer board is buffered again by a receiver op-amp, and this need only be on the first board of a chain, the others can shunt the op-amp with a solder jumper.  Another solder jumper permits the board to be used ‘always on’ without the dimmer.   There’s a big honking mounting hole in the center of the board, and again, there’s lots of ESD protection.

The 6500K white LEDs generate 100 lumens at 300 milliamps, the suggested and my projected load (Cree MX-6′s are available in warmer colors, but with less light output).  This should be 3000 lumens total, which is pretty much enough for surgery.   But… the digital potentiometer and the response of the LED driver should be near flat-line linear at 400 Hz, so I don’t have to run it full blast all the time.  It will be nice to be able to turn the lights UP when I really need them (like during teach-yourself brain surgery).

February 15th, 2010: I worked all weekend and a holiday, and I’m convinced that any further soliloquizins’ will just screw me up, so I pushed the buttons.  Everything is ordered.  The Gerber files went into Sierra ProtoExpress’s “No Touch” automatic verification system on the first try.  That’s scary.  I have no idea if this is even going to work, but it a be a good circuit board dere bubba.  I doubled up the dimmer board and ordered 2, so I’ll get 4 of them for about $100.  The lamp boards were 6 for $200.  The parts were $300.

February 18th, 2010: Most of the parts arrived, and they look pretty good.  Digi-Key did a terrific job again. The power supply is really pretty, and I can adjust it down to 22 volts.  The 5 Cree MX-6′s on each board are projected to drop 3.3V at 300mA, and the CAT4101 drivers can’t take more than 25V, so between 17 and 24 volts should be okay.  From the data sheets, the 24V ESD devices will work just fine with less than ‘typical’ voltage.  The heat sinks look like they’ll do the job, putting on the surface mount D2PAK heat sinks looks daunting, I believe I may invest in an electric griddle and try my hand at pancake-style reflow soldering.

February 19th, 2010: I have ordered a Reflow Soldering Controller kit from SparkFun Electronics.  This kit will help me use an infrared toaster oven as a reflow oven.  The LEDs and the D2PAK drivers and heat sinks will just never work out right without this, and I’ll be needing it in the future for the much finer components I’ll likely need to use for the wireless home automation.  I’ll be heading over to Target for the toaster oven.  I wonder how the wife will react to me baking semi-toxic fumes.  I guess I better clean the garage while I’m waiting for the Fedex and UPS deliveries.

February 28th, 2010: The dimmer works perfectly.  All the dimensions are good, all the parts fit.  The voltage regulator isn’t even getting warm.  I can adjust the hysteresis potentiometer so that one click up from the bottom starts the PWM square wave.  One click from the top, it’s almost completely on, and then at the top it’s fully on.  The switch risers and the standoffs measure up well, the LED in the pushbutton switch works.  If I hold the dimmer one way or the other, the Dallastat digital potentiometer clicks one notch, pauses, and then starts ticking along.   When power is lost and restored, it always comes up with the lamp off, and the Dallastat remembers it’s last setting.  I didn’t do any breadboarding to test any of this, so I’m pretty impressed with it.
Here is a scope picture of the PWM output, 1 volt / division vertical (center mark is zero), 1 millisecond / division horizontal.  It puts out a very clean 5V square wave at ~330 Hz.  This is 32 clicks (of 63 top to bottom) from the top of the Dallastat, so right around a 50% duty cycle.

Here is the built dimmer circuit attached to the power supply.  The pushbutton is lit (it has it’s own white LED inside), the black thing is the up/down rocker dimmer switch.  The four stand-offs at the corners will connect to the back of the wall switch plate.

The Reflow Toaster controller is not working out very well.  To write any kind of meaningful control program, I had to buy a compiler.  It also won’t work well with the goofy boot loader that’s on the chip, so I have to get a programmer.  This is not what I expected, and very disappointing.

So instead, I’m going to try hand-baking one of the boards.  The Cree lamps are what I’m worried about the most, but the tin heat sink for the driver transistor would be very difficult to solder by hand, and I’d likely destroy the transistor in the process.  Here’s my manual stopwatch profile:

1. cook at 175-200F for 5 minutes (pre-pre-heat)
2. bump to 275F, cook for 2 minutes (pre-heat)
3. bump to 410F.  As soon as it melts, count to 10, turn off heat and crack open the door.
4. Open the door a little wider after a minute.  Cool down shouldn’t happen faster than 2 – 3 minutes, so walk away and have a smoke.

I worry too much.  It all worked out great, and I’ve cooked up one pentagon.  And the result…

It works.  It would work better if I remembered that LEDs are polarized.  I got too excited and got two of them backwards on the first pentagon.  However, I soldered the bypasses on the two and calibrated the amperage to 300mA, so the working three are fully loaded.

It’s using a lot more wattage than I suspected.  The three working LEDs are using 7 watts according to my Kill-A-Watt meter, which measures at the plug.  It’s bright, but it’s also getting hot.  I’ll have to risk it and let it cook for a while and see if it cuts out.  The driver transistor has a thermal shut-off if it gets too warm, and I suspect it will.  I may only be able to use two or three LEDs per pentagon with this design.

On the second pentagon, I discovered a design flaw.  I’ve made the driver pins too close to the ground plane, and pins other than 5V shorted through the solder mask.  I fried the driver transistor.  When investigating this on the first pentagon, I found a solder ball behind the pins, which shorted the LED return to ground putting full amperage to the LEDs, and fried one of the LEDs.  Hard lesson learned.  The first now has two working LEDs (at least I didn’t fry the driver on that one) and the second is toast.  It’ll be difficult to rework them.  I repaired all the boards with a dremel.

I made a third pentagon, and that one is working great.  With 5 LEDs, it’s drawing only 6 watts at full amperage and full on PWM, which is much closer to what I was expecting.  It’s hot, both the back heat sink and the driver surface mount heatsink are hot, but not so hot that I can’t hold them and keep my fingers on them.  This suggests that they are working within acceptable limits, and I can turn down the amperage a little and be pretty comfortable that this circuit will last a long time.  I’ll get a temperature sensor soon and find out for sure exactly how hot they’re getting.  The amperage adjustment trimmer starts at 0.20A fully clockwise, and turned up to 0.25A is plenty bright and allows some comfortable lee way, Cree MX-6 nominal amperage is 0.30A, absolute maximum is 0.35A.

Here’s the third pentagon working

Here’s a shot of my desk

March 7th, 2010: I’ve been doing some thermal testing.  The programmer for the PIC chip came, and the toaster controller works.  SparkFun also sent the wrong PIC chips I ordered, big surprise… they got something else wrong.  I’m not sure I want to pursue it.  But the controller has a working thermocouple on it, and taped to the bottom of one LED, I ran the light at full blast under a porcelain food bowl.  I ran it long enough to stabilize the temperature, and it does get hot.  At full amperage, 300mA, it goes up to 78C.  At 250mA, it goes to 71C.  This is just over the limit, at 70C most of the active and critical parts start to derate rapidly.  With the bowl removed, it stabilizes at around 57C.  This is pretty good.  I can’t truly seal the thing inside a glass fixture, but given any amount of air flow, it should be just fine at nominal 300mA amperage.

Cree does “High Temperature Output Life” testing on their stock, they cook LEDs at 85C for 1008 hours and ensure that light output is not diminished by more than 15%.  Running at less than 60C, I’m guessing that I’ll have plenty of light from these for a long time.  My goal is about 250K hours, or 25 years.

I’ve cooked up the remaining boards.  I’ve also successfully repaired my hot air pencil, and removed the parts I messed up from the first two boards.  Replacements are on the way, I just hope I can successfully reflow them again.  A tip o’ the hat to my friend John who pointed me to Silver Circuits ( http://custompcb.com/ ) who I’ll be trying next time.

It’s continuing to use more wattage than I expected.  The third board with 5 LEDs at full dwell reports 12 watts on my Kill-A-Watt.  The first pentagon was doing 7 watts with three working LEDs, so this makes sense.  I’ve ordered the next size power supply.   Sometime I can make another lamp with only 3 or 4 pentagons and use the other one. I measured this one at 6 watts before? It’s possible that this one is goofy, I’ll have to finish the last 3 pentagons and see what they do.

Wednesday, March 10th, 2010: I am a knucklehead.  I didn’t need the new power supply (which is here and very pretty) it’s only using 7-8 watts per pentagon.  I had the Kill-A-Watt set to volt-amps (VA), instead of watts.  It’s pulling 12-13 VA, and 7-8 watts.  I don’t even know what a volt-amp is.  Well, I’ve got a big honking power supply for the next project and this sucker is working per specs I was expecting, woo hoo!  Replacement parts have arrived, and the Fluke 62 Mini infrared temperature sensor gun is here, it confirms the temperatures I was seeing with the thermocouple.  Nothing in the way of final assembly now, just need the time and energy.  The weather has really warmed up, so I may even get a chance to ‘splore the attic a bit and see what’s going to have to happen there for the installation.

Monday, March 15th, 2010: Driver transistors are dropping like flies.  I’m not completely sure what I’m doing to them, but when everything else looks like it’s working perfectly but there’s just no current, I’m replacing the transistor.  I’m pretty sure it has to do with me testing the 5V supplies without the filter capacitor in place.  I’m actually getting pretty good at using the hot air rework to remove the transistor and the surface-mount heat sink, I just wish they weren’t electrically so fragile.  I’ll be adding more protection in the final version of this circuit.

I’ve wired the reflow toaster with the controller, it works.  It will need some calibration, it heats up 1 degree Celcius per second, but doesn’t really cool off very fast.  I don’t have a serial port on any of my working portables, so I’m waiting on a USB-to-serial cable so I can capture and graph the temperatures.

More spare parts, more hurry up and wait.  This is what I get for going straight to prototype without component level testing.  But hey, the dimmer worked right the first time, so it could be worse.

Thursday, March 18th, 2010: More transistors are here, and USB to serial port is here.  I plugged it into the old laptop and it recognized and started the serial port driver instantly, I love Kubuntu Karmic Koala.

I’ve also purchased an Atmel EVK1101 AT32UC30256 evaluation / demonstration circuit board, and an Atmel “Dragon” programmer/debugger.  These are for experimentation with using the One-Net protocol for wireless home automation… but this is for another posting.

So once again… barring any more stupid errors on my part, I may be able to do the final assembly this weekend.  Big maybe, baby, I’ve got the next project all lined up and ready, but there’s one other problem.  I’m thinking I can resist it long enough to get some work done.

Sunday, March 21st, 2010: It works pretty well.  I abandoned the power connectors, they were just too much trouble.  Copper foil tape also didn’t work well connecting the pentagons, I used a piece of wire in between the boards and just leaded the hell out of them.  It’s messy, but it’s pretty solid.

The lamp, all 6 pentagons assembled

This is the lamp with the LEDs at full brightness, and using a camera flash.

Here’s the whole setup: power supply, dimmer, lamp and tape measure for scale

Here’s a shot in the box with no camera flash and the lamp turned down to one click above off… 1/64th, or ~ 1.5% of maximum brightness.

Saturday, April 3rd, 2010: I had to turn down the amperage.  At nominal 0.3 amps and full brightness (100% PWM dwell), it gets too hot.  A few places were creeping above 75 degrees C, and I really have to draw the line there.  Turned down to 0.25A (individually controllable per pentagon), I haven’t seen any scanned spot go over 65 degrees C.  Turning down the amperage will cost 15% of light output, but that’s why it was over engineered in the first place.

I’ve been thinking about another design using a snap-together linear railed model rather than this polyhedral design, but again, that will need it’s own post someday, and if I ever build it.

It’s time for me to get practical on this, I have to buy a hard box to put the power supply in, and mount the sucker in the ceiling.  The weather in improving rapidly, I think I may have to get on this for this Easter weekend.

What I’ve missed so far:

• explore option to bypass the 5V regulator on daisy-chained successor lamp boards,  100mA should be enough for 6 boards or more
• move the pushbutton switch ESD components to the riser (maybe not)
• add lots more ground plane vias around the LEDs
• reverse the dimmer rocker switch!  The pushbutton switch should be above the rocker when mounted, and then the rocker should have ‘up’ make the lights brighter.  The switch is currently (electrically) upside down I must have gotten this backwards twice, because it’s working correctly.

Copyright (c) 2010, Roger Cody Venable (MDVE.NET).  Some rights reserved.

This design is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-Noncommercial-Share Alike 3.0 United States License .

Problem
I am beginning to have need of additional lighting in my house.  A few years ago, my eyes started to show age, and this is not a trend I expect to reverse itself.  It’s the 21st century, I’m bored with snapping on and off light switches as I move from room to room, so I’m building a few lamps I can use.  These will be especially helpful in stairwells, but also in my basement.

Goals

• Motion activated – this is pretty easy, if nothing in the area is moving, it probably doesn’t need to be illuminated.  This also implies adjustments for sensitivity (will it trigger for me, a cat, or a mosquito) and delay (how long does it stay on after triggering).
• Ambient light sensor – no point turning on a lamp when there’s already enough light
• Energy efficiency – uses pennies worth of juice each year.  Ideally, this works during a grid power outage, and/or is completely self sustaining through auxiliary power generation devices like solar panels, a micro-windmill, or a windbelt humdinger.  It should be bright enough to keep me from tripping over laundry, not for reading.
• Solid state – no maintenance required other than occasional dusting.  Zero recurrent costs.

Vision
Create a device which triggers one or more high-brightness white light LEDs.  Device will use low voltage DC power supply, centrally located to supply multiple devices throughout a house.  Device will be installable using a circular hole saw through existing drywall, power supplied through in-wall wiring.

Design

The schematic accommodates  a dual output (+3.3V, 3 – 4 V adjustable, max 1 amp each side) power supply chip, an ambient light sensor phototransistor, the Zilog ePIR (infrared) motion detector module, three trimmers for the module control (detector sensitivity, triggered ‘on’ time, and ambient light level), a0.1 Farad aerogel power filter capacitor, the Cree XLampXP-E LED, a normally-closed optically isolated MOSFET, an N-channel power MOSFET, a PTC (thermally active resettable fuse), a power diode, and a handful of passive support components.

This is a circuit board designed with CadSoft Eagle .  The motion detector is a Zilog ePIR module, which is quite cheap (for what it does) and very simple to use.  After a bit of reading online, I’ll be using Cree XLampXP-E (group Q5) LEDs.  There will be a fairly good power supply on board, so the circuit will need about 5.5 – 7 relatively clean DC volts at half an ampere.  Also included is an ambient light detector (the light doesn’t need to be turned on unless it’s dark), and opto-isolation between the trigger logic and the relatively high-power LED.  The LED voltage can be adjusted between 3 – 4 volts, and there is a PTC device which may help protect the LED from overload.  The Cree LED is rated for 700mA, but I’ll be running it at 400mA.

According to a very brief internet research performed by me while mildly intoxicated, a 60 watt standard Edison light bulb puts out about 900 lumens.  I’ll be using 1.3 watts to drive a 107 lumen LED at around 110%, so about 1/8th the output of conventional lighting at 1/40th the power.  Since I’m driving the LED at 4/7ths of it’s rated maximum, so it should last a long, long time:  “Based on  internal  long-term  reliability  testing, Cree projects  royal blue, blue, green and white XLamp XP-E LEDs to maintain an average of 70% lumen maintenance after 50,000 hours, provided the LED junction temperature is maintained at or below 135°C and the LED is operated with a constant current of up to 700 mA”.   Heat is a big factor, the luminosity ratings drop precipitously with heat, especially with the white ones.  For this, I have designed for a heat sink on the back of the board.

So I’m prepping to make 6 units.  I’ve ordered the parts from Digi-Key , $195.86 + shipping.  Circuit board manufacture: 7 boards from Sierra Proto Express with 10 day turn-around, $189 (provided I don’t screw it up totally and the boards can actually be used).  I can also expand this circuit to use multiple LEDs in a grid, I just have to increase the amperage and the thermal handling.  I can definitely see making 8 or 12 LED units if I like the way this works out, something that mounts on or in an existing drop-ceiling acoustic tile would be neat.  I can add in a battery charging and backup circuit, a small 6-volt motorbike battery should power a few LEDs for hours.

At ~ $70 each, I hope these live up to their ‘mean time between failure’ specifications.

Here are the gerber files I submitted for manufacture: HouseLEDs-01d.zip.  See license below.

January 13th, 2010 – sweet savior on a pogo stick but Digi-Key and the United States Postal Service are fast.  The parts are here.  I swear those 0603 capacitors are the size of a mosquito’s nose, but I have faith that I have the tools that can do it.  Or… make a big honking expensive mess trying .  The Zilog modules are cool, the LEDs were humidity packed, and the aerogel caps are scary small for their rated power.
Sierra Proto Express gave me a call, very kind of them.  Aparently they have a service where they’ll put on the more complicated parts, which makes fairly complex single-board computers a distinct possibility for me, since some of those high density quad flat packages use very very fine wires.

POV-Ray generated with Eagle 3D

Wednesday, January 27th, 2010:  Sierra Proto Express says the boards have been shipped, and they’ll be here in time for me to work this weekend, so I should know soon if this design has any merit to it.  I’ve made this board pretty much just on math, I didn’t do any testing… so I’m interested in finding out just how close to reality are my limited electrical engineering skills.

Thursday, January 28th, 2010: YAY for Fedex who got the PCBs here a day early.  I’ve built one of them and it works… except…

There is one error.  The MOSFET leaks a small but significant amount of current.  The MOSFET gate switches from 0.01 to 3.29 volts pretty cleanly when the detector is triggered, but there’s just enough leakage through the MOSFET that the LED doesn’t go completely off… so it lights up with just a slight glow even when there’s no motion detected.  It’s such a small amount that I’m not sure I’m worried about it, but I’ll measure how much current it’s leaking when I build the second one.  I’m guessing it’s only a few milliamps.

Saturday, January 30th, 2010: I made the other 5 lamps.  It was difficult, my hot air pencil is not heating properly, and two of the LEDs cracked the lens as I was heating them.  The little clear drop of plastic on these Cree LEDs is not actually solid, but kinda like a very stiff silicon gel, and when heated unevenly, it will shatter off a shard.  They still work, so I live and learn, but at $5.61 each, I was slightly disappointed.  Nobody is at fault, these are not designed for hand assembly, and I am making a modern high-efficiency silicon crystal lamp using stone knives and bear skins.

At least they’re all wired and assembled, all components are showing correct function, at least as designed.  Not the kind of work I can do a lot of, my eyes are pretty sore.  The error is more severe than I had hoped, and it doesn’t quite make sense to me.  The optoisolator pulls the MOSFET gate below the 1V minimum gate threshold voltage (I’m measuring 0.003V), and the Zero gate voltage drain current (per the data sheet) is 100 uA.  This sucka seems pretty darned bright already to be running at 0.1 milliamps, so I must be missing something.  An LED capable of generating 107 lumens at 350mA still glows fairly bright when a MOSFET leaks current of 0.1mA?  I don’t ‘get’ it. ‘On’ the MOSET voltage source/drain drop is 0.58V, ‘off’ it’s 0.09V (with a lamp voltage of 3.16V).

At any rate, here are the updated final assembly notes:

• Assemble the left side of the schematic (the power supply), including the power diode (D1), the voltage regulator LX8116 (Q1), and the voltage adjustment (R3), but skip the big power cap (C1) for now.
• Apply power.  Ensure voltage across C1 is VDC minus the forward voltage drop of the power diode (D1).  I’m using 6.00 volts, the cap voltage measured 5.35 volts, for a diode forward drop of 0.65V.
• Adjust R3 (LED voltage adjustment) fully clockwise, measure the LED voltage, rotate fully counter-clockwise and measure again.  Full clockwise is low, I got 2.74 volts; full counter-clockwise is high, I got 4.10 volts.  Leave it fully clockwise at the lowest voltage.
• Check the voltage at pin 5 of the voltage regulator to be 3.3V.
• Disconnect the power.  Attach/solder all components except for the PTC.  Watch the polarity on the light sensor (Q3) and the optoisolator (OPTOMOS1).  The LED has a tiny little + on the side that goes towards the voltage regulator.  The longer pin of Q3 goes to ground, and the marking dot on the optoisolator goes towards the center of the PCB.
• Apply power and ensure that pin 3 of the Zilog e-PIR can be adjusted from 0 to 1.6 volts with the delay trimmer (R7), at top-right.
• Apply power and ensure that pin 4 of the Zilog e-PIR can be adjusted from 0 to 1.6 volts with the sensitivity trimmer (R5), at top-center.
• Disconnect power.  Turn all 3 motion detector trimmers fully clockwise, this turns sensitivity to full, delay to several minutes, and negates the effect of the ambient light sensor.
• Attach a heat sink to the back of the PC board.  Be sure not to short or come too close to one of the through-hole pads.
• Configure an ampmeter (1A scale) across the SMD pads for the PTC. Don’t look at the LED, in fact, you might want to put a piece of tape over it during adjustments. Apply power, and employ a comedy troup of dancing clowns to trigger the motion detector.  Slowly rotate the voltage adjustment trimmer (R3) counter-clockwise until the LED is drawing 400mA (0.4A).  The power supply will go higher than 700mA, but you’ll eventually burn out the LED, so DON’T DO THAT and turn the trimmer very SLOWLY.  You can adjust this upwards to 500mA, but that’s the holding voltage for the PTC, so if you wish to use a load between 0.5A and 700mA, replace the PTC with a higher value, or a piece of wire.
• Remove the ampmeter.  Measure the LED voltage from the voltage regulator at the PTC SMD pad.  This is the maximum voltage you should use on this LED.  Make a mark on R3 so you don’t go over this voltage.
• Turn off power and install the PTC (or wire shunt).  Turn all 3 motion detector trimmers fully counter-clockwise, we don’t want the motion detector to trigger at this time.  Apply power, and the LED will still show some light.  Adjust the LED voltage trimmer (R3) clockwise until the ‘off’ state amount of light from the LED is tolerable.  The ‘on’ state will still be plenty bright.  You can also force the MOSFET off by shorting pins 3 & 4 on the outside of the optoisolator.

I found the LED to be very bright (almost painful) at 400mA, and given this load it should last a long, long time.  Using less amperage should make it run even cooler and last longer.  The heat sink I used became slightly warm pretty hot when the lamp was running for few minutes an hour, so I think the heat dissipation is adequate at this load.  All bets are off when running above 70 degrees Celcius, that’s the super critical overload evacuate all personnel meltdown imminent temperature.

This is the actual manufactured PC board, for comparison to the ‘drawing’ above.

Here is detail on the heat sink on the back, and yes, it’s supposed to be a little off-square so the voltage regulator gets a little better coverage, but none of the through-hole pads is covered.

The ’6′

Build summary
I could have probably used cheaper LEDs and just powered them through the optoisolator if I’d known the ‘off’ state was going to be a problem.  In the future, I should use a real LED driver with a ‘PWM/Enable’ pin instead of a switched MOSFET.  This was fun to make and it works, but I learned a few things making mistakes.  I’ll make another post in the future when I get to installing them in the house.

Copyright (c) 2010 MDVE.NET. Some rights reserved.
This design is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-Noncommercial-Share Alike 3.0 United States License .

Fruit pies

This is for a full pie crust, for just the bottom shell, use 1/2 of these amounts:

2 1/2 cups all purpose flour
1 teaspoon salt
2 Tablespoons sugar
3/4 cup (a stick and a half) unsalted butter
1/2 cup lard
6 – 8 Tablespoons ice water

Into a large clean bowl completely free of cat hair sift the flour, salt, and sugar.  Cut the butter and lard into the flour mixture with a pastry blender.  Add 6 Tablespoons of ice water, add up to 2 more until the dough comes together.  Use the pasty blender as much as possible, chop the dough… don’t knead it (this is not a pizza, you want it soft and flaky).  When mixed, cut into two lumps and chill.  Then you can make the filling:

Cherry

4 cups (1 quart) fresh pitted cherries
1 3/4 cups sugar
1/4 teaspoon mace
1/4 teaspoon almond extract
2 1/2 Tablespoons quick tapioca
1/3 cup chilled unsalted butter

Blueberry

4 cups (1 quart) fresh blueberries
1 cup sugar
1/4 teaspoon cinnamon
1/4 teaspoon mace
1 Tablespoon lemon juice (half a lemon)
2 1/2 Tablespoons quick tapioca
1/3 cup chilled unsalted butter

Dingleberry
Yes, I’m kidding.

Combine the fruit, sugar, spices and extracts, and tapioca in a bowl, chill and let stand for 20 minutes.

You’re halfway done.  Go pee.  Have a cigarette.  Wash your hands again, with soap this time.  Take a break before flouring up the counter and a rolling pin.

Roll out the crust and line a 9 – 10 inch deep pan, fill with the uh… filling… stuff.  Dot the top with the butter, you don’t have to use up all of it.  Add top crust, crimp the edges very high, cut steam vent holes (carve “HARE” on top  Get it?  Hare Pie.  Nyuk nyuk nyuk).

For top crust pies, bake on top of a cookie sheet covered with metal foil in a hot oven at 425 degrees Fahrenheit for 1 hour.  Allow to cool completely before serving.  Fruit pies will keep pretty well out of the refrigerator for a week or more if covered with foil and you washed your hands well enough while making it.

Meat Pies (WARNING!  EXPERIMENT IN PROGRESS!)

1 pound of meat (bison, lamb, turkey, beef, camel, wildebeest, kangaroo)
1 small or 1/2 large yellow onion, chopped
2 large cloves of garlic, chopped
1 Tablespoon oil
1/2 teaspoon salt
1/4 teaspoon black pepper
1/4 teaspoon thyme
1/4 teaspoon rosemary
1/4 teaspoon sage
1/4 teaspoon powdered mustard

a few small red or gold potatoes
1/2 rutabaga
1/2 parsnip
1 cup milk (or 1/2 cup cream and 1/2 cup water)
2 Tablespoons cornstarch

Brown meat in a large skillet with the onion, garlic, oil and spices.  Dice the vegetables and add to skillet, add milk and cornstarch.  Stir while cooking for 10 – 15 minutes while the hard tubers soften some, you don’t want to cook them completely.  Turn off heat, let sit while rolling out a top crust (note: you may wish to use salted butter in this crust… just for meat pies).  Bake at 425 degrees Fahrenheit for 1 hour (until it’s bubbling through the vents).  Serve with homemade tomato ketchup, horseradish, and premium soy sauce.

Cream Pies

NOTE: if you found this recipe because you were looking for porn, sorry!

Cream pies are a little different, you only make half the crust (there’s no top) and bake the crust before filling (425 degrees Fahrenheit for 15 – 20 minutes).  There’s some tricks to this… since there’s no filling, the crust will tend to shrink and bubble up in the middle, so pie weights will be useful.  The order of operation is very different from that of a fruit pie… you need the baked pie crust complete and ready to go before you start on the pudding mixture.  This is when it might be tempting to get a store-bought pie crust.  Don’t DO it, MAN!! You can make this.

Select zero or more of the following base ingredients:
3 bananas
1 cup shredded coconut
3 – 5 oz sweet or semi-sweet chocolate (or Nutella)
1/2 cup citrus fruit juice and zest from the rind

and…
2 cups whole milk
1 cup cream
1/4 cup flour
2 Tablespoons corn starch
3/4 cup sugar
1/2 teaspoon salt
4 egg yolks (bruised and beaten)
1 tsp vanilla

In a medium saucepan, bring the milk and cream to almost a boil (‘scald’ it), stir constantly to avoid skimming.  Don’t use a double boiler here, it won’t quite get hot enough to scald the milk, and so the filling won’t thicken properly.

• If you’re making a citrus pie, add the zest to the milk before scalding, and then afterward let it steep for a few minutes before straining out the zest bits.
• If you are using chocolate, melt it first, then slowly add the milk and cream.

Sift the flour, cornstarch, sugar, and salt, add to the milk while stirring constantly.

• Extra salt is optional for a citrus pie.
• If you want to use coconut or Nutella, add that to the mixture now as well.

Whisk the egg yolks.

• If you’re making  citrus pie, add the juice to the egg yolks.

Spoon some of the hot milk pudding mixture into the egg yolks and stir, then add the yolks to the mixture (don’t just dump the egg yolks into the hot pudding) and cook a few more minutes.  It should be getting really thick and smell really good.  Taste it (don’t burn your mouth) and add more sugar if needed, especially with semi-sweet chocolate.

• Add the vanilla last if used.  Skip the vanilla for  a citrus pie.\
• Use a pinch of chili powder instead of vanilla for a chocolate pie.
• If you use bananas, spoon a little of the pudding into the bottom of the pie crust, then add bananas slices, and then spoon on more pudding.
• Otherwise, use a spatula and pour the pudding mixture into the crust.

Once that’s done, chill and chill out.  You can’t just pop the hot shell and filling in the fridge, but from here on out, COOL is what you need.  When it’s not quite so hot, then put it in the refrigerator.

If you add a lot of base ingredients, you might need to reduce the amounts, it will make a lot, but you can always just pour the remainder into pudding cups.  Cream pies have milk and egg and so they won’t keep out of the refrigerator, they have to be chilled.  Some recipes call for additional baking, I don’t recommend this.

You can leave the pie unadorned, top with whipped cream, or…  did you save the egg whites?  Good!  Make meringue:

4 egg whites
1/4 teaspoon cream of tartar (optional)
1 teaspoon vanilla
1/2 cup powdered sugar

Adding the sugar slowly, beat with a high-speed electric mixer until you get soft peaks, this can take 20 – 30 minutes.  When the pie is cool, plop gobs of foam onto the top of the pie with a big spoon and broil (on high) in an oven 5 minutes until the meringue is golden brown… don’t walk away from this, or you’ll burn the meringue and the pie will get all runny.

It’s done.  Let it cool.  Don’t put it in the refrigerator while still warm, or it will get runny.  When it’s no longer warm (call it an hour), THEN put it in the refrigerator and chill out for at least 2 more hours, and while waiting don’t get any Soupy Sales ideas.

General tips for making PIE:

• Don’t use any ingredients that aren’t at least 100 years old.  Not the actual item (ewww!), the invention of the ingredient… people have been eating pie for a very very long time, you don’t need anything exotic or new to make any of these.  Pie good for cave man!
• Heart Smart warning: This will kill you.  Do not serve this to people without notifying them that this is real pie, and therefore crammed, jammed, and packed with real fat.
• This is not a beginner course on cooking and baking, but it’s not difficult.  If you’ve ever put together a piece of tube frame recreational equipment for your kids in the back yard on Christmas Eve, you have the skills necessary to make a pie.
• Use organic ingredients whenever possible.  Butter, milk, sugar, eggs, flour, and fruit can all be bought organic.  Your body will thank you for it.  Don’t be fooled by the word ‘natural’, natural is not organic.  The word ‘natural’ (as applied to food in the USA) has come to be meaningless at the consumer level through lobbying by the food industry.  Arsenic is ‘natural’.  Read the labels on the ingredients you use.  If there’s anything in them that you can’t pronounce without a chemistry reference, buy something else.
• Cheap fruit makes experimentation more fun.  When you see a quart of blueberries for $4 at the farmer’s market, think PIE.
• You can use white granulated table sugar, but exotic premium sugar at the ethnic grocery store will definitely make a difference.  I wish there were a standardized sweetness scale, but until that science is up another tech level, I prefer to use organic powdered sugar.  If you’re looking to reduce the sugar, you might try substituting about half the amount needed with a commercial sweetener substitute.  I haven’t done this, but there is diabetic friendly sugar substitute available.  Somebody also try a tablespoon of light unsulfured molasses and tell me how that goes.
• In fruit pies, you can use cornstarch instead of instant (or flaked) tapioca, but the texture is boring.  The idea here is to thicken the filling so it will look good on your fork and cut in a nicer triangle.  In the cream pies, tapioca can probably be substituted for the corn starch, but the texture won’t be smooth.
• Use real unsalted butter and actual lard for shortening.  Using these and cutting it into the flour with a pastry blender keeps the gluten fibers short, and not like pizza.  Use some muscle on this, when properly mixed you should not be able to distinguish any individual lumps of butter or lard.  Yes, you can buy lard in the store, it’s usually near the baking supplies, I usually see it in bricks or small white plastic tubs.  Lard does not contain trans fats, because trans fats were invented when people stopped using real animal fat.  If you’re worried about cholesterol, stop eating pie.  On the other hand, if you would rather sacrifice some taste, green mersh label zero trans-fat shortening bricks will work just fine.
• Take your time rolling out the crust.  If you goof it, pick it up and do it again.  Roll it out, fold it over a few times, this makes it flaky.  If the bottom crust has a hole or seam, it will leak.  On top crust pies, seal and crimp the edges very high, it will spill, and make sure the steam vents in the top are big enough that they don’t seal up while cooking.
• If you make a few pies and the next one suddenly seems… not difficult… you’re getting it.  There’s a reason they say ‘easy as pie’.  There’s definitely some arm work in blending and rolling the crust, but nothing else in these recipes is particularly difficult.  Maybe chocolate, chocolate is almost always difficult.

I’m currently experimenting with savory recipes… buffalo with potato, carrots, parsnips, rutabaga, basil, oregeno…. sausage with cheese, onions, green pepper, cayenne… beef with cream and rosemary.   I know the cherry and blueberry recipes work well (don’t skip the mace!).  I’m still perfecting the ‘citrus’ cream pies.

Whaddaya gonna do with those pies, boys?

“Buddha’s Hand” lemon cream pie (Christmas 2009)

Lemon pie - not done yet This is a “Buddha’s Hand” lemon sitting in a blind-baked pie shell in my new porcelain pie dish.  The little dents are from the “pie weights”.

What the... where's the... Is there any LEMON in there? Aparently this type of lemon has no inside fruit, but the outside rind zest is good.  That’s my new Solingen steel chopping knife.

"Buddha's Hand" lemon cream pie This was made on Thanksgiving Day (a feast holiday in the United States), and the oven was full so I didn’t get a chance to toast the meringue.  The yellow squigglies are more of the rind zest.

Buffalo Pot Pie (New Year’s Day 2010)

(note: does not actually contain pot)

Buffalo Pot Pie

This was the first bison meat pie experiment.  It came out pretty good, but I used unsalted butter in the crust, and it needed the salt.  It also didn’t quite have the binding I’m looking for (notice how it’s loose inside), so this was a very good start, looks like I should have this working well in about 4 more tries.

I have in my possession four (4) red patent leather pig hides, which is enough to make a rather large coat, one my size.  As I live in Michigan, I’ll be insulating it, and of course it will need a proper liner.

The leather is pretty lightweight, the thinsulate is really thick, and the innermost liner is paper thin and slippery. I’m also using some red velvet for some of the facings.  This is definitely going to be harder than polyester-cotton work shirts. (Burda pattern 7767 rocks!)

This all adds up to a lot of planning on how to sew the liner to the coat, which seems pretty mysterious to me.  Why does it hold together?  Why would it fit?  How many needles am I going to break doing this?  The only way to find out is to do it, but there’s no material I’d bother to use to make a coat that is cheap… so do or die, this is going to have to happen and mistakes may be costly.  The leather is slightly more expensive than some Cashmere wool, so one way or another.

Here’s the pattern, can you say pimp coat?  Yeah, well, I could have gotten shiny metallic gold leather as well, but then I’d feel obligated to get the cane with the jewel in the top, the heavy gold-rim sunglasses, a leopard skin print top hat, and goldfish disco shoes (hint: they don’t come in size 12).  Being as tall as I am and living in an internationally savvy area, I’m pretty sure I can get away with wearing this coat.  Anytime around Christmas, anyway.

I spent a few days making a custom embroidery tag for it.  This is the funny part.  The “image to embroidery” programming in the world today leaves a lot to be desired. This is a joke, I’m not sewing children’s clothes, I’ll be wearing this coat in only the finest bowling alleys, biker bars…

I found a very nice blog post on interlining the insulation, previously I was considering copping out totally and sewing in the thinsulate by underlining it.  I’m no longer afraid of using the thinsulate, but I had to make some mistakes to figure it out.  I’m making a lot of mistakes.  However, I’m learning from them, and this is also important.  This is not going to be a fantastic work of art.   It’s going to be a coat, and a weird one, but it will be functional.

Findings:
* Leather is a little hard to use
* Velvet is a little hard to use
* Thinsulate is not too bad to use
* Leather coats with thinsulate and velvet linings are hard to make.  Use of a walking foot is highly recommended.
* There’s no way to press open leather seams.  When this is necessary, the seam must be top-stitched open.
* It is actually easy to make simple seams with patent leather, when doing right-side to right-side stitching, it sticks to itself pretty well, and you don’t have to use pins or tape.  It’s harder when you have to sew with the right side down on the foot plate, it won’t move and you have to use tissue paper as a cover.

Picture updates:

Thanksgiving weekend: The shell is stitched, I managed to work on it all day on Saturday.  Welt pockets are a BITCH very difficult.

December 3rd, 2009: Thinsulate must be *fully* attached to the liner before even thinking about attaching it to the coat.  I’ve had to go back and add stitching while doing the front velvet facings, and with the leather and tight corners, the collar and lapels have been degraded to “good” condition.  Oh well, if I don’t want to discuss where I got it, I can say I got it on EBay from a first year Textiles major.  It’s not unusable, but obviously not the work of an expert tailor.

December 8th, 2009: I’ve slowed down, but trying to get back onto it.  The lapel stitching is awful.  Functional, yes, but… well, that’s all I’ll say.  Last night I pinned the sleeves.  Sewing them into place is going to be slightly like sewing a collar onto a rabid weasel from the inside.  While it’s the hardest part, it’s not likely to make things look much worse, so onward I go.  The liner is starting to look easy in comparison, just a lot of cutting and trimming.  I’m hoping the liner material itself won’t be too terribly awful, but it’s really thin and slippery.  Once I get it cut, thinsulate attached, connected together, and the seams overlocked, hooking it into the coat seems reasonable enough… up to the cuff seams, not sure how those will work out.  Velcro?  It’s getting COLD here, need to get this wearable!  I must find a long thin zipper, so I can make the liner removable and then washable.

December 9th, 2009: Sleeves are attached, and I did a good job.  Now to cut the liner and thinsulate.  We’re getting SNOW, and it’s imparting a sense of urgency… it’s COLD here.

December 13th, 2009: the lining is almost done.  I’m having trouble deciding the correct way to finish the lining seams, so I might have to wear it a couple of times and see if the wind blows through them.  I’m thinking that it will, but I’m too uptight sometimes, so we will see.  I’ve got the main lining sewn to the leather at the collar and halfway up the front facings, I have to finish the sleeve insulation/lining and prep that for going into the armpits before I can finish hooking in the main lining.  All that would be left would be hemming and putting in the label, so almost there.  Arm movement isn’t terrific, but I’m not quite ready to sew in a gusset just yet.  With the collar sewn down, it’s really taking shape, and the shape it’s taking I like, even with the lapels a little goofed.  I’ll take lots more pictures of the insides soon, it’s in a wearable state.  It needs work, but the way might be more clear if I got some wear into it.  It’s squeaky.  I think I’d have to oil it to drive if I didn’t have power steering.

December 25th, 2009: The bottom liner was hard to do, I cobbled it a bit and it’s not too bad.  Next one will definitely be better.  Slowed down, need to finish the sleeves, but playing new computer game is obsessive.

After some testing, here are statistics for gaming purposes:
+2 Charisma
-1 Wisdom
-1 Dexterity
+20% versus Cold

July 23rd, 2010 – I finally got finished pictures off my camera, cropped them, and here they are.

the Stir-fry recipe (with pictures)

1 jar of “Thai Kitchen” green curry paste
1 can coconut milk
1 – 1 1/4 lbs of cheap chicken meat, white or dark
1 – 2 cups of rice
1 tablespoon brown sugar
1 – 2 teaspoons turmeric

2 or more of the following:

a cup green beans, snow peas, or snap peas
a cup of green peas (give peas a chance)
a small yellow onion (or half of a large one)
a cup bamboo shoots (or a small can)
a cup water chestnuts (or a small can)
a cup of sliced eggplant (use small ones)
a bell pepper (any colour you like)
4 – 6 jalapeño or serrano peppers
3 – 4 large or 5 – 7 small carrots
a small rutabaga or potato
a large parsnip
a can of store-bought “stir fry vegetables”
a cup of broccoli or cauliflower
a cup of asparagus
a cup of any other vegetable (bokchoy, radicchio, parsley, broccoflower)
fresh or canned mushrooms

“Miller Farms” boneless skinless chicken thighs (still frozen), turmeric spice, red bell pepper, “Thai Kitchen” green curry paste, “Thai Kitchen” organic coconut milk, “La Choy” fancy mixed stir-fry vegetables, “Reese” bamboo shoots, “Reese” water chestnuts, a “Texas New” yellow onion, jalapeño peppers, green beans.  For these pictures, I used half of the onion, half of the jalapeños, and everything else except the three cans on the right.

Directions:

Thaw the chicken if frozen.  Put the jar of curry paste in a wok or large saucepan, add the coconut milk.  Stir with spoon until mixed.  Chop chicken into bite sized pieces and add to the curry sauce in the wok.

left: a package of chicken, thawed in the microwave and sliced; right: chicken added to the curry and coconut milk, still pink and not yet cooked

Right now, before you do anything else, wash and scrub the cutting board and anything else that touched raw chicken.  The cutting board needs to be scrubbed with soap, rinsed, and then final rinsed with the hottest water that can come out of your tap.  No, I’m not kidding, get to it.

Start the rice.

Cook the chicken over medium heat stirring occasionally from the bottom to avoid burning.  Cover when not stirring to hold in the heat and ensure the chicken cooks properly.

the chicken is cooked, no pink left in it.  Don’t add the vegetables until it’s like this or you’ll have to overcook the veggies to finish cooking the chicken.  Undercooked chicken is a total bummer.

While the chicken is cooking, start chopping the vegetables.  The tougher veggies need a little longer to cook than the others, so if using carrots, parsnips, or rutabaga, chop them first.   Onions and eggplant cook pretty fast, add them last.

cutting up green beans, these are really healthy and cheap

When the chicken is obviously cooked, and the rice water is boiling, add the vegetables.  The vegetables will also give up some water when cooking, so it may look like it needs extra fluid at this point, but don’t add any.  Stir occasionally and cover in between.  Near the end of the cooking, add a tablespoon of brown sugar (optional).

left above: vegetables added; right: veggies cooking nicely

When the onions have become translucent, reduce or turn off heat until rice is finished.

left: stir fry is ready; right: rice is ready, this is a brown organic long grain American rice with a teaspoon of turmeric spice per cup of rice added for health properties, but also has a nice color

To serve, make a bed of rice on a large plate and add a large ladle or two of stir fry and sauce.  Makes 3 – 4 large plates.

Eat me.

Notes:

• I recommend Zojirushi rice cookers.
  
  I’ve seen comments on forums saying something like “Why would you spend that much when you can get brand X for less?”.  This is like comparing a Mercedes automobile to a rusty Datsun.  A Zojirushi Neuro-fuzzy will cook any rice absolutely perfectly every time and last for years, the model above is at least ten years old.  If you ever hesitated in making slow-cooked long grain rice because it was difficult in any way, you’ll need to see a Zojirushi work to believe it can be that easy.
• The green curry paste is already pretty spicy, but adding a few jalapeno peppers will really put some heat in this recipe.  This usually cures my sinus headaches.
• My favorite combination is chicken with onion, bell pepper, eggplant, brocoli or green beans, and white long grain rice with tumeric.
• Other meats can be used.  Pork butt, shrimp (prawns), squid, and beef stew meat all work just fine.
• I use a regional brand of chicken in a pack of 6 boneless chicken thighs.  It’s cheap and delicious.  Hint: After thawing it from frozen in the microwave, it will still be slightly frozen in a block.  It’s very easy to cut up when it’s like this.
• I use a stainless steel wok that my wife got me for Christmas one year.  It sits on a small stand above a gas burner and works very well for me.
• The vegetables can be pretty bland looking if they’re all green, use a red bell pepper to add some color if you’re serving this to others.

Everything is done better with Cat Supervision.