Al's Blog-o-Sphere

This project has grown. See this page for more details.

I’ve been spending a huge amount of time working on the weather station and I needed to take a break. The Weather station is coming along nicely, but I’m waiting for a few more parts. I decided to work on another project.

A while back, I picked up a strip of RGBW leds in the Neopixel format. We used them to develop some code and ended up putting some Neopixel bars on the Warlocks 2017 robot as signalling devices. So I had a meter of 30 LED/m Neopixels on hand. I had an idea that I wanted to put them on my recumbent trike, but hadn’t decided how to go about it yet.

I’m not a big fan of flags on trikes, or any bicycles. I don’t buy the conventional wisdom that “You’re so low to the ground. Nobody can see you.” That’s a cop out and blames the cyclist for the motorists shortcomings. If you can’t see a low bicycle, how can you see the lines on the road, and why did you slam on the brakes and put your car in the ditch when a cat ran across the road? So, I’ve decided flags are ineffective and not worth the bother 90% of the time. Increasing your visibility by positioning in the road and with bright warning lights are more productive.

But I did have a couple of fiberglass bicycle flag poles kicking around.

So, if flags are meh, but lights are good, why not fill a flagpole with lights? Challenge accepted. Continue Reading…

Temperature is indoors, in fact sitting where the fan blows hot air out of my laptop, although, I am starting with testing outdoors. Also, sometimes the breadboard system is running, other times, the final prototype is reporting in. You might see some weird charts because of that. (I wish we were having 80-degree weather!) Barometric pressure is pretty universal, though.
See more charts at ThingSpeak…

I have been playing around with some Arduino projects and have been building a weather station. I have a lot to share about the construction of that project and will place it here when I get time to write it up. It has not been a straightforward journey. Check on down to the bottom to see if anything new has been added because I am expanding this post rather than making new posts about it. Continue Reading…

Everyone loves something for free. I got this email recently.

You might not realize it, but I’m not a big fan of Apple products. (Go ahead, that’s a joke, you may laugh here.) It’s not that they aren’t sometimes good. Some are excellent, though overpriced, but others are just so-so. To me, it’s more that the haughty, we-know-what’s-best-for-you attitude from Apple, along with the legions of fanboy sycophants that buy every new product without question that rankles me at every turn. The idea that a computer could be so superior (as they want us to believe) yet so simple your grandmother can use it, just doesn’t add up. Then the futuristic, white-on-white, no straight lines, Jony Ive designs have become boring too.

But the computer end of things has settled down. It’s now kind of a Ford or Chevy choice, either is accepted and most people don’t care. Heck, most people are happy with a Chromebook these days. Continue Reading…