There are some meetings that I really don’t want to attend… it’s never fun fighting with grumpy developers first thing in the morning. Next time it’s going to be an extra contentious meeting perhaps I’ll pick up these donuts to grease the wheels of industry.
We’ve been jealously watching Trina’s plum harvest and anxiously waiting for the blackberries in our area to ripen.
The wait is over. This morning I walked Finney down to the trail at the end of our street and it looks like this year’s crop is going to be a good one. Last year we harvested 4 pounds of blackberries and the jam lasted us about 8 months. This year I think we should target 8 pounds so we don’t run out before next year’s jam session.
My mouth is watering, I better go eat breakfast.
The paperwork I received today had print on all pages… including this one:
There appears to be a different definition of “vegetable” once you get south of the Mason-Dixon line. Don’t get me wrong, I’m not complaining… but I’m pretty sure I just ate 3 years off my life expectancy.
We had a delicious dinner tonight at the Hominy Grill in Charleston, South Carolina. Our entrées came with a choice of vegetables, including “Macaroni & Cheese”, “Deep Fried Cheese Grits” and “French Fries”. No, catsup was not one of the vegetable choices.
Sure, they’re playing a little fast and loose with the queen’s English when it comes to veg, but I’ll give them all kinds of latitude since the food was outrageously delicious. Paula’s ribs were so perfectly prepared that the meat pulled off effortlessly and left the bones nearly spotless. My dinner, the “Big Nasty Biscuit,” has a name that was hard to pass up and the fried chicken breast, home made biscuit and delicious gravy (with a perfect hint of Jalapeño) was anything but nasty.
To top it all off we had wonderful company at the table next door in the form of Timur from DC. He was just starting to eat his way around Charleston and if we weren’t already bound for a wedding party we would have easily been sucked into his wake. His twitter feed will serve as a great guide for what to eat for the remainder of our trip.
I find it’s a good idea to drop in every once in a while to make sure the residents are taking good care of my town. A surprise inspection is always good for morale.
Was doing a web search for an industrial style hose reel. Bing helpfully provided some related searches. Let’s play a little game, shall we?
I’ve been reading about Arduino in Make magazine for years now and decided to jump in. I picked up a starter kit from Adafruit along with Make’s excellent “Getting Started with Arduino” book. The tutorials were a perfect introduction to electronics and provided easy code to get started modifying. Anyone with even the most basic understanding of computer programming can be up and creating in no time flat.
One thing I’ve been wanting to do for a long time is build a weather station for logging temperature, humidity, etc. The parts for Arduino are easy to come by and there are a ton of examples out there to get you started. That was, however, until I came across Make’s really cool Dryer Messenger project. Built with an Arduino, a network adapter and current sensor, this nifty gadget makes your dryer send out tweets when it finishes a load. Yep, no more forgetting your load of laundry only to find it the next day as a mass of un-ironable wrinkles.
Armed with Make’s excellent instructions, a metal project box from Radio Shack and a non-invasive current sensor I set to work recreating the Dryer Messenger. I am using an Ethernet shield instead of the wireless option used in the article, so I had to change the code a little bit… but that was simple given the sample code.
It took a couple of weekends to get it all together and running, but that was more a function of life getting in the way of fun. Now we can say that we are part of the IOT (Internet of Things) revolution. Our friendly dryer, Sam, is now up and running with his very own Twitter account: @3rdPlaceDryer.
Over the years I’ve had several different time & temperature weather stations which gave the current outdoor temperature and humidity but were a bit thin on capturing historic data. I’ve considered buying a fancier weather station which connects to a PC for logging… but those are pricy and require a PC be connected and on. An Arduino, on the other hand, is wicked cheap and tons of people use them as the brains behind their weather stations (IOW: lots of example code is out there to be had).
It’s fairly common to log data from an Arduino to an SD card, but that would require periodically pulling the card and downloading the data for review. I knew I didn’t want that level of effort so went looking for a way to push the data up to some place on the interwebs. I had all but given up on finding an easy solution when I came across COSM.
COSM is a nifty web service which allows developers to push data to the cloud and visualize the result. The service is free to use for basic logging and visualizations but their true raison d’être is a cloud service for the mythical coming of the IoT (internet of things). Hardware developers can use COSM to onboard and manage devices in their product line. I’m unlikely to ever need their cool pay services, but I do appreciate the ability to put meteorological data in the side bar of my website.
COSM has a chunk of sample code that makes it really easy to get started pushing data to them from an Arduino. Because you can push the data directly from your Arduino (provided you have a network interface of some sort) you don’t need to be running a power-hungry PC 24/7 to indulge your inner data nerd. Keeping an eye on your data is easy too with nice data presentation via their dashboard (picture above) or you can embed live, auto updating graphs using nifty image tags. Here are a couple of graphs, first for temperature and second for air pressure:
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Now, if I can just figure out a way to use the anemometer from the cheap weather station I bought off Woot…
[Edit: as of May 14, 2013, COSM has changed its name to Xively]
Spring cleaning time.
