A few years ago, I got tired of a toaster that didn’t bother popping up before the toast was charcoal, so I got on-line and ordered a commercial-grade toaster from some restaurant supply store. Based on the presumption that restaurants couldn’t afford to have a toaster that didn’t work right, I hoped to have a reliable appliance well into the future. Unfortunately, that hope was unfounded. Within two years, the toaster quit working. You could hold the handle down and the heating elements would do their thing, but it wouldn’t stay down.
Isaac, being one of the bigger fans of … Read the rest
In the ham radio community, homebrewing is a term used to describe making your own radio gear. For most hams, this doesn’t go much beyond building and tuning an antenna out of copper pipe or wire, but I’m not really your average ham. For one, I am almost never on the air. That said, as I’ve spent more time recently reconnecting with my roots as an Electrical Engineer, I’ve opted to use my license as an excuse to play around with ideas.
In the process of building my last project (the sunrise light http://www.diligent5.org/?p=1849) I bought an Arduino Uno … Read the rest
A few weeks ago, I wrote about a project I’ve been working on that uses a raspberry pi to mimic a sunrise as a sort of alternative to an alarm clock (https://www.diligent5.org/?p=1849) . It’s generated a rather long list of learning experiences including things like the timing issues I wrote about previously. After thinking about it, I figured it wouldn’t hurt to document a few of them.
First, debouncing switches can be easy or hard… If you’re as dumb as me and want to set the system up to discriminate between long button presses, short button presses, and … Read the rest
This fourth of July we were invited for a second year in a row to go with friends to their family reunion at the family’s farm/ranch outside Grants, New Mexico. I have to say that this family represents the kind of accepting and down right Christian people I think the world needs more of. Let me explain.
Many years ago, when the patriarch and matriarch were young veterinarians just out of school, they landed in this small town west of Albuquerque and set up shop – the husband dealing with large animals, and the wife handling the small ones. As … Read the rest
Peter's Prose, Poetry, and Random Ramblings