DIY Electronic Geek Heaven

Just found an incredibly awesome site…  www.electronics2000.co.uk.  They have beginner’s guides, forums, and all sorts of great projects that I can use to learn things and teach them to my kids with regards to electronics.

Best of all, they have free software!  Electronics Assistant is a Windows program that performs electronics-related calculations. It includes a resistor color code calculator, resistance, capacitance and power calculations and more. Details of calculations can be saved or printed.

 

They also include free for download on their site the EPE Magazine Index, A full index of all constructional projects published in Everyday Practical Electronics magazine.  The database has details of all constructional projects published since 1992, but doesn’t include details of other features and articles.

I’m really looking forward to trying out some of the projects once I’ve got my solar powered chicken coop up and running!

 

The Swarm (of Bees)

Last week my wife came home to literally hundreds of bees on our front door.  They were swarming!  Over the next couple of days we had more afternoon visitors, but in fewer numbers until eventually they went away.

The first day was a bit of a sticky situation, and the following days we had to peek out the peep hole to check for bees before opening the front door.  Luckily my wife could get into the house through the garage, but it got me to thinking about why these bees would choose to hang out at our door for the afternoon when they should be out making honey.

 

Our front yard is very butterfly and hummingbird friendly, which means it’s pretty bee friendly as well.  During the summer months we usually have half a dozen butterflies and a pair of hummingbirds flitting about the various California native flowers.  There’s probably a dozen or so bees doing the pollination rounds as well.

I found a great web site here by the California State Bee Keeper Association that talks about what a swarm is and what to do about it.  In  a nutshell, swarming is how a bee colony reproduces, with about half the bees and the old queen out looking for a new nest.  A scout bee decided that our front door would be a good place to set up a home (and why not with all the flowers right there for them) and landed there and secreted the nasanov pheromone to call the swarm.  Yes, that’s right, bees were having sex with my front door.

If they had set up a nest, we could have called a either a bee keeper or an exterminator to come get the swarm.  The bee keepers would collect the swarm in a box and take them back to an empty hive to make honey.  An exterminator would have sprayed them with either soapy water to drown them, or toxic chemicals to outright kill them.

Bees can be dangerous, especially as the Africanized Killer Bees make their way up the coast.  You can read about attacks like this one on the web.  So my advice is of course to stay far away from them.  But at the same time, we need bees due to their pollination services especially in California where we have so many citrus and almond groves.  And with the current bee population suffering from colony collapse disorder, I’m glad we were able to let them live in peace and move away from the front door to a hopefully safer location for all involved.

 

Back to writing

Ok, things have been going a bit more smoothly lately, so I’m back to writing for a while.

Chicken coop continues to go well.  I picked up a 12 volt solar battery charger that I’ll be using to power some lights and fans on the chicken coop.  The chicken coop will be solar before the end of the summer.  We’re down to 3 laying chickens, and picked up 3 more chicks last weekend.  The body count at the farm continues to rise, but at least it’s not as fast as it used to be.

It has been damn hot lately too, so the whole house fan has been working overtime.

Yesterday I got cavities filled, 2 of them.  Ouch.  Novocain doesn’t stop pain, it merely postpones it.  Bad day to have cavities filled as my wife made pizza last night and I couldn’t even taste it.  Spent the evening sitting on the couch trying to move as little as possible.  Even worse is that I have to go back on Thursday and have a cracked tooth repaired.  The dentist scheduled me for a full hour because the chip came off so close to the root that he might have to do a root canal.  Cavities bad, root canal worse!

Also picked up another weekend project.  An outdoor fan to mount to the patio cover over the table.  It’s a Hunter Northshore and is designed for wet applications, meaning it should be able to withstand the 2 inches of rain a year we get out here in California

And of course, someday soon I may actually finish up installing the insulation in the crawlspace.

Also spent last week doing a bit of canning.  My wife and I picked a ton of plums off our plum tree on the back slope and made a couple of jars of some great plum-vanilla jam and some plum butter.  Good stuff and if we did everything right with the water bath, they’ll be good up to a year in the pantry.  Which of course leads into the next long term project, someplace to store it all.

Did I mention that I want to put recessed lighting in the kitchen this summer too?  Yes, I have lots of projects, time to start knocking back a few, and of course documenting my progress on the site.

 

Solar Powered Chicken Coop – Update

Just a quick update on my project to take my chickens into the sustainable future of solar power.  The basic premise of solar energy is that you can take energy from the sun, store it and use if for later.

 

I’ve been wanting to experiment with solar for a while and I was at Fry’s Electronics the other day and they had just what I was looking for to get started.  A completely weatherproof, 12 volt, 5amp battery trickle charger, which just screamed “Put me on the chicken coop roof!”.

 

 

When I have my weekend free (hah!), I’ll be mounting this to a couple of 2×4’s on the coop roof.  What I like about it is that besides the compact nature, it also has a built in blocking diode to keep it from discharging the batter at night and, although it doesn’t really say, I assume a build in voltage regulator as it’s meant to charge a car battery.

The solar charger has 10 feet of wire and a pair of battery clamps, so it should be easy to run the wire down into a weatherproof box and clamp the leads to a car battery inside.

The car battery is in turn hooked into a small 140 watt power inverter inside the battery enclosure and a pair of 12 volt computer power supply fans.  Between the battery and these components I have two light switches so I can turn on either the AC power outlet or the DC fans.

 

The light switches are encased in weatherproof switches, and I have an old extension cord plug plugged into the inverter with the other end wired into a weatherproof outlet box.

Assuming this goes well, I’ll be adding a floodlight on top of the coop as well to be powered by the inverter so that I can have lights running in my side garden at night.  No more weeding by moonlight!

I’m hoping to have everything assembled and installed in the chicken coop by August.  Based on a 5 amp power supply from the solar panel, I figure I can run my .16 amp fans all day long and keep my chickens cool while I also charge up the battery.

It’s a fun experiment with solar power, I’ve got most of the components assembled and now it’s just a matter of putting all the pieces together and keeping my fingers crossed.  Assuming it all goes well, I’ll probably move my automatic watering timer onto the 12 volt circuit as well.

And while my daughter may only be four, I think this would be a great way to introduce her to the basics of solar power and DC current theory.  I also found a great web site at opamp-electronics.com with a section on various tutorials and experiments, absolutely great for the the beginning hobbyist who wants to do a little experimentation

 

April was a busy month

All I can say about last month is that I’m glad I got through it… some of my highlights included:

1. My laptop computer has been on it’s last legs for a while… it’s an HP pavilion workhorse (nx9000 series) -17 inch monitor, big hard drive, fast cpu, lots of memory, and about 4 years old with a fan that was in hyper drive and enough heat generated to warm a small room to a comfortable temp.  A year ago lines started to show up in the display.  Every month a few more vertical lines would appear.  The nvidia video driver kept freezing the operating system about 6 months ago, so I had to use the generic windows video card driver – which meant no cool video games for me.  Finally, it looks like the video card has given up the ghost.  No video on the LCD, no video on the external monitor.  So this week I finally did the research and bought a new laptop computer and have spend the week restoring backups and reloading all my applications on the Windows Vista64 operating system.

2. Chickens are evil to gardens.  I wasn’t thinking about it and planted my new seedlings that I have been growing indoors.  I went to work for a day, came back with the chickens having made a tasty meal of my little plants.  I now have chicken wire hoops around the remaining plants and am trying to figure out if there is a cheap way to energize it with solar electricity to keep them away from my poor plants.  I will also be building a chicken run.  No more free range for these little chickens until my garden gets a bit more mature.

3. Installing fiberglass insulation under the kitchen.  I live in a tri-level house.  This means there is a crawlspace under the kitchen and great room.  I have always wanted to put insulation in there to keep the tile on the kitchen floor from being ice-cold in the morning.  This month I finally did it.  As it is summer, I haven’t noticed if the kitchen tiles are colder than they used to be.  I probably should have done the geek thing and taken temperature reading of before and after.

4. Dealing with a 5 month old.  This is the age of flipping around, scooting across the floor, drool like Niagara Falls, and waking up at all hours of the night – My wife has been an angel dealing with him, but where I used to sleep through anything short of a nuclear blast – I’m starting to wake up early in the morning and taking him for an hour before I go to work so she can sleep in.  To top it off, last night my 4 year old daughter got into our bed and about 2am pushed me off the mattress…All the books say just take her back to her room, which I did.  She immediately came to “full alert”, and ran back to our bedroom.  Tired as I was, I just went and slept in the guest room.  Just didn’t have the energy to fight the epic battle of “sleep in your room”

As for the fan I keep promising to install in my daughter’s bedroom…yeah, still in the box.  Maybe tonight…after I organize the garage and finish installing the insulation under the great room, assuming she doesn’t fall asleep in her room that is.

 

The Economies of Keeping Chickens

When I first decided to build a chicken coop, there were 2 reasons.  The first was that my daughter wanted chickens.   The second was that the idea of fresh eggs was appealing and I thought it would be economical.

A recent article at the Washington Post talks about the price of eggs going up 30% since last year.  It got me to thinking how much does it cost me to keep my hens?

Now, I originally spent about $300 to put together my chicken coop, not including labor and I’ve probably spent another $30 on the roofing material and the safety hinges for the nesting box roof (don’t want that lid slamming down on any kiddie fingers), and figure around $10 per hen to get them and raise them to the point they are laying eggs.  That means my first egg cost me a whopping $370.  Figuring that they each eat about 1/4 lb of feed and free range (There is a great web page here about grass fed chickens), that’s about 30lbs of feed a month, so I spend about $6 on feed for the month.  I estimated that I get around 5 eggs per week from each hen (Although in reality they’ve been laying every day like clockwork!), and there are 4 weeks in a month.  So I should get around 80 eggs a month.  That means if I had stopped after the first month, each dozen would have averaged about $56 (now that’s some expensive eggs!)

Breaking out the Excel spreadsheet, I can see that if the national average is $2.17 per dozen, it only takes me about 41 months before I reach the break even point of buying vs. raising my own.  However, these eggs are much better than store bought.  I’ve seen some of the specialty eggs from farms that boast free range and humane treatment going for around $6 a dozen.  If I were to buy my eggs at that price, I reach the break even point a little after 10 months.

So what’s the message here?  Prices will only keep going up.  Granted, my feed bill might go up as well, but it’s costing me about 90 cents per dozen eggs in feed.

(  (30 lbs of feed / 80 eggs) x ( $12 / 60 lbs of feed) ) = $.075 per egg

Even at double the feed price, it’s still less than buying a dozen factory raised eggs from the store.

Plus, they make great pets, my daughter loves to play with them, and they all get plenty of exercise running around the yard.  It’s a win-win situation!

 

New Indiana Jones coming out May 22nd

In a recent article by USA Today George Lucas says:

“When you do a movie like this, a sequel that’s very, very anticipated, people anticipate ultimately that it’s going to be the Second Coming,” Lucas says. “And it’s not. It’s just a movie. Just like the other movies. You probably have fond memories of the other movies. But if you went back and looked at them, they might not hold up the same way your memory holds up.”

And I have to wonder is he knows that his last couple of movies have really sucked, and it was only the name “Star Wars” that kept them from bombing.

Now, I do have fond memories of the original Star Wars series.  My wife on the other hand wasn’t much into Sci-Fi.  So when we rented Phantom Menace, it was with two different points of view. 

I’ve seen some bad movies in the past, but Phantom Menace was pretty much unmatchable and Attack of the Clones even more so.  Special effects can’t really make up for bad acting and bad dialogue.  My wife was in complete agreement that sitting there watching the horrid acting was like watching a giant hand scrape fingernails across a chalk board for 2 hours.

Am I looking forward to Indy 4?  Heck yes.  Are my expectations low?  About as low as they can go.  This may be a movie that I have to go see alone just so I don’t die in shame that I dragged my wife to a suck-a-thon (much like when I took her to see Starship Troopers after reading the novel – I do believe that Heinlein was spinning in his grave over that debacle) .  My one hope is that Spielberg can bring this baby home.

 

Switching to Raw Milk

A couple of  month ago, I was over at a friend’s house and they had a container of “Raw Milk”.  I thought this was an incredible novelty because I’d always thought that it was illegal for unpasteurized milk to be sold in America.

I did a little digging and found out that this is not true.  Here is the law:

FDA law CFR 1240.61 states that it is illegal for anyone to transport raw dairy products across state lines “in final package form for direct human consumption unless that product has been pasteurized.”

It turns out that Organic Pastures up in Fresno, CA produces raw milk and it is available at our local Henry’s market.

Little did I know of the controversy surrounding the drinking of raw milk.  The two sides can probably best be summarized with these two PowerPoint presentations:

• Against drinking it: www.cfsan.fda.gov/~ear/milksafe/milksafe.ppt
• Rebuttal : www.realmilk.com/ppt/08rawmilk.ppt

The main arguments seem to be that because we put our cows in such crappy living conditions, they are sick all the time and pumped full of drugs to keep them “healthy”, so we must pasteurize their products so that the pathogens they are living in don’t get passed on to us. 

I don’t see this argument being much different than last year when we had that big break out of E. Coli in all the bagged spinach, or the recent tainted beef recall, or today’s recall of cantaloupe grown in Honduras.  If you treat your  food sources well and it’s clean from the source – shouldn’t it arrive on your dinner table ready to eat?  Based on the risks involved in eating foods, should we ban spinach and other leafy greens from our diet?  Even pasteurized milk can have problems, such as the outbreak in Massachusetts of listeriosis – which was eventually traced back to the processing plant actually reintroducing the pathogen after the pasteurization process.

In a recent letter to the Colorado Department of Health, Mark McAfee makes a couple of good points:

To study this issue further, Organic Pastures contracted with BSK labs in Fresno to perform multiple challenge and recovery tests on our raw milk and raw colostrum. When 7 logs (10 million counts) of pathogens were added to one-milliliter samples of organic raw milk they would not grow. In fact they died off. The salmonella was so badly out-competed that it could not be found less than 24 hours later. The listeria drop was less dramatic and was similiar to the E. Coli O157:H7 samples that were studied, but they also did not grow and declined substantially over time.

…

What is it that causes raw milk to kill pathogens? Just in the last 24 months, the FDA has approved lactoferrin as an approved method of treatment for pathogen reduction in beef slaughter plants. Raw milk naturally has levels of this enzyme-based pathogen killer. Pasteurization inactivates this and other enzymes that kill pathogens. These enzymes include lactoferrin, xanthine oxidase, lactoperoxidase, lysozyme and nisin. There are other interrelated enzymes and beneficial bacteria that also act on the pathogens to inhibit their growth. All of these systems are destroyed by pasteurization. It is no wonder that dairy plants that pasteurize must be kept absolutely spotless. There are no remaining safety systems in the processed milk.

…

The dairy industry does not understand what I have explained here in detail. What the dairy industry believes is that raw milk contaminates pasteurized milk. This is not the case. Pasteurized milk kills the safety systems that control pathogens in raw milk and therefore permit unlimited growth of dangerous bacteria if present.

It’s a pretty good argument and makes some good sense.  I don’t know if some of the “miracle cures” they ascribe to raw milk are true (cures cataracts, arthritis, asthma, etc.), but it would make sense that healthy cows can produce healthy milk for their offspring.

Being the techno-geek that I am, and locked away in a cubicle, even though I could not go out and visit the free range farm, I did manage to find it on google maps.  And yes, those do look like happy cows on a free range of grass.  It’s also interesting to note that they:

tested our milk cow’s fresh manure and did not find any human pathogens. That’s right. . . no Salmonella. She was able to show that when antibiotics are not ever used on the herd (as stipulated in the organic standards) and when cows are not stressed (grass-fed and kept healthy) they simply do not slough off pathogens in their manure.

Which not only is down right responsible of them, but if other dairies followed their practice of keeping happy, healthy, organic cows, a lot of the other outbreaks to our other food sources may not have ever occurred.  Several cases of E. Coli in spinach have been traced back to fields to close to the manure dumps of large dairy processing farms.

One of the “miracle cures” of raw milk is the reduction of eczema – Something my wife has in a very mild form on her hands and uses Eucerin for.  I’m wondering if switching to raw milk wouldn’t actually save us money in the long run if it means we can stop buying all those tubs of lotion?  I wonder if she’ll consent to trying it out for a month?

 

Useless Gadgets I’ve Seen On Amazon.com

 

This may become a regular feature.  I’m all about simple living.  Or, as my wife has put it, she’s got me on the “crap-reduction plan.”

So a friend of mine told me about this, and I couldn’t believe that there was an actual device (and apparent patent) for cracking an egg.

Seriously, can there be a more useless item to spend $6.98 on?

Sadly, the item is offered by Amazon seller “Get Organized“

Shouldn’t one of the first rules of being organized be “Don’t buy crap you don’t need, are never going to use, are uni-taskers and will just sit there collecting dust”?

Next thing you know…well, to late, I just saw it…

 

 

Taking The Train

I ride MetroLink. The trains aren’t exactly something you set your watch by.  I have a lot of fun reading the site at www.metrolinktrainriders.com which reports the delays and other information that www.metrolinktrains.com doesn’t seem to have readily available to us commuters.

Now, at my company, I’m a big fan of the phrase “No Surprises”.  I tell my direct reports that I don’t care how bad the news is, the worst thing in the world that can happen is that I’m in a meeting with my boss and he asks me about some issue or other that I haven’t been told about – wether it’s a project running late, a production support issue, or buggy software.  I extend the same courtesy to my bosses – after all I don’t want them caught out in the cold either.

So it really surprises me when a large company like Metrolink that runs our trains into downtown LA seems to do it’s best to keep it’s riders in the dark about delays.  Everyone knows delays happen, but when the causes keep getting swept under the rug – I have to wonder why they even bother to hide it?  It’s not like we can do much about it – it would be nice to have a website i can check in the morning or even an email subscription alert go out when trains I take are being delayed so I can make alternate plans or drive to a different station based on the delays.

I can’t tell you how valuable it would be to me to know my morning train was delayed by 30 minutes and be able to spend a few more minutes with my daughter before heading off to work rather than sitting on a train platform waiting for a late train.  After all, if Domino’s can track my pizza, how hard can it be to track a train?