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Last spring, I had the pleasure of spending $1200 to replace a set of brake rotors (because you can’t resurface BMW rotors) and the window mechanism on the driver’s side (a design defect in 3-series cars). That, combined with the spousal desire to have...
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The software is all written in C using Codevision AVR , a pretty nice C compiler. It has a very nice wizard that lets you say that you are running your chip at 8MHz and then allows you to set (for example) the timer1 refresh rate to by 52000Hz from a...
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I’ve finished my landscape lighting project, and thought I’d share how it came out. I had a few requirements: I wanted to be able to turn on and off the lights from out where the lights were (some 150’ from the house) so we could have light when we showed...
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My first year or so, I was shooting my daughter’s lacrosse team, which played on weekend afternoons. Then, when my daughter entered high school, she switched to playing games that are in the late afternoon, early evening, or night. There are significant...
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I recently finished the construction on my landscape lighting base station, putting everything into the boxes I have, and wiring everything up. Turned the power on, pressed the buttons, and the relays worked fine. Turned on the remote, and it worked as...
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Lots of progress this week. After teaching skiing all day Saturday, I went back to the cabin and wired up the lights in two places. I had bought some outdoor wire nuts that are filled with silicone, but they turnout not to work well at all and to be exceedingly...
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I’ve been pretty busy with skiing, but have made some good progress. I’ve played around a bit with the available commands , and have made a few decisions. First, I’ve decided to use the xbees in their simple serial replacement mode. In this mode, it just...
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Yesterday was day 2 of the 2010 ski lesson season. We got up there early, and I found that my cadet Rosemary (not her real name, in case you haven’t figured it out) fell and hit her head while skiing during the week. She’s fine, but is out for the season...
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Last year my family decided to try the ski instructor thing, and spent the year as cadets for Olympic Ski School . We’d taken lessons from Oly for a long time, and after topping out in their classes got asked to try teaching. This year, we all have classes...
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I finally imported all my Polar data for last year (complicated because my new laptop doesn’t have an IR port, so I need to go through my old laptop), so here are my stats for the last year. 2009 2008 Distance 2253.3 miles 1578 Rides 84 75 Time...
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I’ve taken a new approach with my landscape lights. To recap, I needed a system that had remote on/off from a few (2 or 3) locations perhaps 150’ or so away from the transmitter. My plan was to do a simple remote pushbutton system, and then to run two...
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At work, I’ve been using a set of Sony noise cancelling headphones that I got about 10 years ago. The ear pads deteriorated a while ago, and after finding out that Sony was happy to send me a replacement set of ear pads for $20 each, I decided that I...
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I saw mommy kissing Santa Claus Underneath the mistletoe last night. She didn’t see me creep down the stairs to have a peep; She thought that I was tucked up in my bedroom fast asleep It just doesn’t make sense. There’s no reason for daddy to be wearing...
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The lights got started before Thanksgiving this year – while waiting for a turkey to smoke – but a few weeks of sub-freezing temperatures stalled things because 15 degrees is just too cold to be outside putting up lights. I had hoped to build something...
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For Thanksgiving this year, in addition to doing our usual turkey (a 20 pounder grilled on the Weber barbecue with apple wood), I decided to do a small one on my cheap electric brinkman smoker. One of the disadvantages of this smoker is that it doesn...