activities

53.855, -1.829 Bingley West Yorkshire

West facing solar PV output from one inverter (can't get RS485 output from the other!) logged on my Raspberry Pi model A

Friday 20th March 2015

I liked the idea of the raspberry pi for many different reasons but one thing I had thought of doing previously with arduino and laptop etc was to make a cheap and cheerful sailing simulator so people learning to sail can get the hang of tacking and gybing. I have found that novices continue to get in a muddle with swapping hands and changing sides of the boat for years after starting, often to the detriment of actally learning to sail. After all these are trivial manual skills that shouldn't take up valuable time on the water!

wiring diagram in jpg attachment.
- This code seems to upload (first attempt I had to manually ground the RESET pin) and work fine, including the sleep and hardware interrupt, apart from the fact that the tilt sensor/switch has to be shorted. i.e. pin 2 at 0V.

We inherited an Aga when we moved into our house; it used to be coke fired but had been converted to gas. Generally speaking it's great and I enjoy cooking on it (and it heats our water for us) BUT it uses a lot of gas.

This scheme uses an arduino type microprocessor with a servo to turn the temperature control right down at night and during the day. The Aga takes about three hours to heat up or cool down but I reckon it must be saving quite a bit of gas (data to appear here when I have collected and analysed it!)

here's a video showing what it does after a bit of basic coding. The next stage will be to include audio input with fourier analysis to set the seed variable, key and beat.

see also
http://arduino.cc/en/Tutorial/ArduinoISP
http://www.arduino.cc/en/Hacking/Programmer

1. Upload the ArduinoISP sketch (in Examples/ArduinoISP) as per usual to the Arduino board via the USB or serial.

2. Change Arduino to manual as opposed to auto-reset (I have used a seeeduino with a little switch to allow this).

3a. Log out of the IDE
3b. In (Windows) C:\Documents and Settings\username\Application Data\Arduino\preferences.txt change the line
upload.using = bootloader
to
upload.using = arduinoisp

4. Wire the proper Arduino --> stripped_down_arduino
5V --> 5V

family christmas
sledging
me cookings
house
garden

Dolomites Easter 2008. Now done as YouTube video.

I'm not entirely sure how YouTube orders them but it seems to vary from time to time.