I listed as part of my winter avoid-cabin-fever goals I wanted to do a bit more geocaching and I actually did better than I thought. I got out on 5 different days finding 8 different caches. Not bad since I had taken a long post knee injury break from caching (according to my caching stats program I went 1274 days because of my knee injury – man that injury fucked up all things physical in my life).
This summer I’ve decided as part of my desire to get more active I’m going to pursue a very ambitious caching goal. In the months of July and August I want to DOUBLE the number of caches under my belt. I ended June sitting at 36 so I’m hoping to hit 72 by the end of summer. Ambitious you say? Nay nay. This weekend I got things started off and clocked 7 caches. That ties the month to date with March 2004 when I first started caching.
My geocaching goals for the summer:
Find 36 caches
Place 2 caches (one up north and one here in the city)
Launch 1 travel bug
Design my own geocoin for placing in caches
I’ll post back as I progress… Looking forward to it!
As mentioned in my previous hobby post I’ve been working on learning the Arduino micro controller. Up until now I’ve been doing small projects that would work with a single component or two working on their own.
My first attempt at bringing a few different sensors and controls together is an LED Count Down Clock. What does it do? It is a single 7 segment LED that when a button is pushed counts down to 0 and beeps. Pretty straight forward but a fun little learning project. Here’s a quick video that gives you an idea of what it does:
The wiring is a bit interesting – figuring out how all 10 of the connections coming off of the LED map is an interesting exercise but with the datasheet isn’t terrible to figure out. Hooking up the buzzer and the button is two wires a piece and straight forward (one to power, one to a controller port on the Arduino).
The basic program is pretty straight forward. I wrote two libraries – one to control the rendering of numbers on the LED and one to drive the sound options. Here is what the main program looks like:
// Main Program
int val = 0;
int oldVal = 0;
int state = 0;
void setup() {
// initialize the digital pin as an output:
pinMode(8, OUTPUT);
pinMode(1, OUTPUT);
pinMode(2, OUTPUT);
pinMode(3, OUTPUT);
pinMode(4, OUTPUT);
pinMode(5, OUTPUT);
pinMode(6, OUTPUT);
pinMode(7, OUTPUT);
pinMode(button, INPUT);
pinMode(speaker, OUTPUT);
}
// the loop() method runs over and over again,
// as long as the Arduino has power
void loop()
{
val = digitalRead(button);
renderClear;
if ((val == HIGH) && (oldVal == LOW)){
state = 1 – state;
delay(10);
}
oldVal = val;
if (state == 1) {
renderCountdown();
buzz(speaker, 2500, 1000);
state = 0;
}
}
So there’s version 1.0 of my LED countdown clock. I’m already starting to plan for my second version of the project which will have the following feature set:
Two 7 segment LEDs powered by a multiplexer
Two buttons – one to start the countdown and one to allow you to select how much time you want on the countdown (I’m thinking of having it selectable by 5s or 10s)
I have an odd relationship with winter. On the one hand it is a season I truly love; to me there is no moment on this earth more peaceful then when it snows and the temperature is just around the freezing mark. There is this beautiful silence and it has a restorative power to it. On the other hand it is dark, cold and a season where motivation to get off your arse can be hard to come by.
To help cope with the drawbacks of the season I resolved this winter to focus on a few hobbies to keep me from wasting away hours. The three primary hobbies I am focusing on are: micro controller programming, geocaching and model railroading.
Micro controller programming
Micro controllers are super small and low powered computers that drive many of the things you have in your homes – DVD players, clocks, televisions, and on and on. My dear consumer whore friend Jim started working with the Arduino micro controller platform a few months ago and he was doing some seriously cool stuff. I’ve never worked with networked devices before (that is devices that can talk to one and other by various means) and my head is full of things I want to try and make. This hobby is a learning hobby for me – it is something completely new (although pulls heavily on my programming experience) that I’m super excited to be learning about.
My sort of end goal with micro controllers is to make a GPS device that will connect to my cell phone while I am ATVing that will report back my position and possibly allow me to send messages back through twitter, etc!
Geocaching
Geocaching is an old hat hobby for me – I’ve been geocaching since 2003 but because of my knee I haven’t been able to dedicate as much time as I’d like. Now that my knee is kinda-sorta-thinking-about-it better-ish post surgery I’m excited to be getting back in to the swing of things and clocking some finds. My goal here is to get out whenever the weather is nice enough (like this past and coming weekends!) to get some exercise and work the knee a bit. I think everyone needs to find a good excuse to get out of the house in the winter and geocaching is that excuse for me!
Model Railroading
I’ve loved trains all my life. Between my dad spending his life working on electric powered trains and growing up about a kilometer as the crow flies from the CN line that cuts through North-East Toronto and listening to the trains as I fell asleep at night. I feel some deep and powerful connection to trains whenever I see one go by I feel the need to stop and appreciate the awesomeness and masterful human innovation of these monster machines.
So as a way channel to play out this love affair I’ve always had an interest in model trains. About 7 or 8 years ago before I got married my dad and I built an initial lay out but between getting married and moving out we never got to complete it. I’ve now picked up where we left off and together with my Dad we are working on building the layout we’ve always talked about.
I’ll have pictures of the layout to share soon and I’ll be posting updates here on the blog.
So that’s my winter coping strategy! I’ll be posting updates as I work through these.
