In the Beginning

Its tough to say when my love of technology first began. To me it almost seems like I was right out of my mother's womb and wondering how the EKG worked , or why the florescent light illuminating most post birth hue would hum the way that it did. I think if I had to nail it down to one of my earliest memories, it would have to be when I was three years old, and playing upstairs in my sister's room. Memories from that time in my life are kind of sketchy and jumbled together like a barely coherent dream. I remember patches of what went on but very little of it came be assembled into any sort of time line.

Our home was a little row house in southwest Philadelphia (when it was safe to live there, probably 1974). The house was built in the late 20's or early 30's and had real old electrical service. Two prong outlets with no ground. The paint was old and peeling, the floor boards creaked, and it seemed like every day my father was working on some part of the house to make it better. At the time I seemed oblivious to all of this. Being three years old my mind was a total sponge trying to soak up as many new and exciting things as I could. EVERYTHING was bright and new, and nothing was off limits.

To get back to my sister's room. I had been playing in there. My sister's listened to a lot of music and hung out in there room a lot and I used to feel left out if I was not in there with them. I am not sure if the size was ACTUALLY bigger than mine and my brothers room, but is certainly felt that way and I felt more comfortale in there as a result. So during the days when my sister's and brother were at school I would roam around looking for things to enlighten my small mind. I was always magnetically drawn to my sister's room, hoping that in some way my presence there would magically make them appear, turn on some music and start hanging out in there. I guess that was my way of expressing that I missed them.

Standing alone in a quite room with nothing happening almost made me feel as if I was frozen in time. Nothing moved, not a sound was heard, and I almost felt a bit guilty breathing since it would upset this delicate balance of the environment. I turned to leave the room and find something else to do and my foot kicked a small Bobby Pin. Seeing as how this was metal and it traveled across a wooden floor it made a slight sound. However in a quiet room with my senses set on maximum gain to scan out anything that my young mind could soak up, the sound was loud and thundering. My attention immediately focused on it.

I picked it up and started to bend it around. I think I even stuck it on my finger. It squeezed it tight and left a small imprint when I removed it. When I relaxed my attention off of the Bobby pin I noticed that I was standing next to a wall.

Being that young and not having a fully developed mind is a strange thing. Your perceptions are different, and you methods for getting tasks done are different as well. Furthermore because everything is so bright and new, being able to rely on a lengthy attention span is never something you can consider. You simply just move onto the next amazing thing and easily forget what you are doing.

So here I was standing next to a wall, after finding this Bobby pin on the floor, which I was still holding, and I decided that I had had enough and wanted to leave the room, but I had focused so much on the Bobby pin that I did not realize I had walked across the room and ended up next to a wall, so I needed to find the door so I could leave. I looked up from my hands and at the wall in front of me and figured that if I ran my eyes along the wall I would eventually find where the door was. Pretty slick thinking for a kid whose brain has not fully developed.

I started running my eyes along the wall scanning for the door and noticed a disturbance in the wall. There was a little box with two dark circles on it. I immediately forgot that I was looking for the door and fixated on this. I walked over to the box and sat down in front of it. It was at eye level for a three year old.

I touched the front of the box and marveled over it. It was cold to the touch, the dark circles when touched were not as cold and had two slits in them. Almost like you were supposed to insert something into them. I knew this because I remembered watching on TV a bunch of ladies sitting in front of walls pulling things out of a desk and shoving them into dark circles with slits on them. This  had to be one of those dark circles I had seen on TV. After they shoved something into the slit they would start talking to someone. Maybe I could talk to my sisters using these dark circles with slits in them?

It was really quiet in the room and wanted someone to talk to. So decided I needed to place an offering into the slit on the dark circle on the box in front of me. But what could I use? 

As I was mulling over this question I noticed that I was rubbing the Bobby pin

"OF COURSE!, I'll use THIS!"

In that eureka moment I felt like a giant. It was like all the planets aligned, the clouds parted, and God himself had delivered the answer to me personally. I could almost feel my mind getting stronger, I KNEW I was more confident. There was now purpose, there was finally a reason for the seemingly unrelated chain of events that led up to that point. I then licked my lips with a swipe of my tongue across my top lip and inserted the Bobby pin into one of the slits.

So in reality this is a story about a three year old sticking a piece of metal into an electrical socket with no ground. The "cold outside box" was really the metal cover of the electrical outlet that had no ground and was simply shorted to the neutral return. Aside from the horrors of a three year old being electrocuted, my first hand experience with this was rather strange.

"Something is happening", I quickly thought to myself. My hand felt like it was moving back and forth very quickly but I could not observe it moving at all. "Was someone trying to talk to me through the dark circle with slits in it? Did this happen to the ladies I saw on TV?" 

Before I could ask myself anymore questions, my hand and then my arm started to hurt and feel very hot. This was not what I expected, I immediately got frightened, and screamed rather loudly. In one motion I let go of the Bobby pin in what seemed like an explosion of my hand. I then started shouting and crying uncontrollably.

Help was not far away and my Mother soon showed up confused and alarmed. I think the only words that came out of my mouth between the sobs were "It bit me!" At that point she noticed the Bobby pin in the socket and what was really going on.

She hugged me very close and told me it would be alright. I started to feel better. When my crying subsided a bit she grabbed my cheeks and moved my face so I looked her straight in the eyes and she said, "Your not supposed to play with electricity" softly to me.

In retrospect I think back to that time and would like to apologize to my Mother, because I don't think I could ever take those words to heart. Without ever having a say in the matter I was now hooked on electricity, and that type of addiction has lead me to be the person I am today.

Let the Deep Frying Begin!

So guess who got a turkey fryer for Christmas?

Now frying was not the first thing I had planned on doing with this setup, in fact it was one of the last things I had planned on doing with it. Lets face it, there are literally endless culinary possibilities with a gigantic pot and propane burner.

The first thing I ended up doing was boiling a big pot of water to see how long it would take. To do this, I filled up the pot to the MAX FILL line which was about three gallons of water. I set the burner on high, and measured the temperature of the water to get a starting point. I then placed the pot on the burner and set a timer. It took roughly twenty minutes to boil three gallons of water. Without delving into a bunch of math, I came up with about 3.3 KW of power being used. Not bad.

My original plan was to use the fryer to malt my own barley and boil up some wort for brewing beer. To do this I needed a lot of time, planning, and materials all of which I did not have. New Year's Eve was looming and I wanted to bring something to my sister's house for the gathering that she had arranged. So in the end I decided to fry some things up to take to her house.

First I needed to decide what I was going to fry up. Although this is a turkey fryer I did not have the time or materials to fry up a turkey. Furthermore I would have had to carve it all up and lets face it, a carved turkey is not really something you want to simply grab and stuff in your face after you have been drinking all night. So I decided that finger foods would be best. Fried chicken is a good choice, and of course we will need something sweet, so I decided on fried Oreos and fried Twinkies to cure a sweet tooth.

Next I needed to procure three gallons of frying oil. I had heard that peanut oil was the best for this. I have tasted things fried in peanut oil before and had liked it. The smell was also somewhat welcoming, so I decided that peanut oil would be best.

With a large list of things to buy in my hand I was off to the beast for some shopping. Navigating the isles of Wal*Mart on New Year's Eve was not as difficult as I had expected. The store was crowded but not unbearably.

I settled for a fried chicken recipe that was easy, yet crispy and delicious. I had my list of ingredients tightly clenched in my hand and ended up buying chicken legs and wings since there were no pre-cut whole chickens about in the meat department. Also I had to get buttermilk. I've never bought buttermilk before and was unsure if it was even carried in the dairy section. It would appear that only small quart sized bottled were available so I snagged one.

When I found myself  in the isle for snack cakes and cookies, I got pretty confused. I had no idea that there were so many varieties of Oreos. I mean it was just outright mind boggling. It was like they had a variety of cookie for every subtle change in the density of creme between two pieces. Then on top of all that, they had all sorts of colors, flavors, shapes, and seasons they were marketing for. It took me a moment but I FINALLY found the regular run of the mill Oreos.

Also while in the snack isle I was equally perplexed by the fact that there were no Twinkies about. I ended having to buy the Great Value Golden Cream Cakes. What a generic rip off! Whatever! It looked like a Twinkie.

As for the frying oil, I searched high and low and was not able to find any peanut oil. It's like there was a shortage or something. I ended up having to pay WAY too much for cottonseed oil at Target.

Now that I had all my ingredients, I soaked the chicken in buttermilk overnight, and got it all breaded up. For the sweets I just used Belgian Waffle mix. Later that day I fired up the fryer.

The frying was a little tough seeing as how it was my first time. Also there was some difficulty in maintaining the oil temperatures throughout the frying process. I suppose I just need to work on that a bit. Some of the chicken in the beginning came out a little darker since the temperature was a too high. In the future I need to keep it between 310-320 degrees.

Despite the setbacks and roadblocks, there was a lot of fried food that fed a lot of smiling faces.

I deem this first fry a success!

Arduino Synth

To continue my efforts in learning as much as I can about the Arduino Uno board I decided to piece together a small synthesizer as per the Auduino project. Below is a small schematic I put together.

I used a 10 Kilo Ohm potentiometers in series with a 100 ohm resistor. To isolate the amplifier I used an 8 ohm to 1000 ohm audio transformer in series with another 100 ohm resistor to keep things safe.

This is a shot of the setup all hooked up and ready to go. Below is a video of it.

Arduino Uno Test

So one of the things I received for Christmas this year was a "Getting Started with Arduino Kit". This came with the Arduino Uno board, a hand full of components (resistors, LED's and the like), some hookup wires and a breadboard.

At first glance all the pieces and parts seemed a bit confusing, but with a little reading and some patience the development process turned out to be a lot easier than I expected. Please note of course that I had just come from using the Microchip SDK MPLAB IDE which requires programming in assembly language.

Anyways, in no time I was up and running. I got the little LED (Pin 13) to blink with some of the example code provided with the Arduino Development Environment.


After this I got a bit ballsy and went right for a program that makes the Arduino speak. Its a rudimentary speech synth and I merely just had to load and run. Below is a video of my effort.

New Year, Same Problems

Well here we are firmly planted into the new year. A time for new beginnings, new challenges, new opportunities, and, hmm well the same problems it would seem. My mortgage is still too much, my equity is still too little (thanks to the market), and every time I try to make a minor improvement to "my investment" it turns into a major project.

This past year the "major project" I had going on was taking care of my flooded basement. The basement was once poorly finished and in great need of some attention, however I did not want to have to completely redo the entire thing. I literally had to rip everything out, get french drains installed and then build something else in it's place.

 This is the basement when we first moved in.

This is during some flooding after I ripped the carpets and walls out

This is the room I built in its place, that took a lot of time and debt to create. Incidentally I spend little to no time in this room. I am so used to having a sinking feeling in my stomach while down here, up to my shins in water, moaning about how forsaken I feel, that I cannot possibly be comfortable in the room in any carnation. Also because the room was finished when I bought the house, it added little to no value to it. On the plus side the french drains and pump have been working rather well this year.

So I ended this year with a minor home improvement, a great deal more debt, and a room that I still do not use. "But that's OK the real-estate market always goes up, Right?" Oh wait! It hasn't. In fact home values in my area have gone down a bit. Perfect.

I hadn't planned on staying in New Jersey the rest of my life. I miss having land. I need at least an acre so I do not feel like I am up my neighbors ass every-time I stretch in the morning. At the moment I am situated on a quarter acre that is higher then all the homes around me so at very least I can lord over them in my smugness and they in turn can point and laugh at me as I try to stop the house from falling apart around me.

Such is life

Mike's Big Bad Battery Box

For those experimenters that are continually on the go, and need a mobile power source that could be lugged about. I offer you the Big Bad Battery Box. Original Article found here.

Finally getting around to filling the decade long need for power
A number of years ago I started toying with homemade VLF (Very Low Frequency) radio equipment. These radios covered a range of roughly 10Hz to around 10 KHz and to aid in reception with minimal noise, I needed to place myself and the equipment far away from man-made electrical interference. This meant going far away from the electrical grid for long periods of time.

As time marched on, it would seem that my need for portable power increased almost tenfold. I have many projects doing many different things, and I always seem to need power in places that scarcely offer it. (i.e. satellite/space station communication, VLF monitoring, geophone monitoring, watching satellite TV in the middle of nowhere, you get the picture). To facilitate all of this I needed a luggable and robust power source at a minimum of cost.

So what did I have on hand?
 Because this need for mobile power has continued for nearly a decade and a half, I happen to have a few parts lying about.

First up is the box. I picked this gem up from one of my regular haunts. It was basically just an empty box that at one time housed a Wheatstone bridge. The store clearly exploited my weakness for rugged wooden boxes.

I found a power supply that fit neatly into the box only one isle over from the box. The total cost of both items was somewhere around eight dollars in 1996.

Poking around a little further in my garage, I turned up a few lead acid batteries. These are two 4.5 Amp Hr 12 Volt lead acid batteries. I pulled these from a small electric scooter a few years ago and could not bring myself to dispose of them.

Ok, now that I have a bunch of parts, what the hell do I do with them?
Well first you want to assemble all the team members to see how things would be mounted and wired together.

The basic ideal was this. I wanted a box that contained, one variable power supply, both lead acid batteries, and a power connector. Each item would have its own power hook-ups. This way the box is multi-purpose. If near an outlet I can use the power supply, if not I can use the batteries in series or parallel, the power connector can be hooked up to either the batteries or the power supply. This configuration also allowed me to use the power supply to charge the batteries. Score one for me.

 Solving for the variable
The problem I now faced was how to make the power supply variable. I am sure there are many ways to do this and Lord knows the way I choose is not nearly as efficient as it should be. However I only was able to use what I had on hand and to make it work for me.

The picture below shows voltage regulators. They basically take a larger voltage and make a stable lower voltage, regardless of the load you place on them (Well, sort off).

The voltages I have on this unit are as follows 5, 8,12,15,18, and 20. The power supply provides around 21 volts. I wired these up to a 12 position selector switch.

In the second picture you can see everything all wired up. Be sure to make your lengths of wire consistent with how everything will be mounted in the box.

Once everything was soldered together it was time for a test. I checked each of the voltages and they all came out to be right on the nose.
 

Putting on a decent face.
Finally I had to make things look nice. I used an old piece of paneling from one of our daughter's walls as a face plate. I cut holes, sanding it down, and sprayed four coats of enamel on it.

Presenting the Big Bad Battery Box!
I am pleased. Now I just need enough time from all the events in my life to take advantage of my latitude this winter to see if I can catch some of the Northern Lights on my little receiver that will now have PORTABLE POWER!!!!

The Diabolical Phone Switch

Sick of teenagers abusing the use of your house phone? Well your prayers for a solution have been answered. I give to you the Diabolical Phone Switch. Original article available here.

 The Disclaimer
First let me say that I will not be held responsible for any of the dumb crap that may result from any ideas you may derive from the following text.

I am basically presenting a device that I created in a few nights worth of free time to cure a pesky problem I have been having with phone abuse from three teenage daughters.

Be aware that this device uses line voltages from an AC power outlet, and that proper care should be taken whenever line voltages are to be worked with. So be safe and don't be stupid!

But Why?
I like to think of myself as a reasonable person. I fully understand that teenagers like to use the phone, text message, and generally wallow in their own ultra-dramatic pubescence. Teenage girls are the worst for this. And having three of them REALLY makes things difficult when they all wish to use the house phone at once.

Despite the fact that there are 24 hours in a day, this still does not seem to be enough for teenagers who wish to blabber all day and night.

Because of this, I find myself threatening to disconnect the phone at a predetermined time of the evening just so I can get some sleep. Furthermore before my nightly slumber I have to either walk around and collect all the phones or unplug the main line.

This is no joke they will literally stay up all night on a school night talking non-sense.

To remedy this and save some sanity I decided that some automation might take care of this problem. This way I don't have to lift a finger to insure that the phone goes off at a certain time of night. 

What I need it to do

Basically I need a machine that I can put into the main phone line, which will turn off the phone as per a schedule that I can control. I will also need it to default itself to enable the phone line if power is lost in case of emergency.

To accomplish this I will use a lamp/Christmas light timer that has the ability to be programmed on a weekly basis.

When triggered the timer will enable a 12-volt wall wart (Transformer), enabling a relay, which is normally closed. This breaks the contact in the line disabling the phone. The timer will also remove power to the transformer to release the relay and re-enable the phone.

The Pieces and Parts of it all
Okay, so this is where you need to put on your thinking cap.

Going through the parts required you want to make sure that you choose a timer that will suit your needs. I had one laying about that allowed me to program a weeks worth of scheduling.

As for the wall transformer and relay. You want to make sure to match the voltage of the transformer to something the relay can handle. The smaller the voltage and current consumption of the relay the better. Also the relay will need to be able to switch at least two wires. Each phone line is a pair of wires. Finally you'll need a pair of phone jacks and a box to mount everything in. 
 
Start soldering it all together

Be careful and double check everything that you are soldering together. Here you can see the relay being soldered.

Also I needed another wall transformer since the other one didn't produce the correct voltage/current that was needed for the relay.

In the back you can see the phone jacks. We will be utilizing the red and green wires on both the jacks. When wiring to the relay make sure that green connects to green and red connects to red.

Getting it together and testing
 Here we see everything soldered together, and ready to be tested. The timer that I have allows you to trigger it manually. I used a multi-meter set to check for continuity to insure the relay was working properly.

Once everything checked out, it was time to mount into a box.

 Scary isn't it?
Looks more like a time bomb then a device to cut off a phone-line doesn't it? It's packed into the box a little tight but I had to use what was on-hand. I kept the components secured to the box using Velcro on the bottom of it and then put Velcro on each component. It's not fancy but it seems to work.
I also cut a few holes in the lid for the phone jacks and the A/C line cord. Once the timer is programmed I tape the lid on, plug in the phones and wait for the cry's of pubescent angst. My days of yelling to get off the phone at a reasonable time are FINALLY over.

Tis the season for Ground Radio

Well I had thought about it, I have planned it, and now I have finally got started in my experiments in ground radio.

Ground radio is simply like any other form of radio with the exception of the antenna system. In this method of receiving and in some cases transmitting signals, a ground rod is used as the antenna. For more information on the benefits and strange occurrences in the ground radio field please visit this link

Aside from some of the more corny aspects that the link has to offer I still have a lot of faith in what a ground radio system can provide.

 

The Setup

Below is a picture of my meager setup.

This is my ground radio electrode. It’s basically just a 5 foot copper pipe 3/4 inch in diameter. Every 6 inches I drilled a hole through the pipe. Once driven into the ground I charge the electrode by pouring brine solution into the pipe. The solution leeches out of the pipe into the surrounding soil. Once it looks like the liquid has leeched out completely I then pack the pipe with rock salt to keep it charged.

This is the radio receiver I hook up to the ground electrode. I believe this is a Rycom 6010 Selective Voltmeter. Basically it’s a voltmeter that monitors AC currents. The cool thing about this meter is that it is tunable with a tight 250hz filter and can monitor AM and BOTH sidebands.

If you look closely you’ll note that the meter portion of the unit is modified. I had to put my own meter into the unit since it came from EBay with a busted meter. I tap the wires going to the meter and use them to interface with a PC.

 

Next I take the wires coming from the meter tap and hook them up to a data logging voltmeter that is serially connected to my computer. If you look at the screen you’ll see the results of about 12 hours worth of monitoring.

 

The Experiment
The experiment at this stage consist mainly of monitoring a signal over a 24 hour period, logging the results on the PC and then having the data produce a graph that shows signal strength over time.

For this I needed a signal that is not only constantly on, but will also change overtime. A good candidate for this is a Navy Submarine Mega Transmitter in Cutler Maine. This transmitter is part of a network of very low frequency transmitters that broadcast a 50 baud signal to all the Trident Submarines all over the globe. As a side note I have come to find it a pointless venture to try and decrypt this 50 baud signal.

 

In addition to the transmitter broadcasting on the order of a million watts, the antenna system is also designed to penetrate through earth and water to get its signal to the sub.

Also because the signal is 24 KHz, its wavelength is roughly the distance from the ground to the ionized layer of atmosphere that is affected by the sun. So here we have a signal that can both travel through the Earth & water yet have its signal strength affected by the sun.

 

The Results
When I first hooked the receiver up to the ground electrode I was surprised at the intense signal strength and low noise ratio that the system produced. I was picking up things that I could NEVER pick up with an antenna above the ground. Furthermore, I did not have to have a tuning network setup to reject unwanted noise.

 

The first attempt to monitor a 24 hour period’s worth of data failed because the video card in my ancient PC gave out. After playing with the software a bit I managed to get it installed on my laptop and succeeded in my monitoring efforts.

 

Below is the graph I got from the monitoring I did two days ago.

Ok, the X-Axis is obviously time over a 24 hour period. The Y-Axis is the signal strength dictated by the meter in milli-volts.

 

If you look around 6:12 AM you’ll see that the sharp drop in the graph represents the sun rise. As the sun rises the solar radiation starts to hit the atmosphere and it begins to ionize. This ionized layer causes the signal strength to drop.

 

You can see after the sharp drop in signal strength that there is a small burp that occurs after this. This has always happened in all my monitoring and I’m not really sure WHY it happens.

 

Moving on you can see that between 10:30AM and Noon there are two sharp spikes in the graph. These are either small solar flare, or some sort of gamma ray burst. Two years ago when I did similar monitoring there were many events like this that lasts many times longer since we were at the peak in our solar cycle.

 

Finally around 5:40 PM we see the signal strength jump up again as the sun sets.

 

Lessons Learned
Well it’s hard to tell, since I have done this sort of thing before.

 

This experiment was basically set up to insure that my equipment is in working order.

 

And the results are, it worked perfectly for my needs to move on to other ground radio experiments.

Next I plan to use more then one ground electrode and to place a big coil and a tuning network in the system.