Wednesday, April 16, 2014

Bloomington, IN, Cont.

Here are a few more photos taken this evening as I was walking towards a get together associated with the PTC. This is the exit from campus towards Kirkwood Ave. one of the restaurant lined streets near the campus. The get together was at the Irish Lion, a recreation of an Irish pub. On the way back, I stopped at the Bombay Cafe, a very informal Indian place a couple of blocks from campus.

This is the courthouse and is a good example of the masonry found on just about every public building in town. This building looks pretty nice compared to the well weathered buildings on the IU campus. N.B. no leaves on the trees yet but there are flowers planted in some of the planters both here and at the campus.

Another public building, the local Carnegie library extending out of the back of the more modern public library. Again, note the use of limestone to cover the building.

Today, there was more discussion on power systems in use by projects including an excellent presentation on LiFePO4 with an emphasis on discharge performance at extremely low temperatures. The batteries are extremely light for their capacity and that attracts some motorcyclists to them. But they can be easily destroyed by improper charging. In fact, Enduralast, the maker of my new alternator, does not recommend them due to the difficulty charging them. I guess each cell needs to be independently monitored by the charge controller to prevent overcharging. They are being used successfully but with sophisticated charge controllers for their solar and wind power systems.

I also talked to several folks with experience using the same radios that I am planning to deploy in Barrow this summer. They have been using them very successfully in Antarctica where the climate is much harsher than Alaska.

On a completely unrelated note, I brought a couple of the Arduino boards with me to play with while in the hotel. This is the Uno R3 with built in PoE Ethernet and SD card slot for data storage. The little daughter board on top in the picture is the USB interface that is only used when downloading programing onto the board. I now have a web server running on this tiny computer and will be using that to post environmental data on a regular basis to another server. I'm thinking that I may want a RTC (real time clock) so I can timestamp my data.

Thursday morning - This pipe organ is in the back of our meeting room and, as I was told, it has only been here a couple of years. What that didn't tell me is whether it is new or restored. But it looks like it's been here for a long time.

 

9 comments:

  1. Thanks for the campus photos. I guess all I remember about the campus is that I thought it was pretty...no details. So your photos confirm that it is indeed a pretty campus!

    Here's the info on the organ- http://newsinfo.iu.edu/news-archive/21762.html

    I'd love to hear either of them!

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    1. Thanks for the link. It would be interesting to hear it. Years ago, when I was in college, a friend would play the pipe organ at Pomona College. I helped with the sound equipment and recording. There is absolutely no way you can electronically reproduce the feeling of a live performance with any sort of recording.

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  2. Great architecture. Reminds me a bit of the Winnipeg campus.

    Now I get it why the Alaska weather doesn't bother you a bit... you are constantly traveling ;-)

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    1. It is interesting architecture. I don't think that I really expected it to look as it does.

      IMHO, I don't think that I travel that much. But definitely more than I did for the first twenty years. Travel peaked around ten years ago and has been dropping ever since.

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  3. The courthouse looks cool, but that pipe organ is amazing. Would be neat to be able to hear it.

    How was the grub at the pub and Indian place?

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    1. They had appetizers at the pub and they seemed incredibly ordinary and I'm afraid that it wasn't much better at the Indian place. Pretty okay but nothing to write home about.

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  4. Richard:

    You've got me intrigued with those Arduino boards. I just wonder if I could get them to do something useful. I went to their website but I don't know where you would learn the programming language.

    Those are majestic looking buildings on Campus. They don't make them like that anymore

    bob
    A weekend photographer or Riding the Wet Coast

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    1. With the Arduino, Google is your friend. I had a hard time getting started but I would suggest downloading the development environment and look at all of the examples. Adafruit has a whole series of tutorials building basic circuits and writing some simple programs.

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