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.

 

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