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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Arduino Stuff

Another completely non-moto, very geeky post. This afternoon (Friday), my Amazon order of Arduino pieces came in and within 15 minutes, I had them incorporated into my latest project. The blue object installed on the breadboard top/center in the picture is a digital temperature and humidity sensor and just to the right is the ultrasonic distance sensor. The temperature/humidity sensor will simply be monitoring the air temperature inside of the utility room in the hut. The intent is to mount the ultrasonic "ping" sensor near the top of the fresh water tank and measuring the level of the water. I did test the the sensor will get a reasonable reflection from the surface of water by just taking the unit outside while being powered off of a 9v battery. It even gets a good reflection from snow. I can think of all sorts of application for this sensor.

Another item that I was really looking forward to trying out was this board. It is also an Arduino Uno R3 board but has integrated Ethernet, PoE (Power over Ethernet) and SD card storage. This is in addition to the 5 analog and 8 digital inputs. With this board, 5 of the digital inputs are being used by the Ethernet and SD interfaces. The PoE will allow me to run an ethernet cable from the PoE switches that I have installed in all of the residential huts and use it for both power and data.

Much of the afternoon was spent trying to get the web server code running reliably and I will be taking one of these with me on my upcoming business trip. I don't think that I'll be playing with it on the flight but it may end up consuming my evenings. I can think of worse ways to spend my time. I personally find this stuff incredibly interesting and have been looking for a way to learn how to use these microprocessors.

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Keeping Busy

Here is an example of how the road maintenance folks push the snow and ice as far to the side as they can. In most cases, over the edge so that the runoff doesn't collect on the road. This has been our typical weather for the last week or so. Cool in the morning (~2°F) and warming up into the high 30s (°F) by late afternoon.

For some areas, like our parking lot, the water just collects as they haven't melted the storm drains yet. Here, I am parked on the sidewalk next to the 6" high curb. So the ice is over 6" thick at this point. I was lazy and didn't actually park in a regular parking space as I wasn't planning on staying very long.

One of the projects I have been working on this week has been learning some Arduino programming. I needed to make a bunch of low power environmental monitoring systems for use in the Barrow huts. I want to monitor temperature, humidity, water level in the fresh water tank, moisture on the floor (i.e. flooding). And have all of this reporting on a "dashboard" accessible over the network. Shouldn't be too difficult and I'm having a great time learning how to do it. This is an Arduino Uno R3 board that I'm playing with but will be deploying another model that has an ethernet connection and is powered by running DC voltage over the Ethernet cable. I may also use wireless in some of the huts depending on what's available.

 

Here is some colorful food for the Wisconsonland challenge but I'm pretty late to the game. This is a Pad Hed, a Thai mushroom/pepper stir fry. It tasted wonderful!

One last thing, I ended up working on the bike all afternoon and one of the things I did was install a panel mount jack for the Gerbings heated gear. I initially just had a wire hanging near the battery but when I installed the new fusebox, I moved the hanging cable to the fairing. When I was a Radio Shack looking for Arduino parts, I decided to look for a replacement power plug for my heated liner. Yes, I probably could've just sent it back to Gerbings to repair since it is still under warranty but since I found the plug, I just fixed it. And since they had the right size plug ("N"), I looked for a panel mount jack and they had that as well. I think that this looks and works a lot better than a power cable hanging from the bike.

Other tasks completed today, changed to oil and filter from the 5w30 "winter oil" to 20w50 which is what is recommended for anything above 5°F. The oil filter was much more difficult to replace than any other time. The sidecar subframe makes it extremely difficult to get the filter out. In the future, I may simply remove the sidecar and front subframe. Today, I removed the exhaust headers instead and they didn't come out easily.

I also removed the car battery in the sidecar and reconnected the Odyssey motorcycle battery which lived under the seat all Winter. When I plugged it back in, it still had 12.7v and easily started the engine. Put the seat cushion back into the sidecar so I could once again carry a passenger. Still on the list, replace the front brake lines.

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