Cold Commutes

The sky was clear and cold as I pedaled east.  It had been nearly a week since the roads were dry, and the recent end of day light savings time had brought the faint dawn light back into my commute, if only for a short while.  

Instead of turning east on the main highway after emerging from my rural back-country path, on a whim I continued straight toward the river, lured perhaps by a glimpse revealed by the dwindling fall foliage.  There was a car parked in nearby, facing the river and with a sun shade in the windshield.  Piled belongings in the back hinted at the possible presence of an unfortunate slumbering occupant.  Cars are designed to keep you dry and warm, although the latter only when running.  I imagine it was a long, chilly night.

The path meandered  down toward the river and closer to the bridge.  Several other cars were there, obviously not there for recreation, but their occupation status unclear. I made my way down the boat ramp to watch the cold, silent river, make its way past.  I'm sure we must have paused here on one of my many canoe trips down the river during warmer seasons.  This morning the river was all business.

Not wanting to backtrack too far, I made a brief scramble up an embankment to gain the familiar roadway just prior to the bridge launching out into air above the river.  Riding to the crest, I paused to take in the view of the fall colors showing warmly in the morning light.  I have been trying to apricate the views from bridges more, although it is usually difficult with close traffic and narrow paths.

Onward to work, where I can warm up from my morning passage.  I will pause again on the west-bound bridge on the way home to enjoy the view from the other side in very similar light, the sun disappearing from its short journey across the sky.

Cycling into Fall

I'd ridden almost a thousand miles over the summer on an e-bike, mostly commuting.  With fall weather closing in, I took the opportunity to test my fitness level out on an extended ride.  I have fond memories of riding out to the Buena Vista ferry with Neil, and had mapped out a loop that was within the capacity of my battery if I rode conservatively (and contributed some wattage).

Relive 'Buena Vista Loop'

Regretfully, I only took one picture along the way.  It was a beautiful old barn set against the fall colors.

There were lots of cute Halloween displays at the farm houses in the area.  There was only one farm dog to keep an eye on, thankfully behind a fence.   I did get quite a scare by a red-tailed squirrel making a surprise run at me before veering off.  That bushy tail in the blur of peripheral vision makes it look like a much bigger animal!  There was also a small bushy gerbil-size rodent along the road I stopped to check on.  He did not look too healthy, but when I reached down to share a pretzel with him, he high-tailed it with remarkable vigor.  I left the pretzel as a peace offering and hopefully he came back for it.  

I've been using an app call Komoot to plan and track trips.  I can then use the generated data and photo(s) to create the video at the top.  Technology has come quite a ways.

The ride took a little more than 2.5 hours with rest stops at the ferry, the bridge, and Hill Top Cemetery.  It clocked in at 38 miles and took 540 Wh (according to my Kill-a-Watt meter).  This is ball-park to the stated 40 mile range and 500 Wh capacity of the battery.  I don't think I could trust my luck much farther since pedaling a 50 pound bike without any help is quite a chore (ask me how I know).

My legs were sore the following day, but a good sore.  I am very curious how I would do on a regular bike at this point, and reckon a 20 mile pedal-only trip would be roughly equivalent.  Might be time to dust off the now thirty year old Trek and find out.

Free Dinosaur, to a Good Home

We love this little guy, but our city does not allow male dinosaurs, and he has started making the most god-awful racket in the mornings. Nothing worse than the call of an adolescent male dinosaur to wake you from your peaceful slumber.

We've heard some people just cook and eat their male dinosaurs, and I image they taste just like chicken, but as you can tell from the photos, this guy is a bantam, so there is not much meat on him.

If you can give this guy a good home, let us know. We will deliver a reasonable distance.

And Then There Were Twenty Seven

Preaching A Different Kind of Religon

I skipped out on the morning session of Conference to give an Arduino seminar to the local model railroading group. Last time I went to one of these, it was all the way down in Roseburg! This time I just had to travel several blocks to our local Prince of Peace Church. Not too many people have combined microcontrollers and model railroading quite like I have, so it was up to me to convince them it was easy and fun!

Here are my slides:


During one of the Maker Fairs, I sketched this out to help illustrate the various functions the micro-controller does on the layout:

All together, it is a bit overwhelming, even for me, but taken a piece a time, it is quite doable. Instead of bringing the full layout, I used the Sparkfun Inventor Kit and a small section of track to demonstrate the various ways I use Arduino.

I think it went well. I got lots of question during and after the seminar. It was obvious they were thinking about ways to apply this to their own layouts! I got home in time for the afternoon Conference session and D. Todd Chrisofferson's wonderful talk about women in the church.

A Day on the Willamette

Had a great day on the Willamette. We went from Crystal Lake Park in Corvallis up to Hyak Park near Adair. It was about 10 river miles, and took about four hours.

We saw a lot of osprey, including a juvenile that took off from the nest. We also saw a large heron.

We had lunch at Half-Moon Bend. We had camped near here on a previous trip.

We had the river to our selves. It made for a great escape from civilization.

Crazy Math

I have been struggling through an online linear algebra course for five weeks with some of my colleagues at work. My brain is not as sharp as it once was, and of course my memory never was. Still, I like learning and solving problems. I finally got the payoff when I was able to use:

to change this:

to this:

I couldn't explain how this works to save my life, but it is amazing to me that someone figured it out. Math can be cool.

Reunion Pics

Here are a few of my favorites:

Pinewood Derby Photos

This was my second year running the Ward's Pinewood Derby. We had several workshops prior to the event to help get the bodies shaped. The kid's designs were amazing.

We had 28 entries this year, twice that of last years event. Luckily I learned my lesson about delegation and of course the leaders really stepped up.

The hit of the night was the photo-finish video replays. Some of the races were really close and they kept the crowd occupied while we got the next heat ready.

It was another great event. Hopefully we made some lasting memories!

2D Printed Pinewood Vanagon

I'm not the first to make a Pinewood Vanagon, but I doubt anyone has made a photo-realistic one like this:

We had an "open" division for the dads (and Cubmasters). There were some crazy entries. Annie didn't want to build a car this year so she had to drive instead.

I don't think she had any idea of what I was up to when I was taking the original photos, but this is what I had in mind! The car on the right was made with a 3D printer!

I think the height exceeds the limit (rules vary), but other than that, it is a legal pinewood car. The sides are balsa and it only weighed 4.5 oz. when completed. The original axle spacing was perfect. I didn't bother with adding weight, graphite or polishing axles (Annie's car was embarrassing fast last year, loosing only to the car that took Districts).

Here is one of the original photos I started with.

How did it do? Let's just say I didn't loose every race. With vanagons, it is about style, not speed!

I'm getting a lot of interest in this, so if you want to try and build your own, the files and notes are here.

Toys of My Childhood

I am taking a "Learning Creative Learning" class online from the MIT Media Lab (the brains behind Lego Mindstorms). One of the readings was an essay by Seymour Papert titled "Gears of My Childhood" where he talked about how his early love of automobiles and gears in particular shaped his learning ability.

In reflecting on the things that sparked my interests as a child, I think it is notable that I can't narrow it down to just one. I seemed to have access to countless creative toys. I remember building a "arctic research station" out of Legos and placing in a snowdrift overnight. I remember the 300 in 1 electronics kit from which I built a radio. Erector sets, Lincoln logs, tinker toys. Some of the things I remember were not toys. My dad's university office held a number of scientific instruments he would let us play with, including one for measuring sound levels in decibels.

If I had to narrow it down to one, it would be the computer. There were a lot of them, starting with the teletype terminal at dad's university where we could play Star Trek on a special account if the system wasn't too busy. And all the craft items we made out of punch cards and program tapes! I wrote about the early computers in my life here.

The latest toy to spark my interest is also a computer.  The Raspberry Pi Linux computer is a marvel. It is faster and has more memory than the university's main frame did, yet I bought it for just $35. It can be used for about anything from commanding toy trains via the internet to learning computer system administration. The applications are endless, and the price puts in reach of everyone. I can't wait to see what the toys of my children's childhood bring about!

Back on the Rails

Holidays seem to be my train time. I did a train show in April and a merit badge clinic in September and that is about it. I have gotten excited about the new Raspberry Pi Linux computer, and plan on using it to control my layout instead of the two Arduino microcontrollers I use now.  There were are a lot of things that I hacked together to get the layout working, and I've long wanted a chance to do it over, simpler and cleaner.

My first step is designing a new control board. This will basically have an Arduino brain (Atmega 328) and two L293D H-bridge controllers. That isn't much of a departure from how it currently works, except it collapses several separate modules on to one board and will be able to control the engine and turnouts itself, or interface with another computer (say a Raspberry Pi)!

Perhaps my biggest leap in simplicity is in the turnout control. In my prior amateur stumbling, I ended up using a transistor to control a relay to control Ken Stapleton's switching circuit (times two!). I burned up two Atlas under-table switches figuring out that Rube Golberg setup. I guess that happens when a 5 volt guy starts trying to control 12 volt systems.  I've determined you could do the same job with several two-dollar, high-power MOSFET transistors, or (drum-roll please) a L293D H-bridge. There are two of these on the Adafruit motor control shield I'm currently using, capable of powering two DC motors each, of which I'm currently using exactly one half of one. A single H-bridge, with some diodes, can control both turn outs! It works, and I've only burned up one resistor and two cheap transistors.

 

The prototyping and testing is done, and the board is laid out and sent off for manufacture. See if you can tell the difference between my board and Lady Ada's motor shield. That is Open Source Hardware for you. She provides all the design files and I just stripped it down and built if up the way I wanted, complete with a  Wii nunchuck adapter! I just have to wait six weeks for it to come back from China to see if it works as advertised. If it works, I'll post my designs on line for others to use as well. So it goes.

Recreational Statistics

At our Ward's Christmas party this year, they had a large jar of Hersey's candy kisses and we were asked to guess the total number. The closest guess to the actual number got to take them home. I remember reading a story about how in such situations, that the average of all the guesses would be closer to actual than the winning guess, a sort of accuracy through consensus thing. Here was my chance to test that out, so I volunteered to check the answers.

We had 72 guesses cast, and as we went through them, I could see the average would be low because some of the smaller kids had unrealistic guesses like 8 or 20. One kid wrote "there are 0 kisses in the jar, but some candy kisses". Funny, and true, but no chocolate for him. The winning guess was 454, which was about 8% higher than the 417 actual pieces. Robin had the next closest guess and was quite disappointed.

Days later, I plugged all the guesses into my magic bit box to see what the statistics said. The average, or mean, as I predicted was very low at 208. That indicated an abnormal distribution, which a histogram quickly confirmed. Somewhere in my reading, I came across a tidbit that said the median would be a better statistic to use for a skewed distribution. Sure enough, the median is 407, or about 3% off actual, and much closer than the winning guess. So I guess with a little quibbling about the use of mean or median, the story was right.

I tracked down the story, and it is from a book called "The Wisdom of Crowds", and involves guessing the weight of an ox at the county fair. I'd rather have chocolate.

Fun Facts: Hershey's Kisses were introduced in 1907, but the term "KISSES" wasn't trademarked until 2001. Hershey makes more than 60 million kisses a day. Candy kisses that is.

A Dress for the Ages

Rachel made a dress for a ball she was going to with a friend. She picked out the pattern and the fabric and had it finished in about a week.

If you haven't heard of steampunk, think Jules Verne, or more modernly, Levianthan by Scott Westerfeld. It is Victorian techno sci-fi.

We talked her in to wearing it to church and she got a lot of compliments.

 Just amazing. Can't wait to see what she tries next!

Conference Talk Title Game

During Conference, after a speaker finished, I started asking the girls what they thought the title of the talk would be just to see if they were listening. They were. It helped me pay better attention as well.

Here is what we came up with for the Sunday a.m. session:

If there was a true winner to this game, I would have to say it was Sis. Burton for having the clearest message in her talk!

New Flooring

With June and Smitty back in Florida, it is time for us to find some new tenants.

The big upkeep item is redoing the kitchen floor. Lots of work, but going quickly with good helpers.

One day, four teeth?

How many teeth have you lost in one day (without a dentist visit)? The other day Annie kept coming up to me and telling me she had lost another tooth.

She quit after four. That has to be some kind of record. Hope the tooth fairy brought some extra cash.