All posts by Langdon

Ads, ad blockers and a totally awesome discovery

I include Google ads in this site to generate some income from my project work and the effort of documenting it.  Now, many of you are probably running ad blocking software in your web browsers – I certainly do, so I don’t blame you if you do.

However I learned something important tonight: Google can sometimes serve up some freaking awesome ads!

I am still working on eliminating the personal dating ads (I have managed to kill the awful weight loss ones!), but while testing my site, I discovered that there was an ad for a website called Simscale.

Disclaimer: I have nothing to do with Simscale and have not been paid or induced to endorse them in any way.

I just think that the service that they offer is frickin awesome.

Simscale (https://www.simscale.com/) is a cloud based simulation service that can perform fluid dynamics analysys, finite element analysis (stress analysis), and thermodynamic analysis of your project.  You upload your 3D model, configure the simulation (non-trivial, but doable), and their cloud system computes the results for you.  You can pay for the computer time to keep it private, or make it a public project and they will do the computation for free!  That is a seriously good deal.

Designing a piece of machinery, or a tool and want to know if the design is robust enough?  Simscale can tell you where the points of failure will likely be.  Want to simulate the airflow in a building (or through a heat recovery system) – Simscale can tell you what will happen.

When I studied industrial design over twenty years ago, this sort of analysis was vastly expensive and mentioned only in passing by our lecturers.  Now days, it’s completely commoditised and accessible to just about anyone with and internet connection, 3D modeling software, the inclination to learn some new skills, and a few hours.

Any way you look at it, this is an amazing service – and one that I am seriously contemplating using with my projects.

The Midnight Clock – 1

I love sleep. I really love a good long sleep and waking feeling well rested. It’s not the easiest thing to do though these days. Our lives are so busy, there are so many demands and temptations to stay up late and get up early. As the Bon Jovi song goes: “Until I’m six feet under / Baby I don’t need a bed / Gonna live while I’m alive / I’ll sleep when I’m dead…”

I love staying up late, and often find that I am very productive between midnight and 2.00am. However, since I almost inevitably wake up around 7.00am this limits my sleep to only five hours a night. Not enough for me. I really like seven to eight hours.

All in all it makes it difficult to get enough sleep and most importantly quality sleep. So when I recently saw this TED talk by Jessa Gamble about “biphasic sleep”, I was immediately captivated by the idea. Jessa’s research suggested that human beings evolved not to sleep the whole night through, but to sleep in two portions. One early in the night, the other a couple of hours later. The gap being filled by low level activity like talk, sex, reading etc.

You can read a longer article about Jessa’s work here:

http://magazine.utoronto.ca/feature/jessa-gamble-circadian-rhythm-chronobiology-seasonal-affective-disorder-polyphasic-sleep/

This style of sleep appeals to me strongly I am often tired in the early evening and ready for a sleep, but I force myself to stay up until later so that I will sleep right through and (hopefull
y) not wake up. But it’s a Catch22, since when I get to 11.00pm or midnight, I start to wake up again and feel active. That leads to me sometimes staying up too late researching an idea, or doing something else and then not getting enough sleep.

Biphasic sleep seems like the ideal answer – sleep for a while early in the evening when I am tired from a hard days work, wake up for a couple of hours and enjoy that uniquely quiet and peaceful time in the middle of the night, then drift off back to sleep again and sleep until dawn. It seems to suit my circadian rhythm really well.

So I decided to try it out. I have had two nights of early to bed with short periods of being awake in the middle of the night (which surprisingly) just happened naturally – I woke up around midnight without and prompts, and then drifted off to sleep again around 2.00am.

The only problem was that when I woke up, I had no idea what time it was and I found turning over and looking at the clock disturbing. I really didn’t want to do it. This lead me to thinking about a new project – something that I have dubbed The Midnight Clock.

The Midnight Clock would (as the name suggests) turn on around midnight. I would not however be harsh and bright, it would be a soft light that would gradually increase in brightness (to perhaps the intensity of a 10 watt incandescent globe) over the course of about 20 minutes, then hold that brightness until about an hour and ten minutes, at which point it would slowly fade away over the course of half an hour to nothing.

If I was very tired and just wanted to sleep, this “clock” would not wake me up, nor would it keep me awake. But it would be a direct indication of the time if I happened to wake up and wonder. If it’s fully dark, that’s ok, go back to sleep. If it’s getting lighter, then it’s ok to wake up more…

I am thinking that LEDs (warm white, or RGB which I could tune to an orange/red part of the spectrum) would be ideal, driven by an Arduino board to handle the light level and timing. The Adruino would be capable of driving the LEDS without needing a separate power supply and pulse width modulation (PWM) hat or add on, so the system would be simple and compact.

I am going to put this project on my list for the near future. It’s a good little one day Quick Project and would be a nice addition to my on going science experiment with sleep.

The image attached to this post is an oil painting by Andrew Stevovich, Woman with Autumn Leaves, 1994, 36″ x 72″, Private Collection
from: https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Andrew_Stevovich_oil_painting,_Woman_with_Autumn_Leaves,_1994,_36%22_x_72%22.jpg

Motorcycle helmet HUD – 3

2016-08-23 08.26.00I may still be waiting for my 3D printer to arrive, but in the mean time, the components for my HUD were waiting in the mail box today!
It included a Rasberry Pi model 3 B, an Adafruit Feather Bluefruit (bluetooth enabled Feather development board) and some headers for the Bluefruit.

So now I’m ready to push forward with this project and get the electronics finalised.  Once the 3D printer arrives, then I can start working on housings for the electronics.  Lots to plan and lots to do!

 

The Howto Howto

Over a couple of decades the distilled wisdom of my family’s experience of hosting Christmas for our relatives has been collected in a notebook that has become known as The Christmas Book.

It contains pearls of wisdom like: “Light the kettle BBQ at 8.15am for turkey to start cooking at 9.00am, for 1.00pm lunch” (yes, we usually have a monster turkey (boned and rolled and stuffed with a few boned and rolled chickens, and the thing takes at least three hours to roast!).

Or: “Prepare glazed sweet potato ahead of time. Reheat early Christmas day, then wrap in beach towels and put in bed under covers to keep warm until lunch is ready to serve” (yes this really works – with sweet potato and other things – and it helps a lot to relieve congestion and gridlock when you only have one oven to work with!).

The point is that it never hurts to have a reminder when we are doing things that – while significant – we don’t do regularly enough to have a clear memory of all the pitfalls and potential problems.

For me with TtM&D, making a “How To” video is similar. Shooting video is easy. Shooting very good video that clearly tells the story is a much more complex problem. There’s a reason after all why professional production crews have lots of people, each with their own job to attend to. Just because you are only one person filming something doesn’t diminish the complexity of the task, it just means that it’s all on you to get right!

To that end I am going to write and publish Howtos for the things that I do to create material for TtM&D and post them (see the Resources menu), who knows, they might be useful for you as well, either directly, or as a starting point for your own memory aids.

On the list so far:

  • Making video
  • Sound recording with video
  • Making 3D models
  • Audio recording

Fuel level sender unit examination

The fuel light on my motorcycle (a Triumph Dayton 955i) came on recently and steadfastly refused to go off, even with a full tank of fuel.

My mechanic swapped it out for a new unit and gave me the old one to play with.  I have often wondered exactly how a fuel sender unit works, so I took it apart and investigated.

[su_youtube_advanced url=”https://youtu.be/3n56y_591iI” responsive=”no” width=”900″ height=”600″  autohide=”yes” rel=”no” theme=”light”]

Motorcycle land speed record attempt

There is something about Englishmen and going REALLY fast.  They seem to be very good at it.  Both the engineering involved in building land speed record cars and driving them.

The current land speed record is held by Andy Green, driving the ThrustSSC (that’s: SuperSonic Car) and yes, ThrustSSC did break the sound barrier on land on four wheels with an average speed over one mile in two passes of 1227.986 km/h.  Any way you look at it, that’s insanely fast.

Not content with that, Richard Noble, who lead the ThrustSCC team, is now aiming for 1000 mph (1600 km/h) with his next project Bloodhound SSC.

But now Triumph, with the help of Isle of Man legend Guy Martin, are aiming to push the motorcycle land speed record from 376.363 mph to 400 mph with the Triumph Infor Rocket.  So once again English engineering and pilot are pushing the boundaries of what’s possible.

I read the Triumph Infor Rocket in Wired Magazine online.  You can see the article here.

Specs for this insane motorcycle:

  • 25.5 feet long
  • Two 1.4 liter engines
  • 1000 horsepower
  • Parachute for braking

That is one very, very serious bike – and it’s a Triumph!  I have a special soft spot for this land speed record attempt, as I ride a Triumph myself – a 2004 Daytona 955i.  It would be great to see Triumph take back a title that they haven’t held since the Triumph powered Gyronaut X-1 set a land speed record of 395.363 km/h in 1966 – that’s 50 years ago.

Here’s hoping that the Rocket and Guy Martin can do it.

Fast Internet access is here at last

I was notified yesterdaty that fiber optic Internet access has been connected to my building.  It’s not especially relevant to TtM&D, but it will definitely make web browsing for research as well well as uploading large files much, much faster!  I am very much looking forward to getting off the horribly slow ADSL2 connection that I have currently.

Motorcycle helmet HUD – 2

Ok, today has been an interesting day for discoveries.  I was thinking about the limitations of having to have a wired connection between the helmet and main unit on the bike and it got me thinking about Bluetooth and wireless options.

The first thing I discovered (which I wasn’t aware of) is that basic Bluetooth modules (and slave and master pair) can be readily inserted in place of a serial connection between devices.  Unfortunately I don’t think that this would work in the case of driving the Neopixel LED strip that I am planning on using for speed display, but it did point me in the right direction.

What I found was the Adafruit Feather 32u4 Bluefruit LE Arduino development board:

https://www.adafruit.com/products/2829

It’s a fully functional Arduino single board computer with the following features:

  • Size: 51mm x 23mm x 8mm
  • USB powered
  • Built in lithium ion polymer battery charger (!)
  • Bluetooth 4.0 Low Energy module
  • Heaps of GPIO pins

And it’s cheap (USD$30).  All of this makes it perfect for controlling the LED strip.  It’s small, batter powered, low power consumption, has Bluetooth for communication, and is perfect for controlling LEDs.

I have ordered one to play with and get a feel for Arduino (which I haven’t used before).  So my Raspberry Pi 3 B (which also has Bluetooth 4.0 support) should be able to talk directly to the Feather and issue commands about what light pattern to display.

This means that the helmet components just got more complex, but it should be worth the hassle to have a wire free connection.

Invisible IR spotlight

Another old project that I recently dug up and want to complete is this REALLY powerful invisible infrared spotlight.

I chose 940 nanometer infrared LEDs for the job as they are completely invisible to the naked eye.  I should insert a WARNING here:

If you are thinking of replicating this project, you need to be aware that it is uncertain if very powerful IR light like this can damage the retina in the eyes of humans and animals.  Therefore, the best thing to do is to be cautious.  DON’T look into the IR beam directly.

DON’T point the beam at people or animals that are close.  No-one wants eye damage.  Safety first, last, always.

2016-08-07 17.02.59Building the spotlight was an interesting project.  It uses 304 infrared LEDs that emit infrared light in the 940 nanometer range.  The LEDs have a beam angle of 15 degrees, so the light is reasonably focused without needing a lens on the front of the unit.

It has a light sensor in it, so that it automatically turns on in low light conditions where a wildlife cam, or CCTV camera might need extra illumination.

I also added a fan to the enclosure as the density of the LEDs lead to a fair amount of heat being generated!

The power supply to the unit is 24 volts to keep the current draw down, so there is a 24 to 12 volt transformer in the housing as well to run the cooling fan.

Testing of the prototype went well, the LEDs are seriously bright and made for very effective illumination in total darkness.

ir-spotlight-casingI came across an old sketch that I made of the housing, so I thought I would add it in.  I have another set of  LEDs mounted and soldered in to another board to make a second unit one day, so it’s good to have the original housing drawing.  Note that the cooling fan ended up on the back of the unit rather than the top as suggested here.

I will post more about this project in due course.

Motorcycle helmet HUD – 1

This is an old project that I am finally getting back to, with the hope of completing.

I have ridden motorcycles for nearly twenty years, and being tall (6’2″) means that on all of the bikes that I have owned, the instrument cluster is out of my line of site – usually obscured by the chin guard of my helmet (and there is absolutely no way known that I will ever wear an open face helmet).

This is a problem, because it means that I have to frequently take my eyes off the road to check that I am not exceeding the speed limit – something ridiculously easy to do on a modern sports bike.

My solution, which I prototyped over a year ago uses a GPS receiver connected to a Raspberry Pi single board computer, and a stick of RGB LEDs to give a visual indication of speed in the rider’s peripheral vision, where each LED lit corresponds to a speed band (40 to 50kms, 50 to 60kms etc).  The prototype also has an LCD screen and a Raspberry Pi camera that down the track I want to use for automatic speed zone detection (using a convolutional neural network for speed sign identification) but that’s a bigger project for another time.

The prototype worked in stationary testing, but I never got the chance to do testing in a vehicle and the Raspberry Pi has since been scavenged for the Heat Recovery Ventilator project, so I really need to buy another one.

So this is a project that definitely needs to be revived.  I have been off the bike for a while, but did a long trip recently and got thinking about it again seeing all of the police on the road and really missing having cruise control!

Stay tuned.  More to come.