Blog silence


Posted by Nate in Bruno, Day to Day, Projects.
Wednesday, December 5th, 2007 at 7:03 pm


Whew.  I wasn’t sure if I’d find time to post until after the holidays!  It’s been a little hectic around here, for sure.  A quick recap for those wondering what Duoteam’s been up to:

  • img_0479-resized.jpgCelebrating Thanksgiving in Nebraska at Karen’s brother’s house.
  • Karen helped decorate and overall spread good cheer for her office’s holiday party.
  • We’ve both had colds.
  • I haven’t biked to work since the day before Thanksgiving (see above – but I intend to soon!)
  • junie_bruno.JPGI finally started brewing again after blowing my supply at the wedding.
  • It snowed!  We’ve had two storms in a row, and more forecast for tomorrow.  After a disappointing winter last year, we’re off to a good start.
  • Bruno turned 3!  He got to have a little friend over for some massive bouts of tug-o-war.  Fun.

pict0004.JPGI’ve also been tweaking the mostly-working-perfectly wakeup system, just today I adjusted the sensor to determine when the alarm is going off and fixed a little bug in the light timing.  I had to program it to start about an hour before we want to get up since it takes that long for our house to get up to the temperature we want – it’s been near zero in the mornings for the last few weeks.

pict0003.JPGNot sure who’s interested in the details, but in the pic at right you can see the components that went into this.  From roughly left to right: the cannibalized innards of a 5V power supply ($2 at Savers!), the kit I put together to fade the 120V light, and on the right is a barebones Arduino board soldered into a little PC board I got from Radio Shack that’s also holding the rest of the circuitry I designed.  Nothing too complex, and I know I could have gotten it in a smaller box, but this one holds the light nicely.

Pretty nice in action, too.  It’s nice waking up to some light instead of bleak & cold darkness.  I’ve found it’s much more of a psychological effect (for me, anyway), where I’ll wake up with the light and the sound and know that there’s more time in the cycle before I’m "supposed" to get up, but I’ve been making an effort to not be tied to this "scheduled" wakeup time.  If I’m awake and it’s close enough, I get up!  Hard to break myself of the "but the alarm won’t go off for another 10 minutes!" thing – but I think that just leads to bad sleep in the morning.  Anyway.  Good progress, and I definitely like it better than any other alarm I’ve used.

That’s all for now!  Keep bugging Karen, maybe she’ll post!

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3 Responses to “Blog silence”

  1. Q Says:

    Dude, that wake-up setup looks pretty damn sweet. I kinda want one now . . .

  2. Peter Says:

    intense, d00d, intense . . . I meant to ask you about this thingy-majig when I saw you the other night — I think we should get together for a round of Settlers and we can chat then (or are you still grounded from Settlers?)

  3. troy Says:

    YEAH!!! So glad to hear from you!. It’s been a little busy down here too, but I find myself with copeous amounts of down time too. Ergo, I am glad to catch up on Duo Team business!!