College

I have just finished my first semester at USF. Hopefully this break I can update more and continue the trend into the next semester like I failed to do this fall. I have been spending literally hundreds of dollars on components recently, so interesting projects should be in my future. I shall make a valiant effort to actually blog about it.

On a side note, the only good electronics store near me is going out of business. This is a horrible tragedy. I beg of all the DIYers out there to visit your local stores (if you have one) (I'm not talking about Radioshack and their sorry excuse for an assortment of parts) and spend some money. Keep the businesses alive.

Zip ties

My lightning detector stopped working last week. I suspected a problem with the batteries because it had been acting up, but I was nonetheless doubtful that the batteries could be low. The quiescent current of the detector is low enough that the shelf lives of the D-cell batteries are barely affected. I did suspect that the battery holders could be broken or that the batteries could have become dislodged. I opened it up, and sure enough, one of the battery holders had broken again. I had fixed it once with a combination of a few tapes (aluminium and masking), but the adhesive had pulled off. Not having a replacement on hand and not wanting to make a trip to the overpriced cell phones and maybe some electronics store (Radioshack), I decided to try zip ties. Long story short, they seem to work very well.

This is just a quick post of something interesting yet obvious. I move in to the dorm tomorrow, so I have been busy. HOWEVER, I should have a more interesting and full project writeup soon on something that I began and fully completed within the last few days. Hopefully it is impressive enough to be featured on Hack A Day or a similar site! 

Vacation, 3D, and Van De Graaff

I hadn't written anything for quite a while because of a two-week roadtrip that my family and I took before I went off to college. Needless to say, it was a blast, but I didn't do much science. However, I did buy a set of Nvidia active shutter glasses at a used electronics store. I figured I could hack the protocol and use it with the IZ3D drivers that are available for multiple 3D setups and seem to be somewhat open for hacking. After getting the glasses to blink, I tried to see over what frequency range they would operate. Unfortunately, they seem to cut out right around 60Hz, so they don't seem like a good candidate for low refresh rate displays (like almost all of mine). Luckily for me, USF has given me a $1,200 computer stipend, so this was the excuse I was needing to get a computer with a 3D display. USF prefers Dells, and sure enough, Dell has an Nvidia based 3D laptop. (They also have an Alienware 3D laptop, but I don't need to spend $400 on fancy lights, even though I want to.)  Nvidia glasses timings are summarized here. For you Arduino users, delayMicroseconds (at 16MHz) is adequate. Surprisingly, the IR patterns function without a carrier signal. Being used to TV remotes, not having to code the 40ish-kHz signal was a nice surprise.

On an unrelated note, I was at Ikea this week. I was browsing around when all of a sudden I found OMG-PERFECT large stainless steel hemispherical bowls with no lip for $4.99 each (Blanda Blank). These have been EXACTLY what I have been looking for to make a topload for a Van De Graaff generator. They also sell smaller ones (and MUCH more expensive larger ones), but 11" diameter is a wonderful size. Hopefully I can get together a HV-pumped VDG generator in the near future, but I need to figure out belts and bearings. This made my day!

#EDIT: Dell has discontinued the custom ordering to campus stores, so I instead purchased a $1200 laptop (XPS 15) that I am trying to sell. This means no 3D computer for a while for me. Oh well.

Stream of consciousness

A couple weeks ago, I looked into Active Noise Canceling (ANC) technology. I already understood the concept (wave superposition of an inverted signal to yield a zero sum), but it was interesting to see that the ANC chips were essentially just opamps that relied on the user for gain values and audio filters. I don't have the same level of understanding of analog circuitry as I do digital, so I put off deciphering the filter elements and instead just bought a pair of ANC earbuds by Audio-Technica. They should arrive in time for the 2-week roadtrip starting this weekend. Maybe I'll get around to making my own sometime. discreet implementation, chips with digitally set gain, analog chip with real values for filters

I also bought two Kingston 64GB solid state hard drives. They were on sale. After flashing new firmware (they have bad firmware - which is why they were on sale), they will be added to a custom desktop in RAID 0 configuration. The desktop wasn't being used, so I am working on getting it to match and sync with my laptop. The RAID 0 should yield 128GB at about twice the speed of either the drives individually. Extrapolating from my laptop's performance with an Intel SSD, this is going to be amazing. 

I also bought a broken TI84+SE calculator. Goodness, I have been spending a lot of money recently. Hopefully I can get her working. If all goes well, I plan to backlight her and maybe even add solar power and rechargeable batteries. I have worked with Li+ batteries before, so this should be doable. {Yes, I use the female gender when referring to electronics (like people do with boats).} I had a strong urge right then to place a semicolon after that last bracket. 

Laptop Thermal Compound Replaced

Lauren, my primary laptop (HP tx2), had been overheating, burning my lap, and shutting down unexpectedly. Upon installing Speccy (same people as Ccleaner), I found out that she was running in the high 90 degrees Celsius. Considering that my AMD processor is rated for under the boiling point of water, I knew something needed to change. Task manager showed usual idling CPU usage, so I couldn't blame the heat on any one program. Lauren was just getting old and dusty. I also expected that she had poor quality thermal compound on her processor.

My best friend, neighbor, and fellow computer expert, Lukas, had a partly used tube of Arctic Silver 5 that he was willing to give me. Today, I took the time to disassemble Lauren, clean the heatsink, and replace the (dry and crappy) old thermal compound. After a scare with the screen's cable not being properly in, she is back up and running and COLD!!! Well, cold in comparison. (66*C with a few tabs open in Chrome)

For those of you wishing to do as I did, Arcticsilver.com has good instructions.

Welcome

Hello, World.
I am beginning this blog to share what I do. The name takes from my usual response when someone (usually a non-science person) asks me why or for what purpose I have done something scientifically beautiful when they cannot see the beauty and do not understand the underlying processes. To better explain this concept, I reference the great Randall Munroe: Beauty - XKCD

As to the URL by which my blog may be called by the vast mesh of domain name servers (of which, I prefer 8.8.8.8 Google, FTW), it is my first handle and, therefore, crappy enough that it wasn't already taken.

As to the topics of my posts, they will be anything from computer science to microelectronics to pyrotechnics among myriad other similar things that I spend my free time doing and my thinking time thinking.

Welcome to my blog. I hope to update at least weekly.