ChetOS.net

Check out http://cameochemicals.noaa.gov/.  You can put in various chemicals and see what you get when they are combined.

It was designed for environmental disaster mitigation (think industrial spill).

Great news!  Amanda is pregnant.  We had our first ultrasound today, and the baby is right at 7 weeks.

We waited to tell most people until after the first sonogram.  Thank you to those who knew for your prayers.

I will post a scanned copy of the image on Facebook later today.

Well, I broke down and used my Christmas money to buy an Arduino Duemilanove.  This is an ATmega328 microprocessor on a board with all the support circuitry.  The entire unit is called an Arduino, "Smart Projects" builds the boards and wrote the bootloader firmware, which allows it to communicate via USB.  The model name "Duemilanove" is Italian for 2009 (the year of this model's production).

You can read a whole lot more on Arduino's website, or you could look at the Arduino wikipedia entry.

To expand it, you hook up "shields", which are just printed circuit boards that send data on some of the Arduino's I/O ports.  The three that most excite me are:

* Ethernet Sheild (for network access)
* XBee (enables 100ft wireless communication between Arduinos)
* Touchshield (touchscreen interface).

The Ethernet shield is *relatively* cheap at about $40.  The XBee shield is $65 (and you would need at least two).  The Touchscreen is about $175.  I guess I'll be saving my birthday and Christmas money for a few years :-).

But, you only need one Ethernet shield to get it to communicate with the outside world.  And I am thinking I can inject 5V in the unused wires to power it.

I don't know what I am going to do with it, but a few cool ideas:

* Home Automation (turn on lights and stuff remotely)
* Data Logging (temperature, humidity, etc)
* Drawing or simple cutting (like a CNC machine)
* Various LED effects (think Knight Rider)
* High speed photography

That is all I can come up with right now.

The ATmega328 is an 8-bit processor running at 16MHz, it has 2K of RAM and 1KB of non-volatile EEPROM.  It has 32KB of flash memory, which is used to hold programs.

The Arduino folks have written an IDE used to program it, the language looks like C.

Oh, and you have to watch out for "kits", which are cheaper.  They are unassembled, they provide the board and components and you have to solder them and junk.  I am no good at it, so it is worth the extra $15 dollars to have them built.

Also, there are three different models of the XBee, but only one XBee shield (they all fit), so a lot of companies sell the shield alone.  This means it looks like you are getting a great deal, but you actually have to by the XBee chip separately (which is the bulk of the price).  The best XBee chip can broadcast about 1 mile if you have line of sight.

I downloaded the Ocean's Twelve soundtrack, and I have to say, it is really fun to program while listening to Jazz Fusion and slightly-Psychedelic Rock.