Windmeadow Labs

I have been searching for ways to painlessly save money. I thought I would start by looking at my utility bills.

My latest water bill put my average daily water consumption at 77 gallons per day. That covers, bathroom, dishwasher and clothes washer. (I didn't water the yard this month) Daily showers make up the majority of my water usage.

I saw a Monty Python skit that used semaphore. It was interesting so I decided to built a robot semaphore system.

I wanted to use the wii nunchuck accelerometer for some measurements. I didn't really want to drag my computer around, so I built a little data logger. The nunchuck accelerometer data gets written to an eeprom. Then later I can download the data to my PC.

I am working on a data logger for the wii nunchuck. I need something to record the accelerometer values that get output from the nunchuck. I had a Microchip 25LC080 eeprom handy and decided to hook it up to my Arduino.

The Arduino site has a great tutorial on working with serial eeproms http://www.arduino.cc/en/Tutorial/SPIEEPROM . I used it to get most of my information. The eeprom I am using is a just little different than the one in the tutorial.

With my '93 Mazda 626 getting a little long in the tooth, I decided to get a new vehicle. Rather than buying a new car, I opted for a scooter, keeping my old car as a backup for rainy days. After doing some research and test riding a couple of scooters, I decided on a Blur 150 from Genuine Scooter Company.

Setting up a good apache test website can be a pain. Mod_backhand can help simply things.

Usually your have your live website, www.mycompany.com, then you may have a dev website called something like dev.www.mycompany.com. Sometimes using a non production domain name causes problems. It shouldn't but sometimes when you use legacy code or third party programs, you don't have total control of everything. Then you can get into DNS tricks, changing host files, etc...

Here is simple howto, to run your lawnmower off of propane gas instead of gasoline.

It was much easier to run off of propane than I thought it would be. First I pulled off the gas tank and carburetor. Next I got a length of hose. I took one end and put it just inside the intake manifold. I then got my propane stove and took of its burner. I attached the other end of the hose to the stove's gas outlet, then used some duct tape to try and hold everything in place.

Wood gasification is the process of turning wood into carbon monoxide and hydrogen by reacting the raw material (wood) at high temperatures with a controlled amount of oxygen. Without oxygen, the wood can't burn so it transforms into gas. This gas can be used as fuel in an internal combustion engine.

The Wiimote makes a perfect control system for a fire fighting robot.

It has IR sensors which can detect a candle and a bluetooth transciever to communicate back to a host computer. I use a boebot as the robot platform, an arduino, wiimote and a Linux computer.

With a little hacking, data can be read from a wii nunchuck directly into an Arduino, using TWI (aka I2C). The nunchuck contains a 3 axis accelerometer, joystick and buttons for only $19.95. The same accelerometer in kit form, cost $34.95 at Sparkfun. Plus the nunchuck is already wired up in a nice clean case! So the wii nunchuck should fit nicely into anyones robotic project.