Sharkey's blog

I've been recalcitrant in getting a link of some sort to the Flying Tortoise blog, an active and interesting place to read up on such matters as tiny housing, housetrucks, live-aboard water craft, and life's outlook in general. Keith manages to keep the dialog lively, entering an average of over a post a day for the last two years (I don't have to point out that this is probably thirty times more than what you'll get around here...) The photos are superb, and the Tortoise serves as a finger on the pulse of some of the other blogs that relate to what is now considered "efficient living".

Drop over and give it a look, it's refreshingly Kiwi-esque in character:

The Flying Tortoise

True to form, Randy Grubb has (at least mostly) completed the Decoliner according to schedule (at least, mostly on schedule, it seems that the "completion date" was bumped forward four months when the project looked like it would be finished this year some time). The engine and mechanicals of this Cruiser are still unknown.

Here it is, with portholes installed and all shined up for a stay at some Intergalactic RV park:

Although I thought I was close to actually constructing this project, it turns out that I've stuck myself into more development before getting that far.

Early in the experimentation around the Watthour calculator, I realized that I would need a second processor. Since the current sensing code in the Watthour calculator samples the current 3,000 times before using mathematical calculations to average out the current, the circuit runs a bit on the slow side. This isn't a problem for the display, but I could foresee problems if the controller itself had so much delay when it should be busy adjusting the Variac. I tried lowering the number of samples, but this quickly resulted in jittery and inaccurate readings and calculations.

For the price of a second Nano, I wouldn't have to be concerned how many clock cycles the display used up, so I ordered a second one from the auction site.

It seems hard to believe that it's been ten years since novelist and Merry Prankster Ken Kesey shuffled off the mortal coil. Although I knew his brother Chuck rather better, I have to say that his passing impacted me more than I would have expected.

My first near encounter with Ken was in the tiny burg of Creswell, Oregon. I was riding through town with Jay in his old pickup truck, when he pointed over to the entrance of the IGA market and asked if I knew who the fellow just getting into a 1966 Pontiac Grand Prix convertible was. Without hesitation, I recognized Kesey, perhaps not so much on sight as on presence. Somehow, I just knew it was him.

We continued to have brief associations over the years, I got to know the Springfield Creamery folks through my association with the Oregon Country Fair, worked on the Creamery facilities a time or two. My meetings with Ken were always cordial, he never seemed to "put on airs" or act superior in any way.

Very early in my research for this project, I happened upon the Open Energy Monitor project, a group of people who had come together to explore the hardware, software and philosophy of monitoring one's own energy use, including electricity, gas, water and whatever else (wonder if I could put an Arduino to work on my wood stove?). The site included examples of whole-house energy monitoring, rather like an all-inclusive "Kill-a-Watt" meter. The hardware needed to do this was actually very basic, schematics and part descriptions were supplied, as were the Arduino sketches needed to make it all work and return results. There were even users who were using the Arduino to control excess solar production by dumping power into water heaters!

One of the basic sketches and associated libraries in the Arduino IDE tutorial is LCD (Liquid Crystal Display), which allows information from the processor to be indicated on a readout for the user to view. I've always considered displays to be PFM (Pure Freakin' Magic), so I copped a small display from a derelict satellite receiver at the radio station and decided to play around with that for an evening or two.

Research showed that most small non-proprietary LCD displays use a generic protocol and can be addressed using a pre-determined set of instructions which were contained in the Arduino library. The rest was pretty simple, although it involved connecting what seemed like a lot of wires to a small connector on the back of the display and a fair amount of finger crossing, as I was not able to find an exact pinout of the particular display I was using. Never the less, after jiggling a few loose connections, I had it working.

The hardware was working fine. Each night, I'd remove the Arduino from the system so that I could noodle around with it in the IDE (development software). Once the Nano that I'd ordered had arrived, I'd put it into the production system and have the Duemilnove for testing and other possible projects.

One small problem that I had noticed was that with the increased sensitivity the new mouse provided, the Variac was going nuts when I ran the washing machine. The washer is a horizontal-axis unit, it agitates by running the drum one direction for a minute or so, then stops for a few seconds, then runs the drum in the opposite direction, repeating this cycle over and over. The Variac would frantically turn up and down in response to these cycles, and was really getting on my nerves. The controller would even try to adjust the dump power in response to water and clothes tumbling in the washer drum, the loading and unloading of the washer motor was evident in the wattmeter disc motion.

Although the controller seemed to be working well, I did notice that there was some "creep" in the disc that wasn't being detected by the optical mouse. When the power level running through the meter was very small, the disc would turn very slowly and the mouse would "wake up", turning it's internal LED on to full brightness, but the controller would not indicate that there was any movement, and the Variac would not be adjusted. Checking the data coming off the mouse using a terminal session showed that in spite of being awake due to the motion, it wasn't putting out any motion coordinates. Nothing for the Arduino to work with.

Now that I had a method of reading the data coming off of the mouse, I needed a way to get this info off the Arduino board and out into the real world to do some work. One of the motion control web pages I found while researching was a description of an interface to control a simple remote control car by using mouse movements. The RC car was a very elementary design, with simple push buttons for forward, back, etc. The provided sketch of the code looked like it could be used to illuminate LED lamps when the mouse was moved, so I tried it out, using red and green LEDs for movements forward and back (Y-axis) on the mouse. This worked fine, and it also meant that I now had a way to see what the processor was doing with the mouse movements without having to have a USB cable connected to a computer and a terminal session open and running.

Something new was on the horizon. Actually, the idea for a controller replacement I had was not new. Back when I built my last wattmeter hack, I was already thinking I'd like to sense the direction and speed of a rotating meter disc using an optical computer mouse. I had spent a good deal of time searching the internet for ideas or plans, and asked nearly everyone I knew who had computer or programming experience about the hardware and code needed to do such a project, but no workable solutions presented themselves.

A few months back I was explaining my solar power system to a visitor (John of the Polymecca Housetruck), and mentioned the mouse idea. John replied that "a lot of people are building things using Arduino microcontrollers". That sounded kind of exotic and probably expensive, so I didn't think much more about it.