Backyard Webcam - Fish-eye upgrade

Backyard webcam upgraded with "Fish-eye" lens.  The two original cameras have been replaced with one camera.

The new fish-eye lens has a very wide field of view.

Weather and WebCam

Migrated weather station logger from WindowsXP to Ubuntu Linux. The Dell Mini 9 with the windowsXP OS was high maintenance, and was stressing the hardware. Particularly the SSD (solid state drive). After it crashed and did not recover on December 23rd, it was then decided to migrate to linux.

The Davis WeatherLink software is not available for use on linux. Wview was selected as the replacement. The software is open-source, and is relatively easy to install by the intermediate to advanced user.

The Wview software opened up a new avenue of usage. The software has the ability to upload to wunderground.com. There is a new link in the upper right corner of the blog. Clicking on this link will take you to the Weather Underground website. It also has a image of the backyard webcam. NOTE: If you click on the image, you will be taken to the webcam and webcam archive page. If you click on the weather data, you will be taken to the weather graphs and weather archive data.

Still using the Davis Vantage Pro 2 ISS weather station hardware. It has been in service since 2006.

Arduino Controlled Jack-O-Lantern lighting

1 Arduino + 1 9Volt battery + 2 Red LED's



code:

#define LED2 9 // the pin for the LED
#define LED3 11 // the pin for the LED


int i = 0; // We'll use this to count up and down

void setup() {

pinMode(LED2, OUTPUT); // tell Arduino LED is an output
pinMode(LED3, OUTPUT); // tell Arduino LED is an output

}

void loop(){

for (i = 0; i < 255; i++) { // loop from 0 to 254 (fade in)
analogWrite(LED2, i); // set the LED brightness
analogWrite(LED3, i); // set the LED brightness
delay(8); // Wait 10ms because analogWrite
// is instantaneous and we would
// not see any change
}

for (i = 255; i > 0; i--) { // loop from 255 to 1 (fade out)

analogWrite(LED2, i); // set the LED brightness
analogWrite(LED3, i); // set the LED brightness
delay(8); // Wait 8ms
}
analogWrite(LED2, 0); // turn off led
analogWrite(LED3, 0); // turn off led
delay(400);


}

AeroQuad is finally fly'n However, crashed after only a few minutes of flight. :(

Web Cam Update

Original mount was made with wood. Replaced with electrical grade pvc conduit and electrical grade pvc 'J' boxes.

Small Diesel engine - Wonder what I can do with this???

There are a lot of interesting youtube videos of small diesel engine projects. These engines can be acquired for a nominal price from amazon.com

If you are into panoramas, the new sony DSC-TX7 has a cool feature called "iSweep"