Internal Reflection

Glass component out of a laser printer-most are plastic.

Cupola Light Panel

Control circuit based on a PICAXE microcontroller under development.

3 Phase 50 AMP Relay Bank

D3 design utilizing all 6 high power 3-phase 50 amp relays. A very loud CLANK when they are turned on!

Water Pressure Gauge

The pressure gauge on the large water tank in the basement of the house I grew up in. Charles Smith Mersick was born in New York City in 1840. After education in New Haven and work in the hardware and metal business, he formed what would become C.S Mersick & Co. Interesting photos of the interior and exterior of the company can be found by clicking on the title to this post.

Bell installed his first telephone exchange in New Haven in 1878 and published the first phone book-a single page-including a listing for C.S Mersick & Co.

Laser Diffraction

Diffraction pattern formed by a surface etching on a back light diffuser out of a LCD display.

Mechanical Delay Device

Out of a high current-50 amp-relay rack likely used to control large motors. This device, actuated by the gray bar at lower left, introduced an adjustable delay of approximately one second after the solenoid is powered up. This is a pneumatic device with a knob, top rear, to change the rate at which air escapes. The motion controls a switch, top left. We have six of the large three-phase relays.

Cool New LED Light

Latest D3 Design.

Rectifier

Selenium plate rectifier out of a very old-tube based-photo studio flash unit.

Power for Audio Amplifier

D3 design for new power supply for high power audio amplifier built into small Sun box. With two additional transformers, 22 pounds on the scale....

27 Years and Now Our First Dell

Our Cloud Wizard has built our first private cloud: Arrived today-Dell T100 server based on dual-core 3Ghz Xeon processor with VT technology to support node role in Eucalyptus cloud architecture running on Ubuntu. D3 has an instance of Ubuntu server running on top now and I've applied for an account-hopefully the administrator will approve it.....

Latest D3 Invention

A new circuit design with a micro-controller dimmer for an array of overhead lights; first installation planned in our basement ceiling.

IBM 3274 Controller

Very heavy gauge steel for cabinet, card cage rack, and other components. The maintenance manual has detailed schematics, waveforms, and assembly diagrams for every subsystem and component. Discontinued in 1990; now in our back yard under the deck!

8 Inch Floppy Drive out of an IBM 3274 Controller

How often do you find an IBM 3274 controller? 1.2Mb formatted capacity?

500Gb 7200 RPM Drive

Failed drive...ebay purchase gone bad...

Oven Controlled Oscillator

A remarkable find, a 5 Mhz oven controlled oscillator that works great! Excellent reference and calibration source.

Magnetic Sensor Vehicle Detection

Early working prototype of HMC1021S single axis magnetic sensor (D3 mounted on green board top) with output amplified by AD620N instrumentation amp feeding a LM393N comparator. We've tested and measured a response of approximatedly 30mV (output of amp) to an auto at a range of 3ft.

Conduit Time

Given a large trench in the front yard, installing a conduit pre-wired with Romex, coax, cat5, heavy gauge 12vdc, and speaker wire plus a pull-string seemed to make sense. We've built it with junction boxes on each exterior end plus two access ports on either side of the sidewalk.

Personal Music Studio

The orange spot on the blue cushion is from a led array mounted on the ceiling!

HAL for Home

RFID Keyed Entry: D3 designed a circuit to convert the square-wave output of a RFID reader to control a relay that is connected to our garage door opener. This is an inside view of the assembly and installation. On the front of the house, waving a tag just below the small red LED (visible through the hole and on the front to indicate sensor location) opens or closes the door.

Quansoo Evening

Quansoo Terror

A Fiery Searcher: these guys are predators with a particular interest in caterpillars. They are one of the largest beetles in North America. Thank goodness for window screens....if you click on the image for a larger view it may lead to nightmares....

Fort Rodman HDR

Early experiment with HDR imaging using Photomatix.

Can we send an invitation for a cup of coffee or a beer?

Perhaps a mile north.....we've already seen the big-no HUGE-black pick up truck with a SAM in the back bed, secret service with guns guarding the guy with the black briefcase, helicopters, fighter jets, Coast Guard cutters, and more....lunch on the deck is clearly being viewed from a satellite..

We Don't Need No Stink'n Crane

An eminently practical approach to painting the boat bottom by taking advantage of the tide....

Fine Mule

Attention to Form II

AC/DC

Exceptional concert....amazing performance by Angus ...thank you WBCN for the great tickets for $10.41! More photos found by clicking title of this post; password is ACDC.

Brown Stag Beetle

A visitor to our back deck last night...I'm staying inside until January....This photo made a big splash in the papers-click on the title....

D3 Smokes the Fleet!

Halifax Race

A class start of the '09 Halifax race. The light gray yacht behind the black boat flying the blue spinnaker is 143 feet long. The maxi-racers followed this start. Additional pictures can be seen by clicking on the title of this post; the password is "halifax".

Substantial Clipping

Output of fuzz circuit in purple showing harsh clipping of input signal.

Guitar Fuzz Circuit

A great sounding ToneBender MKII fuzz pedal circuit constructed with vintage Sanyo germanium transistors D3 harvested from a old reel-to-reel tape recorder circa 1960s. Planning to build this into a portable box with pots for adjusting gain and effect. A link to the source for this circuit can be found by clicking on the title of this post.

Dead in the Water

Our engine failed this afternoon coming out of Manchester harbor; good practice anchoring in a hurry. After some diagnostic work we discovered these parts inside the fuel bladder had popped out of place and blocked the gas flow.

Signal Generator Circuit with Volume Control

This is the prototype circuit using the XR-2206 signal generation IC. D3 extracted a Toshiba TC9235P volume control IC out of a small Cambridge SoundWorks desktop radio found at a yard sale; the up/down control (silver knob) is out of a CD player. The XR-2206 has a pin dedicated as an amplitude modulation input and early testing shows it works very well. For use testing our amplifiers, filters and enclosure designs, we plan to build this into a portable instrument box.

Mayapple Flower in our Shade Garden

A photo of a Mayapple flower growing in our shade garden. These plants were transplanted from my grandfather's house; this was the topic of his last research project. The article published in the American Journal of Botany can be found by clicking on the title of this post.

Push Button Circuit Schematic

This is the circuit D3 designed for the new push button shown in the earlier post. It provides logic and timing for the blue blinking sequence (earlier video) and control lines for indicating charging (red solid) and errors (blinking red).

Push Button Switch

This is a new switch with blue and red led lighting that just arrived. D3 built a circuit to blink with a slow-on slow-off pulsing mode as seen in this video. This will be used to turn our speaker systems on/off. Working today on new functionality, the circuit design now has a start-up sequence that blinks 5 times when the button is pressed and then stays on. It also has a control line that turns the color to red and blinking that will be used as an error or out-of-range condition indicator.

Power Supply Failure

Not every supply works as we would like.....

Air Deflection Fin Design

Improved fin design for seagull whacker.

Seagull Whacker

One end of the frame to support a dual seagull-whacker.

Mother's Day Kite Surfing

A real treat to see an Olympic caliber kite surfer fly by just a few feet away. A full sequence of photos from this run can be found by clicking on the title of this post (then click on slide show button upper right).

BS2P

We recently upgraded to a BS2P Stamp microcontroller with support for I2C and seven segment displays. In this photo, D3 wrote code to write and read-back from an I2C eprom on the breadboard and display the results on a LCD display scavenged from a printer. He also successfully connected a larger 4 line display with back-light from a first generation hand-held GPS.

New Table Lamp

View of the base of a lamp D3 made from an interesting insulator rescued after the local electric company replaced it. Likely out in the weather for many years, the porcelain is still in fine shape.

120 Watts with Excellent Specs

Just arrived today from the UK: only $25 for a completely integrated 120 watt amplifier with very good performance characteristics. We had this up and running in short order with as much volume as we dared to push through our test speaker! Perfect for the signal chain feeding the larger speakers in our prototype design.

Synchronous Chorusing of two Peepers

Females have a perceptual bias towards the first call of a sequence. The males have evolved to
make call-timing adjustments to their own free-running call period in response to competitors in their immediate environment. This is a short segment of a recording of the advertisement calls of two males. The frogs were approximately four feet apart; the microphone was held equidistant between the two. In this trace, one frog delays his call until he becomes the leading caller. As this calling bout continued, the other frog subsequently adjusted his timing to become the first caller; this pattern repeates througout the recording. The original audio can be found by clicking on the title of this post. Our next step is a stereo recording with two microphones as the live effect is striking.

More Peeping

iButton Water Temperature Test

The iButton inside the brass chamber was suspended from a tree branch just below the surface of the Peeper swamp for 48 hours starting at 8pm. The following day, it was very warm with the air temperature rising above 90 degrees. Both the night before and night after were much cooler as was the second day. Temperature sample rate was 5 min/sample (horizontal scale is 5 minutes/tick mark). Information about iButtons is available by clicking on the title of this post which links to the Maxim-IC site.

iButton Deep Water Chamber

This is a simple brass chamber containing a temperature recording iButton mounted on a foam-core insert. The orange tape indicates the end most tightly secured; both Teflon tape and heavy rubber gaskets internally are used. Tonight, we suspended it just beneath the water surface in the swampy area behind our house with the device set to take temperature samples every 5 minutes.

Spring Peeper Call

This is a spectral analysis of a recording we made tonight of a spring peeper. The fundamental or dominant frequency is consistently near 3200Hz. The male calls as loudly as possible at this pitch to attract a mate. Distinct harmonics are seen at 2x (6400Hz) and 3x (9600Hz) with overtones spaced evenly between at 1.5, 2.5, etc. Audacity is the audio tool used for presentation and analysis.

Spring Peepers

Spring Romance

Something New/Old

With tourism down, new attractions can often help....

Light Box

A great light box built from a CCFL back light extracted from an old LCD display. Exceptionally uniform light intensity distribution across the entire surface. The colored squares are filters. It runs on +12vdc (2amps) & + 5vdc.