Technical Rockabilly

My wife got me the advanced arduino starter kit for Flying Spaghetti Monster-mas! I’ve been having a ton of fun playing with this thing and trying to remember how to program . My office is full of blinking LED’s and beeping speakers and swearwords. This thing is great! I can’t wait to buy a dedicated arduino for my chicken coop door opener. haha

What I’ve done so far:

• blink an LED
• fade and LED
• botton controlled fading LED
• light sensing box that sounds an alarm when opened.

I give you: vulcan.troseph.com. The latest addition to my computer collection. She’s no spring chicken but she’s going to have a lot of web hosting power.

Specs:

2x Dual core 2.8Ghz Xeon Procs

4Gb ram

750GB raid 10

Ubuntu 8.04 LAMP stack

It should be up and running within a couple weeks. Wewt!

This is the chicken door opener prototype I’ve been working on. The idea is the sensor will be mounted to the top and when the sun comes up, the door opens, and frees the birds.

The circuit is pretty simple. And stolen from here.

I used identical components aside from the LED’s.

4.7k Resistor
2k-100k LDR
2N3904 Transistor
Guts salvaged from the CD drive of a Sony boom box
4AA battery holder
mercury switch

My friend Jorge just got this email from his manager regarding overtime. This place is beyond ridiculous!

I have been informed that you had overtime on this up coming paycheck. Payroll spoke with Dick VanLame about it and they are not coming down hard on anybody this time, but please don’t do it in the future, or it warrants an occurrence in the future.

John Doe has 0.05 Overtime hours for the 2009.11.16 to 2009.11.30 pay period.

Obsequiously,

Manager Testes,
Swing Shift Supervisor
<mtestes@awfulhost.com>

0.05 = 3 minutes! This place is a joke!