Geek

Cost of a Light Bulb

Back in 2007 I wrote about the cost of running various things from a Christmas tree to an Xbox360. Maybe I’m a cheap skate, but I’m always amazed at the cost of the simple light bulb. Now that we have a bigger house, I’ve been looking for bulbs to replace to save money. It can make a big difference!

Take for example, your basic 60W old-school incandescent light bulb. If you left that on 24 hours a day, every day for a year, that would cost $52! That’s just ONE bulb. I had 100W equivalent exterior CFL bulbs that go on with my fancy timer every night, and I figured out that if I replaced them with 60W equivalent bulbs, I’d save about $20/year and it was plenty bright enough.

Or let’s say you have a living room with 3 100W incandescent bulbs that you use an average of 3 hours per day. If you replace them with 3 100W equivalent CFL bulbs, you’ll save $25/year.

I know it’s not really that much money, but you do that here and there a couple times and you’ve just paid for a Netflix subscription.

Generally you can run about 4 CFL bulbs for the cost of one incandescent bulbs. In a few years, the cost of LED bulbs will come down enough that we’ll all be buying those instead of CFL. You can run about 10 LED bulbs for the coast of one incandescent bulb, and LED bulbs don’t have the warm up time that CFL bulbs do. They’re still pricey but they last longer. You’ll want to do your math before you switch to LED.

By the way, if you’re at all interested in this stuff, you should pick up a Kill-a-Watt. I still find myself plugging various things into it and seeing how much power they use.

benmartens November 4, 2011 Geek, Home Improvement

Windows Media Center LCD Arduino Project

JimM got me interested in Arduinos. They are simple electronics boards that contain almost everything you need to get started with your project. When it arrived in the mail, I connected it to the computer via USB, opened up the development environment, uploaded a small program to the board and boom, I had a blinking light. Simple, yes, but the time to results was extremely low.

My overall plan was to build a display for the Media Center PC in our living room. I wanted to be able to easily see when it was recording something or when one of the tuners was being used by one of the extenders. There are some premade solutions that would have probably worked, but this seemed like a great starter Arduino project and I would end up with something that was completely customizable.

In addition to the Arduino, I got a 20×4 character LCD screen and some small supplies like resistors, wire, buttons, and a potentiometer. This is the point where I should show a schematic for the whole thing, but honestly I never drew one. I built little portions of it as I went and ended up with something that works and hasn’t burned down the house yet.

Basically, the Arduino Uno sends power to the LCD and a 10K potentiometer controls the contrast of the screen. The board also sends the text for the screen through four wires along with a couple extra wires for enabling the screen, etc. The board powers the backlight for the LCD but I hooked up a resistor there to dim the backlight a bit. I had originally planned to have the backlight be controllable from software but I gave up after a couple failures trying to get a transistor hooked into the circuit. There is also a simple button hooked in, but I haven’t needed to use that in the software yet.

Once I got it all soldered together, I stuck it into a plastic hobby box from Radio Shack. I had to cut out a rectangular hole in the front for the LCD. That was done freehand with a Dremel and looks pretty bad when you get up close. Luckily it hides in the shadows and you can’t really tell. I have ideas to do that better next time.

The box now sits by the Media Center and is connected to the PC via USB. That cable provides power and communications. A C# application gathers status from the Ceton InfiniTV tuner and sets the display for the LCD in the box. (For the curious, there is a JSON interface to get to the InfiniTV status.) When a tuner is in use, the box displays the channel call sign and the name of the show that is being recorded. I get that info by mapping the channel number from the tuner to a call sign and then looking for the corresponding file in the Recorded TV folder. That file has the show name. When a tuner isn’t in use, it shows the temperature of that tuner. I’ll probably come up with something better for unused tuners in the future.

This was my first real electronics project so I learned quite a few things that are probably obvious to other people:

Use a bread board. Soldering everything to see if it worked was a pain.
Use header pins so you don’t have to solder directly to the LCD screen.
This whole thing could have been done in a couple minutes by buying a pre-made LCD shield that plugs in on top of the Arduino. I’m glad I did it manually the first time, but next time I’ll probably go for the shield.
Buy an introductory electronics book.
Take more pictures along the way! I was so excited to get this working that it somehow slipped my mind.

What’s next? I have quite a few project ideas but I think the one I’ll tackle next is making a tilt/pan mount for my camera that is controlled by an Arduino and will automatically take big panorama pictures. I’m also going to build an intervalometer into it for time lapse. This project will involve more buttons, motor control, and power from a battery.

benmartens March 11, 2011 Gadgets, Geek, Projects

My Windows Phone Applications

I now have seven applications in the Windows Phone marketplace so I thought I’d give you a quick rundown. You’ll see that it’s not quite as impressive as it sounds since some are sort of duplicates.

	Cascade Skier This is my most successful app, and by successful I mean that I have about 500 downloads. That’s not a lot, but I’m pretty happy. If you ski in the Pacific Northwest, you need this app. I have a whole page devoted to it’s features and it includes a YouTube demo. The short story is that you get hourly weather updates for all the local resorts and webcam images. It also makes use of the live tile feature of the Windows Phone platform to show current stats and the webcam in your live tile for your favorite resort. The webcam as part of the live tile is a recent addition and isn’t shown in this screenshot yet. http://cascadeskier.studio711.com/ [Screenshot 1] [Screenshot 2] [Screenshot 3] [Screenshot 4] [Screenshot 5] [Screenshot 6] View in Marketplace
	DiamondStats The first app that I sent to the marketplace was DiamondStats. I didn’t really think anybody would buy it but I’ve sold about 15 copies. When I play rec league softball, I like to keep my stats, but I don’t like trying to remember them during the game because it takes my mind off what I should be doing. With this app, you come back into the dugout, easily mark what happened and you’re done. It keeps track of your total stats over various games. It’s nothing fancy but it was a good learning experience and something that I’ll use. [Screenshot 1] [Screenshot 2] View in Marketplace
	Puzzle Toolkit The idea for this one came from a couple guys at work who are very involved in PuzzleHunt. This app is one stop shopping for puzzle clue solving. It provides a variety of tools to help you solve clues related to braille, zodiac, Chinese zodiac, maritime signal flags, binary/hex/decimal/octal/roman numerals, ciphers (Vigenere, RotN, substitution, Atbash), resistor codes, semaphore flags, morse code (including ambiguous morse code with dictionary checking), and ascii conversion. While all the other apps are $0.99, this one is priced at $3.99. I split out individual parts of this toolkit and they’re available for $0.99 each as separate apps. There is a separate page for this application with a little more information and a YouTube demo video. [Screenshot 1] [Screenshot 2] [Screenshot 3] [Screenshot 4] [Screenshot 5] View in Marketplace
	Ambiguous Morse This is part of the Puzzle Toolkit. You can type in a serious of dots and dashes without spaces and the app will figure out all the possible translations of that series. Since that can get big quickly, you can filter just by words that are in the dictionary. a reference page helps you go from letters to morse. [Screenshot 1] [Screenshot 2] [Screenshot 3] [Screenshot 4] Ambiguous Morse
	Braille Translator This is part of the Puzzle Toolkit. As you start filling in the dots, it tells you what the current dot pattern represents and also tells you what other letters could be formed if you added more letters. A reference page helps you go from letters to Braille. [Screenshot 1] [Screenshot 2] [Screenshot 3] View in Marketplace
	Ciphers This is part of the Puzzle Toolkit. It will help you encode and decode Vigenere, RotN/Caesar, substitution, and Atbash ciphers. [Screenshot 1] [Screenshot 2] [Screenshot 3] [Screenshot 4] [Screenshot 5] View in Marketplace
	Semaphore Flags This is part of the Puzzle Toolkit. Set two arm positions and see what letter it represents. Set a single arm and you’ll see what letters can be formed with that position set. A reference page helps you go from letter to flags. [Screenshot 1] [Screenshot 2] [Screenshot 3] [Screenshot 4] View in Marketplace
	Live Tile Web Cam Take any web cam image and make it your live tile! If you know the URL to the image, this app will get it set up as your live tile and will automatically refresh it for your every hour or every day. Note: The Windows Phone operating system will only support images that are JPG and PNG files that are less than 80KB in size. [Screenshot 1] View in Marketplace
	Live Tile Web Cam 2 Take any web cam image and make it your live tile! If you know the URL to the image, this app will get it set up as your live tile and will automatically refresh it for your every hour or every day. Note: The Windows Phone operating system will only support images that are JPG and PNG files that are less than 80KB in size. [Screenshot 1] View in Marketplace
	Timelapse Calculator Calculate how long it will take to capture your timelapse photos and the length of the resulting video. [Screenshot 1] View in Marketplace
	Exposure Calculator Quickly calculate the correct aperture or shutter speed based on the film speed (ISO) and lighting conditions. [Screenshot 1] [Screenshot 2] View in Marketplace

Your downloads and reviews are greatly appreciated! Feel free to contact me if you have bugs, comments, feature requests, or even app requests.

benmartens January 20, 2011 Geek, Projects

Ceton InfiniTV Media Center Demo

About a month ago, I wrote a post about the guts of my Media Center PC. But what does it really do? Why did I build it? Since you can’t all stop by and check it out in person, I’ve put together a demo video.

It’s dorky, I know. The various cameras aren’t calibrated the same and my shirt sleeve kept flipping up. But by the time I noticed all these things, I was too far in to start over. So enjoy this (amateur) video showing just a few of the reasons why I love my Windows Media Center PC.

If you’re running just about any version of Windows 7 or Vista, you have the Media Center app. You won’t be able to do the live TV portion, but everything else is available to you for free.

benmartens January 6, 2011 Gadgets, Geek, Projects

Harry Potter Newspaper

After doing the Halloween video, I decided to give special effects another try. This idea had been floating around in my head for a while and here is the result. It’s not perfect, but I thought it was good enough to share.

If you’re curious, the main effects I used in Premiere Elements 8 were lightning, crop and corner pin. The pinning was almost a frame by frame effort as I manually tracked the movement of the paper. If I had $700 for After Effects I could have used motion tracking and the result would have been much cleaner. I also used a combination of blur and coloring effects to try to match the look of the paper. The strange background in the inset video is the result of using chroma key for a background that wasn’t uniform. I did it as an accident but thought it fit the overall look pretty well.

It’s amazing what you can accomplish with a few hours at the computer. We’ve come a long way since the days that we used to sit in the dorm room with multiple VCRs and audio input sources cabled together to attempt to mix videos.

benmartens November 8, 2010 Geek, Projects

Windows Mobile Podcast Player

I have bad news. My 120GB Zune died. The original 30GB is still alive and well but Tyla uses that. My Zune got daily use in my car. I had all my music on there and I mostly used it to play the many podcasts that I listen to (TWiT, Car Talk, Home Theater Geeks, Windows Weekly, and Preston and Steve.)

I decided to use my phone (HTC Touch Pro 2) until I can get a new Windows 7 Phone which will double as my new Zune. The only problem with using Windows Mobile 6.5 as a podcast player is that the media player app doesn’t save your position when you stop listening. This is critical for podcasts which span multiple drives to work.

I fired up Visual Studio and started coding an app to do this. It’s a bit tricky to keep the phone from locking, but I got it all working. The UI is nothing fancy but I’ve been using it for a few weeks and it works quite well!

If you’re interested in running the app on your phone or getting the source code, it’s all available at http://podcastplayer.codeplex.com/ for free.

benmartens October 19, 2010 Geek, Projects

Potholes Timelapse Video

Yesterday I posted a timelapse video where the main feature was the GPS points on the topo map. When we drove back from Potholes a few weeks ago, I focused more on the images. I taped a USB webcam to the rear view mirror and had it connected to the laptop which was running an app to capture an image every two seconds. That worked great except that there was a problem with the inverter and the laptop battery died before we even made it back over the pass.

I took the images that we were able to snag, combined them with the GPS data and created another timelapse video. It’s all done with a custom C# program so if you geeks out there have any questions, let me know. Basically it’s a WinForms app with a web browser that loads the Bing maps and then I use Win32API calls to capture an image of the app. I have another app that combines all the image files into a WMV file.

The next thing I want to try is using the little HD video camera to record the images/video and see how that works. I have a suction cup camera mount that should make it easier to mount in the car and using the video camera means that I won’t need to have the laptop running. I plan to give it another try when we drive out to the coast in a couple weeks.

The video is embedded below, but again, it works best when you view in full screen HD quality. The GPS wasn’t able to get a lock on the signal for a while so it starts out with just images and then the location data kicks in. I wasn’t intentionally trying to keep our camping spot a secret since you could just watch the images and figure out where we were.

benmartens September 3, 2010 Geek, Timelapse, Travel, Video

Camp Muir Timelapse Video

I’ve been playing around with a lot of time lapse ideas lately. I took some pictures for part of the return trip from Potholes which you’ll see soon, but on the hike up to Muir, I distracted myself by thinking how I could combine all the various data I had collected into one display.

In the backpack, the GPS was taking a recording every few seconds. I was also snapping photos every once in a while. To combine the two, I wrote an app to plot out our current location on top of a topo map and show a photo that was taken at that time (if one exists.) With the GPS data, I was also able to show our rate of ascent, the current elevation, the current time, and the latitude and longitude.

I combined that all into one application, wrote each update out to a new image file and then combined the image files into a movie file. It’s embedded below or you can find it on YouTube. It’s best when viewed in HD in full screen mode.

benmartens September 2, 2010 Geek, Outdoors, Timelapse, Video

Compass Declination

I was replaced the battery in my fancy Sunnto Vector watch which meant that I had to recalibrate some of the sensors including the compass. Calibrate a compass? We all learn in grade school that magnetic north isn’t exactly the same as true north, but it’s generally close enough that we don’t think about it. In the midwest it’s pretty close to the same, but out towards the coast the difference is significant. Here in Seattle if you follow a compass and walk north, you’ll be heading almost 17 degrees too far to the east!

Even more interestingly, the declination changes from year to year. In Seattle, it is currently decreasing by about a degree every 6 years. I strongly recommend that you click this Wikipedia link to watch an animation of how the magnetic field has changed over the last 400 years.

You probably don’t need to think about this in your day to day activities, but if you spend time outdoors, it’s good to have in the back of your mind in case you find yourself relying a compass in a survival situation.

benmartens July 5, 2010 Geek, Outdoors

Computer Build

A couple weeks ago, I mentioned I was about ready to pull the trigger on the new computer. That day finally arrived and I carved out some time to put it together on Wednesday.

The final parts list looks close to what I said in that post.

Core i7-860
GigaByte P55A-UD3
PNY NVidia GTS250 1GB
Corsair XMS3 8GB DDR3 1600
Corsair TX CMPSU-750TX 750W
Nippon Labs Delux 3.5″ Internal All In One Card Reader/Writer
Antec Two Hundred Case

The only thing not in that list is the DVD drive which I took out of the old computer and the hard drives which I had laying around. The OS is on a 160GB drive and the two 250GB drives are in a RAID0 config. Since the whole computer is backed up daily to the Windows Home Server, I’m not concerned about the reduced reliability of RAID0.

The whole process took me about three hours to finish. I could easily do it again in less than an hour, but I was taking my sweet time to be careful not to destroy my ~$1000 worth of parts. I had about a 45 minute panic attack when it didn’t boot. The fans would spin, a couple lights came on and then it would die. It would continue to repeat that cycle until I shut the power off.

Finally I figured out that there was a second power plug that needed to go into the motherboard. Once I plugged that in, everything worked and I was in business!

I built this computer to handle HD video so while I was building it, I filmed the whole thing. Tonight I edited the video and it was fantastic. I wish I had a before and after demo for you, but previously I’d get maybe 1 frame every second or two and every time I started or paused the video it would take a few seconds to respond. With this computer, it plays back at regular speed and is extremely responsive. Rendering was also a breeze. What used to take a couple hours to render now takes about 20 minutes.

The real test, of course, is whether or not I’d try this again. Initially I would have said no but I think the nervousness has worn off and I might be willing to give it another shot. There was a definite cost savings over buying it prebuilt from Dell and I got higher quality parts.

And Ken, I should have listened to you and gotten a modular power supply. But even with that, I still would have a mess of cables running everywhere. I need to open it back up and break out the zip ties.

I sped up the video so the whole process takes less than 5 minutes. If you go to YouTube you can watch it in HD.

benmartens April 16, 2010 Geek, Projects

Studio711.com – Ben Martens

Just trying to get through life without looking stupid, so far it's not going very well.