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16Aug/090

Squeeky Clean In No Time…

Soap Making Session 1A few months ago, Natalie started playing around with making her own lotion bars. While she was researching, she came across numerous folks blogging about making them but also making soap. It's something we were both interested in since we started going to the farmer’s market downtown. The old-fashion soap was simple, far longer lasting and had no nasty chemicals in it, we loved the several bars we purchased. The problem is, it's quite expensive compared to the Irish Spring you can pick up at any China-Mart. We figured it had to be cheaper to make it ourselves and the knowledge of how to do so would be priceless. Becoming more self-sufficient is something we both feel can't hurt.

This week-end was our first attempt at soap making. We had purchased the lye online with some other essential oils and dyes here. We decided very early on we'd use the Cold Process method of making soap as it yielded a very hard soap that lasted longer and was just more similar to how my grandmother had made her lard-lye soap. Soap Making Session 2

As you can see, we made two batches of soap. One for me (the red bar) and one for Natalie (the brown and yellow) one. Mine was scented with a Karma knock-off (from lush) and Natalie decided on Oatmeal, Milk and Honey. They both smelled fantastic and turned out better than expected. We are going to attempt to make a cinnamon scented batch tomorrow to prepare for the gift-giving season ahead.... (and yes, I did make the wooden molds and wire cutting block). More pictures below of our first attempt...

 

Natalie's Oatmeal, Milk and Honey Soap

(Natalie's Oatmeal, Milk and Honey Soap)

 

Natalie's Oatmeal, Milk and Honey Soap

(Natalie's Oatmeal Soap showing yellow swirls from top)

 

Both Soap Batches

(Both our soaps waiting to be cut)

 

Jay's Karma Soap being cut

(Cutting my soap)

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9Aug/090

Charge that IPod with MintyBoost goodness…

 MintyBoost

Ah the power of Altoids! And now it has the power to charge your IPod with as much minty power as does at killing that early morning coffee breath!

It's been out there for a while but I finally broke down and ordered the parts to build my own. This really is a perfect way to learn, easy enough for the beginner and has amazing charging capacity with normal AAs! Great details here if you are interested in making your own. If you are not intrested in wiring one up, let me know, I can hook you up with a finished model.

BTW, adafruit.com shipped my order within an hour! Now that's what I call customer service!

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9Aug/090

Sound Detection With The Arduino

Sound Detection with the ArduinoI decided on Saturday that I'd try my hand at building a setup with the Arduino to detect sound. I found the perfect schematic online here from the guys over at SparkFun.com. They have a really nice breakout board for an Electret Microphone but it's ~$8.00 and I already had the stuff on hand to build my own. I think I'll still pick one of theirs up at some point, just to have around. It's quality built and tiny. I've attached the Schematic and the code with additional high-res pictures below for anyone more interested. I used an OpAmp to increase the voltage and had the code check for a threshold. Once the threshold had been exceeded, it would light up the red LED. The end result looks very similar to one of the old-school VU meters. You can adjust the gain on the amp by increasing the R5 resistor. This would make an excellent sound detector or even could be hooked up to a small speaker, it's a simplistic mono-amplifier after all...

ElectretMICProject
Title: ElectretMICProject (783 clicks)
Caption:
Filename: electretmicproject.zip
Size: 1 MB

ElectretMICProject
Title: ElectretMICProject (783 clicks)
Caption:
Filename: electretmicproject.zip
Size: 1 MB

9Aug/090

Communicating With Ardunio Using Micrsoft .NET (C#)

Being a .Net developer, I figured I needed to know how to get my applications to talk to the Ardunio board via the USB serial port. Took a few hours to get the Ardunio code working, but here is the final results.

I setup a simple VS2008 C# project (you'll need to modify to compile with VS2005) to turn a LED on and off by clicking a button on the form. You'll need to change the hard-coded COM port to the correct one for your setup and hook up the LED (don't forget your resistor) to the digial PIN 12 on the Ardunio board.

  •  A few things to note: 
    • I'm using a fixed char command "INLENGTH" which will need to be updated if you wish to increase the command char length.
    • I've used # to pad the command when I don't have a 6 char command.
    • LED must be on digital PIN 12 (you can change this in the code of course).
    • COM port is hard-coded in the .Net code for my setup, change to correct COM port on our computer.

 

ArduinoSerialCommTest
Title: ArduinoSerialCommTest (749 clicks)
Caption:
Filename: arduinoserialcommtest.zip
Size: 43 KB

ArduinoSerialCommTest
Title: ArduinoSerialCommTest (749 clicks)
Caption:
Filename: arduinoserialcommtest.zip
Size: 43 KB

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7Aug/090

Learning To Count Again..

Arduino Seven Segment Display Project

I decide to stop by Radio Shack and pick up a seven segment LED (RHDP) so I could learn to use it with my Arduino board. I had actually ordered a few from Jameco but I had a couple of hours to kill today so I decided to feed my impulse. The cool thing about these displays is that they are really easy to use. You can see in the pictures there are lots of wires, it basically takes 1 digital output per segment and a common ground to run it (I didn't use the decimal point), but really the coding was super simple. Ignore all those resistors on the picture below, I didn't have a 68ohm resistors so I had to improvise with some lower ohm resistors put in series. This is a very satisfying project and only took me about 45mins from start to finish, highly recommended for those new to the Arduino board... I've included a ZIP file with the code and a few hi-res pictures for anyone instrested.

 

Arduino Seven Segment LED Project

SevenSegmentLED
Title: SevenSegmentLED (815 clicks)
Caption:
Filename: sevensegmentled.zip
Size: 1 MB

SevenSegmentLED
Title: SevenSegmentLED (815 clicks)
Caption:
Filename: sevensegmentled.zip
Size: 1 MB

2Aug/090

Lockheed Martin’s MKV kicks major butt!

If you haven't seen this thing yet, you gotta check it out. Check out the video, this is for real...