Monthly Archives: July 2011

Start of a HomePowerMonitor Design

Posted on July 31, 2011 by Skye Sweeney

So what does one do when you want to put in a whole home power monitor? Hit Google of course. After many hours of searching, I found numerous consumer power monitor systems and countless industrial systems. The industrial systems where … Continue reading →

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Sources of data on Home Energy Monitoring

Posted on July 31, 2011 by Skye Sweeney

This posting will be updated with external sources of information of power measurement.

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Power monitor

Posted on July 28, 2011 by Skye Sweeney

Over the last few years my wife and I have noticed out electric bill getting larger and larger. This is not surprising with the cost of everything going up, but what does bother me is that our usage of power … Continue reading →

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Trouble with Reset

Posted on July 25, 2011 by Skye Sweeney

I have been working on an MSP430 based sailboat start timer. For those readers not into sailboat racing, races as started by a series of “guns”. At predetermined times before the start of a race, the race committee creates an … Continue reading →

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Indoor Lightning

Posted on July 25, 2011 by Skye Sweeney

Strange as it may be, my lightning detector goes off every few minutes… but without the thunder and blinding flash of light.

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A Max Hold Circuit

Posted on July 25, 2011 by Skye Sweeney

Since the conversion rate on the MSP430 would not reliably see my piezo sparks, I decided to try my hand at a max hold circuit. I considered using a simple RC circuit to try to capture and stretch out the … Continue reading →

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50 Turns

Posted on July 25, 2011 by Skye Sweeney

I started with 50 turns of Radio Shack magnet wire on a 12 wooden embroidery hoop purchased at a craft store. These bare ends I connected to an oscilloscope and waited for a storm. As luck would have it, it … Continue reading →

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Lightning detector

Posted on July 25, 2011 by Skye Sweeney

Over the years, I have had more than my fair share of computer equipment destroyed by lightning. Even with good surge suppressors, I still seem to loose parts of computers. Do I live in Florida where they get daily lightning … Continue reading →

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Robotic DVD Burner

Posted on July 25, 2011 by Skye Sweeney

Over the years I have had the need for a robotic DVD burner. A device I can load a stack of DVD into and unleash. Hours later, I have a neat stack of burned disks. Luckily for me, I had … Continue reading →

Posted in Projects, Robotic DVD burner | 4 Comments

Skye’s Build log

Posted on July 21, 2011 by Skye Sweeney

I will be using this blog to detail the various fun projects I am working on. These include: A robotic DVD burner used to backup my Linux file server. A lightning detector to shutoff my computers as a storm approaches … Continue reading →

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