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 was not long. Amazingly I would getting peaks of close to 5 volts out of the loop antenna for a storm that was many miles away. I also discovered that although I though the antenna would be fairly directional that it was not. The geek in my already considering if I could determine the direction of the storm. 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 storms? No. I have lived in New York and New Hampshire where wee see perhaps a dozen storms a year. Chalk it up to bad luck.

But perhaps I could spare some of the problems if the storms passed with all my computers shut off. 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 access to one at work. With the right permissions I was able to bring it home and use it. I burned several 50-100 runs of DVDs for various school functions and for the FIRST LEGO League movies I had made.

Then came the horrible day when a power supply in my work horse PC failed catastrophically. If spewed high voltage out the 5, 3.3, and 12 volt lines destroying everything except an 3 1/4 inch floppy drive. Included in the mayhem was my system drive, my data drive and my backup drive. Continue reading →

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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
  • A whole house energy monitoring system
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