Archive for the ‘Nonclassified Nonsense’ Category

…or at least that’s what the guy who called my dad said.

I was brushing my teeth this morning at 7:25 when my phone rang with a local number.  

“This is the El Paso County Sheriff’s office.  Is this Joanna?  Are you alright?”

“Yes…?”

“Are you able to speak freely?”

“Yes, I’m at home with my husband.  We’re getting ready to go to work.”

“Can you verify your parents’ address?”

Well, I know they’re on Ford Drive, and there’s a 1, 4, and 5 in the address, plus an additional one of those, though I can never remember which.  I just turn left at the red mailbox when I go over there.  I guessed, and Berck said, “That’s not their address!”  As noted before, I have a hard time remembering numbers, even with the police.

The dispatcher didn’t seem to care.  “And you’re okay? Your father called us very upset and said someone called him and said he was holding you at gunpoint and was demanding money.”

I looked outside.  An inch or two of snow had fallen that night.  There weren’t even any recent tire tracks on our ally.  Nothing but rabbit footprints outside.  “No, there’s no one here but us.”

“Okay.  We’re going to see if we can get the caller to meet us somewhere to drop off the money and see if we can get this resolved.  Can you verify your address?  We’re sending a deputy to make sure you’re okay.  You said you were getting ready to leave for work.  Can you stay at your house until the deputy either arrives or contacts you by phone?”

We waited 45 minutes.  I spent the time sending an e-mail to my office manager saying I’d be late and then shoveling the driveway.

Berck finally insisted I call the Teller County Sheriff and see if we could go to work.   The dispatcher said she had no idea what I was talking about, that El Paso County Sheriff’s office hadn’t contacted them, but if they did, she would let them know that I had checked in and was fine.  She added, “Oh, yeah, that’s a scam that’s going around.  We got three of those last week.”

I’d called Dad to let him know I was fine and sent both him and Mom text messages, in case they were still talking to the police and couldn’t answer.  Dad texted me back and said he’d call in a little bit.

When I did talk to Dad, he said he’d dropped Mom off at the airport to fly to Mobile this morning.  A number he didn’t recognize called his mobile phone.  He thought there was a possibility that it was the airline, so he answered.  A guy with what sounded to him like a Latin accent said that there had been a horrible accident involving a relative and did he have any relatives in town.  Dad said he had a daughter.  Then the guy said that he had a gun but that he wouldn’t hurt me unless Dad gave him money.  While they were talking, Dad had put his phone on mute and called 911 so the police could hear the conversation as well.  A deputy also showed up almost right away.

That’s about when I got my call.

The caller eventually demanded that Dad go to Safeway and wire him money.  So he’s probably not even in the country.

Then Mom texted me.  She had just landed in Dallas and wanted to know what my text message was about.

 

 

 

 

 

I quit grad school. I even felt bad about it for a few days. But then I committed to build an airplane, and now I feel much better.

I knew grad school was going to be a substantial amount of work, but after several weeks of essentially doing nothing but working for 4 hours after work and all the weekends, I was starting to fall behind. Someone else at Georgia Tech mentioned that they’d already taken 3 days off of work in order to try to get caught up with school work. You know what? Screw that. I don’t need the degree; I thought it would be fun. This much stress just isn’t fun, and Joanna pleaded with me to quit on multiple occasions. The idea of quitting probably wouldn’t have occurred to me if she hadn’t been so persistent about it (I actually thought she was being dramatic at first, but it became clear that she was not.) Once I started thinking about quitting, I did it as quickly as possible because the refund was based on the day I decided to withdraw.

But I’m really doing this. Building an airplane. This is probably the most excited I’ve been about something since I started flight school. I never thought I’d have an airplane of my own, and I still won’t. My coworker, Randy, and I are doing this together, and we’ll share ownership when we’re done. We have no idea what we’re doing, but we have books, the internets, no grad school, and gumption.

I need to start a builder’s log. I initially decided I wasn’t going to do the blog-as-builder’s-log thing, but it’s probably a good idea. The builder’s log is required to prove to the FAA that we built 51% of the aircraft, and they like pictures. So I’ll probably set up a separate WordPress site for that…

Most of our tools and the kit for the aircraft tail arrived today. I’m planning on taking it home Thursday and using the long weekend to get started!

Today is the first Christmas we’ve spent alone.  Unless you count Christmas ’07, whenBerck got the last flight from O’Hare to Colorado Springs, getting in late at night.  Berck has a bad cold, possibly the flu, and has been pitiful all day.  I made myself some cheese eggs and bacon for breakfast, making lots, fully expecting Berck to steal about half of it.  But he must really feel bad, because he only had one piece of bacon and a forkful of eggs.  For Christmas dinner we warmed up some breakfast burritos Berck got from a New Zealender who comes by his work and sells them.  Berck did brew a double batch of beer but then apparently  expected me to clean up from it.

It was nice to have a relaxing day at home, though.  We opened up presents in the morning, and I video chatted with Ben in Mobile and Mom and Dad who are visiting the Baileys in Seattle.  Berck and I went through a few plastic tubs of his dad’s that have been in storage in the garage, tossing a lot of it in the trash, keeping some of it, and putting some in a box to take to Goodwill.  The sort of things we found ranged from a dusty quarter of a roll of Tums (trash) to a set of surgical tools engraved with Dr. Kelsey’s initials (keep).

With as crazy as life has been lately, it was really nice to not have to do anything all day on a Wednesday.  And we get to have the same schedule next week.

Maybe Berck will be feeling better by then and we’ll even cook the duck I bought at the store yesterday.

Here’s one of the neighborhood deer watching Berck brew out on our deck today.  I think he may have won an argument with a hammock.

Andrew asked for a write-up, but this is probably shy of that. Feel free to contact me with questions.

The motivation for the project is that our house is cold in the winter, and it’s painful to go to bed without the bed warmer on. It’s difficult to remember to turn it on every night until it’s time to go to bed, but it takes a good 45 minutes to get nice and warm. The solution? A Raspberry Pi!

Sure, an entire computer is overkill, but there’s actually not an obvious solution that’s smaller. A simple lamp timer or X10 sort of device won’t work because it’s a soft-power switch. Even if you could make it turn on when power’s applied, it’s difficult to manually override.

The bed warmer has separate controls for each side, and this solution handles them separately. I started by wiring leads to one of the warmer controls. First across the switch contacts to be able to control and, and then also across the LED so that I could detect whether or not it was on.

I was able to determine that the GPIO pins on the raspberry pi should be sufficient on their own and I didn’t need anything fancy like a gertboard for this project. I ordered a pi breakout cobbler as well as a dish and solderless breadboard and some jumper wires from Adafruit. I bought a giant pack of resistors from Amazon.

I started with a sainsmart relay module to close the contacts on the switch. I initially figured I could do it with a transistor, but I was worried about interference and strange things happening if I tried a common ground between the Pi and the warmer. I ended up needing some NPN transistors anyway because 3.3V wasn’t going to flip the relay, but the +5V available on the GPIO worked fine.

There’s a ton of ways to access the GPIO pins on a Pi (Python seems to be the most popular). Probably for the purposes of this project the /sys interface and a bash script would have been sufficient, but being the C kind of guy that I am, I was very happy with the well-documented and very robust BCM2835 C library.

After demonstrating that I could flip the relays and turn the warmer on and off, I set about figuring out how to read the LEDs. Once again, I could use a transistor, but I was still worried about interference. Some searching on the internets led me to the wonderful world of optoisolators. I’d never heard of such a thing, but it’s exactly what I needed.

Unlikely the NPN transistors I was able to pick up at the Radio Shack in Woodland Park, optoisolators turned out to be more difficult to come by. I picked up a pair of NTE3083’s from a local store in Colorado Springs I had no idea existed, but they have a huge selection of components. the NTE3083 has a darlington step-up transistor which I don’t believe was at all necessary in my case, but worked just fine. I had to play around quite a bit to find a resistor value to power the LED side of the optoisolator that was just right. Too small, and the LED on the warmer would dim noticeably. Too high, and the optoisolator wouldn’t trigger. Once I figured that out by trial and error, I had a working prototype.

I wasn’t satisfied, though. The clicking of the relays was annoying, and I didn’t want to be woken up by them. (One of the design goals is that if we forget to turn a warmer off, the Pi can do that for us as well, because it’s seriously annoying to wake up at 1am drenched in sweat because you forgot to power the thing off.) Fortunately, my discovery of optoisolators would work well for activating the switch as well. I ordered some more optoisolators from Amazon.

A week later they still hadn’t arrived and I checked the Amazon order status. I failed to notice they were being shipped from Hong Kong and were scheduled to arrive at the end of December. So I gave up and ordered from Radio Shack. This time I went with an NTE3086, which had two opto-isolators on a single 8 DIP IC. Perfect.

Today I finally got around to testing with that. The only problem with this setup is that I used the same color leads from both sides of the switch contacts, because with a relay the order didn’t matter. Now that they’re going through a transistor, it very much matters. It was even simpler to connect the optoisolators than the relays (especially with the very nice and easy-to-locate datasheets that NTE puts on the web), and so I was ready to convert the prototype into something more functional.

I got a solderable breadboard that’s nearly identical to the solderless one I had so transferring the layout would be simple. Were I planning ahead, I would have put the solderable breadboard on top of the solderless one (as it was designed to do), because then you can just lift the solderable one up, flip it over, solder the connections and be done. As it was, I had to transfer it all without forgetting what went were. Not a big deal, but I’ll know if I ever do this sort of thing again.

I’d also spent an insane amount of time ordering some 22 AWG solid-core wire, because threading stranded wire through breadboard holes is a pain. I finally found what seemed like the best value on Amazon and ordered it. When I went to use the wire today, I discovered it’s stranded! I went and looked at the Amazon order and the one I ordered is clearly labeled “stranded”, though the solid core version looks exactly the same.

Anyway, after a day of soldering, modifying the second warmer controls, and then fleshing out and cleaning up the code, it’s done and it works! It’s the first bit of electronics I’ve ever created, and if it weren’t for the existence of the raspberry pi, its great documentation and an internet full of people messing with it, it probably would never have occurred to me to even try it. I really enjoyed hacking on hardware for a change, and I’m guessing that there’s more projects to come.

The source code is nothing fancy and contains nothing non-obvious, but if you’d like to take a look, I put it up on github.