NedLog

The EnvStick is cheap, homemade temperature sensor that plugs into a USB port. It provides a simple way to collect a room’s ambient temperature. I made it for fun.

EnvStick Features: - Temp sensor (+/- .5 deg C) - USB 2.0 - Windows/Linux software - Poll up to 100 times/minute- In-circuit programming- Only 11 components- Indicator LED

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I dug out my 9-year-old Garmin GPS the other day and brought it on a snowmobile ride near Grand Lake, Colorado. It gave me a chance to use the great, free visualization tool GPSVisualizer.com.
You can use this tool with any GPS or GPS-enabled phone.

Here are the results - click for a larger image:

Here is elevation projected on a satellite image. You can see me doing little hill climbs at the highest altitude (in purple), and then jacking around a lot while everyone else did bigger hill climbs (in blue, under the “Gravel Mountain” waypoint).

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Here’s an initial take on an idea for running Maxim’s One-wire protocol over standard Cat3 phone cable for cheap, modular networking of a bunch of small temperature sensors…
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The HandySwipe provides a portable magnetic card reader interface and display. It collects card data from a “Type 2″ card reader (shown here), and displays the data on a small character LCD screen. Type 2 stripes are by far the most common in use, such as on credit cards and drivers’ licenses. The device can store up to 50 cards, runs on four AA’s, and has a serial connection to download its memory to your computer in CSV format. It can also download data in a raw bistream format compatable with StripeSnoop, so you can take advantage of StripeSnoop’s powerful parsing and analysis features (LRC error checking, backwards swipes, card type/contents/issuers/etc.)

Read more about it here…

I was looking for a cheap way to interface my PIC microcontroller projects with my X10 home automation system. Plug-in serial X10 interfaces have to be … plugged into the wall, so I thought a good alternative would be to hack a wireless X10 remote. It worked… click to read about it.