welcome to spiceland.

Howdie stranger. Its been *forever* since we last posted. I (Michael) have decided to abandon Facebook and Twitter as much as I’m able. I’ll try posting more frequent updates here instead. Why, you may ask?!? Mainly I am concerned that I don’t own or have future access to the information that I post. I’d rather archive it myself to serve as a reference for the kids when they are older. I still have Facebook set up to suck in our updates so all of you can still get it that way as well.

This weekend all of us (except Heidi) ran in the Twilight 5k. Tru did the 1 mile run in about 12 minutes. I was so proud of her. Now that I know she has such stamina, she’ll have to run with Erin and me. Here is a video of the event:

And as an extra, here is a funny video of Heidi and her blanket:

(For both videos, click on the button at the lower right to change from standard 340 to 720p HD (higher quality).)

Have we become lazy? Are we being taken over by our kids? Probably. But that isn’t the only reason we’ve neglected our blog.

We’ve been using facebook for a while now. It allows us to automatically send updates to the people who have noted that they care to hear (by ‘friending’ us). On this blog, we ask people who care to ‘subscribe’. They can do this using the link on the left side or by putting the RSS feed into their news reader. Who does this? Noone! This is one of the reasons we tend to favor facebook. By the very nature of it, people subscribe to get your updates by friending you. The end result? .. no posts here.

Another unfortunate trend is ‘micro updates’. We normally don’t log into facebook and do posts within facebook. We use a Twitter. For the 73% of you who don’t know what that is, it is a sevice that lets you send small little messages to your fellow twitter’ers. Also, we have ours set to update our facebook pages with any twitter updates that we give. The end result? … little micro messages as updates instead of long detailed blog postings with pictures.

What should we do? Well, for now it looks like we are sticking with facebook. We’ll still try to update you all here but we get less of a response. Should you all join facebook? No! In fact, there is something kinda strange about the parental generation being on facebook. We need to be goofier there (yes, we can get even goofier than we do here). You all keep doing what your doing and we’ll try to do better about posting updates here.

Stay tuned for some pictures of Tru’s first soccer game. Erin, by the way, when is that coming about? Normally I don’t get to see the pictures unt

Aerogarden Timelapse

Erin got an Aerogarden for me for father’s day as a *big* surprise. It is an “indoor kitchen appliance.” More specifically, it is a microcontroller based hydroponic garden that is about a cubic foot. It sits on one’s counter and grows things. We have herbs and peppers in ours. For the first month, we set our DSLR camera up, pointed at the Aerogarden, and set it to take a picture once every 30 seconds. The video below was made from those pictures. Also, below you will find a link to an HD video that you can download.

Get the Flash Player to see this video. If you are seeing this from facebook or some other site, click on the link to watch the video on our site.

Here is the 720p HD version at 60 frames per second:
http://spiceland.org/media/timelapse720.avi

^^^ click the link above to download the HD version.

Above is a trailer for a new movie coming out soon. I thought it looked hilarious so I thought I’d share. Also, I wanted an excuse to try embedding a Hulu video

Bird Cam

Get the Flash Player to see this video. If you are seeing this from facebook or some other site, click on the link to watch the video on our site.

We installed a camera on our front porch. We have a bird that comes each year and makes a nest on the top of one of the columns of our front porch. We aimed the cam at him and installed some software that captures videos whenever it detects motion. Here is a short clip.

Mom and Dad said that as soon as I was able to ride my tricycle well enough I’d get a big girl bike. See, they got this tricycle when I was 2 years old and couldn’t reach the pedals. My tricycle may have been pretty and red, but it was hard to ride. Even after I figured it out, it wasn’t very fast.

My tricycle days are over! I’m cruising in style now on my pink princess big girl bike. It was just different enough to pedaling the tricycle that it took me a little while to figure it out, but after a day and a half, I’ve mastered it. My dad tied his remote controlled car to the front of it to help me go up hills. I don’t even need that anymore!

What’s next? I still need to figure out how to stop. I hear that if I pedal backwards it will put on the brakes and stop, but hey, one thing at a time. For now, I just turn off the sidewalk into the grass, and that does the job. Also, Dad has just been running after me (sometimes with Heidi in a stroller). Pretty soon, we can all go on a bike ride together!

Below is a picture of a bug in our microscope. Tru and I got a microscope for Christmas. We’ve been using it to explore the miniature world around us. This weekend, we’ve been looking at all of the bugs we could find. The picture below was taken from our flip video camcorder.

As an advertising gimic, they are giving away free 3d glasses just about everywhere (I picked mine up at Kroger). They are for a super bowl commercial preview of the Aliens vs. Monsters animated movie. If you are like me and too impatient to wait for the super bowl commercial, you want to use them now. They are not the old school blue and red glasses. Instead, they are “ColorCode 3-D” glasses. You can click on the link below for a gallery of cool stuff to look at while you are waiting for the super bowl.

http://gallery.mac.com/csvendb

Get the Flash Player to see this video. If you are seeing this from facebook or some other site, click on the link to watch the video on our site.

Get the Flash Player to see this video. If you are seeing this from facebook or some other site, click on the link to watch the video on our site.

A few coworkers were talking about GPS running watches a few weeks ago. Right now they are very expensive. We started talking about ways of building something much cheaper. Here is a prototype for one made out of electronics parts that I already had

The main purpose of a GPS running watch is to show you how far you’ve run or jogged. Also, it can tell you how fast you are running both in terms of speed (mph) or how long it will take you to run a mile. Since Charlie, one of my co-workers, trained for a marathon, it was evident that he wanted to be ontop of his target time. This type of info would be crucial for his type of training purposes. I’m sure more features could and should be added.

Cost. Commercial GPS watches seem to cost anywhere from $150-500. This one is probably $20 + the cost of a GPS module. Currently the cheapest GPS modules are $40. That still puts the cost in at $60 or so.

Details. The heart of this is an AVR atmega8 running at 1Mhz. It has 8k of flash which is 99% full. The LCD display is from a Nokia 3310 and are about $6 online. The GPS module was from my UAV project that I abandoned. It outputs TTL serial which it sends to the AVR. The AVR then parses the serial string and interprets the data. Since we don’t have much room for the code in flash, lots of care has to be taken to keep the code size small (no snprintf’s here). For input, I used an IR remote. I seem to be standardizing on that these days because it only takes one pin on the microcontroller and gives me lots of buttons to use. Obviously, on a real watch it would need buttons instead.

Lastly, I should mention that LCD support was provided by CC Dharmani’s LCD library. Many things to him for helping me troubleshoot as I was bringing up the LCD.

Whats next? I’ll probably put everything into a small project enclosure so that I strap it to my arm. It will probably be so big that I won’t really want to jog with it much but I can at least see if it is really usable. If that works out well, I may try to see who else might be interested and I could make a special board for it and power it with a cell phone battery to make it only 2″ x 2″ x 0.5″ so that one could actually wear it as a watch. At that point I’d actually have to spend some $$ so I may never get to that point

Thanks for watching!