Good morning! Happy Sunday. Three weeks to December’s Cold Moon. Mostly sunny and 27 degrees in Delmar, NY. There is a south-southeast breeze at 6 mph. Kind of a cold day, although this morning has warmed up quite quickly. 

I do kind of regret not heading up to Vermont yesterday, but honestly it would have been a fairly cold and long night.  But so be it — there are still plenty of opporunities to get camping in the future — possibly as soon as next weekend.

Today will be partly sunny, with a high of 39 degrees at 1pm. 10 degrees below normal. South wind 5 to 7 mph. A year ago, we had partly cloudy skies. The high last year was 45 degrees. The record high of 68 was set in 1909. 7.3 inches of snow fell back in 1968.

The sun will set at 4:34 pm with dusk around 5:05 pm, which is 59 seconds earlier than yesterday. At sunset, look for partly cloudy conditions and 38 degrees. There will be a south-southeast breeze at 5 mph. Today will have 9 hours and 50 minutes of daytime, a decrease of 2 minutes and 14 seconds over yesterday.

Tonight will be mostly cloudy, with a low of 25 degrees at 6am. Seven degrees below normal. Calm wind. In 2016, we had mostly clear skies. It got down to 31 degrees. The record low of 13 occurred back in 1981.

Yesterday, I finally got my hair cut. Barber kind of messed up but I fixed it well enough. He’s getting a bit elderly and sometimes gets distracted but he’s fun guy to get your hair cut. After visiting the barber shop yesterday, which was steamy hot then the blast of cold air stepping outside, I started feeling sick again.

I went to the grocery store then came home. I was going to head out hiking, but ended up reading this book about electricity and electronics and it started to get late before I knew it. Honestly, I wasn’t really going to go up to Vermont yesterday, and it was too late to go to Five Rivers so I decided to give Big Red a break, and just walk down to the library rather then go hiking. I wanted to return one book and get more books out about electronics so I could further my knowledge. 

Besides spending most of the evening laying on the bed reading through several books on electronics, I hooked up the Arduino to the infrared sensor that came with the kit, and used to the universal remote I had bought to use with my HDTV tunner (that never worked with the tunner), and played with capturing various signals from the remote through the serial port and the Arduino IDE. I am thinking rather then have a physical switch on the LED driver I am building, I should just use a remote control to go between modes. It would be cool to make the volume button raise or lower the lights in the room. Maybe hit something like “1” on the remote to set reading lights, “2” to set a dimming red light for going to bed, “3” to setting a dimming red light that becomes light red to orange to yellow to white-bluish color eight hours later in the morning.

So many of the books you get out from the library on the Arduino are for projects that are pointless, or are aimed towards little children. But I honestly are primarily interested in building LED drivers that provide high-efficency lighting that can be precisely controlled. Once I get the one working well enough upstairs, I may build ones for other rooms, or even possibly build one for my truck. The Arduino microcontroller is easy to program, the components are cheap, and the 5050 LED RGB chip gets you 75 lumens per watt or about 18 lumens per every 20 mA 3 VDC chip, which is roughly a quarter watt per chip at maximum brightness. Then obviously add some losses from the built in resistors, line losses, the MOSFET transistors, power supply and the Arduino, which when powered by 12 VDC will somewhere between 30-50 mA due to loses from the built-in linear regulator stepping the voltage down from 12 VDC. I’ve heard that color rendition is rather poor from many 5050 RGB LEDs, I may want to eventually incorporate some warm white RGB LEDs into my circuit to provide light with better color rendition. RGB LEDs don’t suffer from color shifts like old florescent bulbs do when driven evenly on all channels, but they make colors somewhat over saturated and are hard to tell apart, because your not producing any true color light besides Red, Blue, and Green. Human eyes mix those colors together to produce white, but the “simulated” white still doesn’t show the mixed colors like true full-spectrum light does, as produced by daylight, incadescent bulbs, or closer-to-full spectrum lighting produced by phosphorous.

I am fully aware that there a lots of Chinese LED strips and bulbs that come with remotes that are quite flexible. But I want to automate my set up further, and really understand the technology well myself. If I’m thinking about eventually living in an off-grid cabin, I should look at making every watt work as hard as possible, and build a 12 VDC lighting system that is highly efficent and flexible. Inverters are rather inefficent, I think I would to avoid using one for an off-grid cabin, although it might make sense to have one for the occassional 120 VAC tool and maybe to power a mini dorm-room style refrigerator. I doubt I would ever need a large refigerator, although I guess if I got a deer or cow wrapped I would probably want  something that size. 

There are plenty of efficent 12 VDC laptop chargers like the one I have in my truck that uses a boost converter to produce 19 VDC out there from 12 VDC, and my LCD monitor I currently use is 12 VDC — but if I needed another voltage — there are plenty of Chinese boost and buck converters you can find online — to produce whatever voltage you need. If you understand electronics, there isn’t much what you can’t build pretty easily out of Chinese parts that you can order off of Ebay or Amazon. 

It’s such a nice day, I should take a shower and head out to Five Rivers for a walk. Then maybe to Walmart to get some supplies for the week, and then maybe for an afternoon hike — maybe Hannacroix Preserve (?) — then out to the folks house.

Next weekend, I may take an extended weekend to head up to the North Country or the Adirondacks. I’m not really interested in the Southern Zone Deer Hunting but I will bring my .22 and my shotgun and may look at small game up north. Assuming the weather is not too cold, snowy, or rainy. Heck, maybe even get the kayak out one last time. If not, I may look at building that solar panel rack (finally) for my truck.

As previously noted, there are 3 weeks until December’s Cold Moon when the sun will be setting at 4:22 pm with dusk at 4:53 pm. On that day in 2016, we had rain, snow, partly cloudy skies and temperatures between 42 and 35 degrees. Typically, the high temperature is 41 degrees. We hit a record high of 63 back in 2009.

Well I better think about getting outside before this nice day fades into darkness. Have a great day!