If you need a fast, powerful and inexpensive $7 or less development board to monitor sensors or control a device, I highly recommend the Wemos Lolin32 ESP32. It has Bluetooth and WiFi built in, so your electronics project your building can talk to the internet or your smart devices, all the common interfaces like I2C and SDA, lots of true PWM pins for dimming lights or controlling motors, 1.25 MB of flash ROM and it works well with most common Arduino accessories and libraries and porting Arduino to code to it is easy.

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If you need a fast, powerful and inexpensive $7 or less development board to monitor sensors or control a device, I highly recommend the Wemos Lolin32 ESP32. It has Bluetooth and WiFi built in, so your electronics project your building can talk to the internet or your smart devices, all the common interfaces like I2C and SDA, lots of true PWM pins for dimming lights or controlling motors, 1.25 MB of flash ROM and it works well with most common Arduino accessories and libraries and porting Arduino to code to it is easy. Good stuff.

Photo.2013.11.16 17.09.50

Would You Eat This Christmas Meal in a Can?

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Would You Eat This Christmas Meal in a Can?

"Unfortunately, after hours and hours of investigation (okay, it took 30 seconds), we discovered that the dinner is actually a hoax from graphic designer Chris Godfrey. The fake can reminds us of the Whataburger Beer the internet loved just a few months ago. The Christmas meal may not be available in any stores however it shouldn’t stop you from making your own this holiday season. Just grab an empty can and layer in all your holiday favorites. Boom, the Christmas Day meal is served."

November 19, 2018 Morning

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Good morning! Monday’s come back around again. Monday, Monday! Long weekend though after the Thanksgiving break. Next Monday is Cyber Monday 🛍️. A few snow flurries around the freezing point in Delmar. ❄ Calm wind. Despite the dusting of snow we get last night, there is only about an inch of snow on the ground, with many bare patches showing. ☃ ️Might get a few more inches tomorrow morning but the rain expected for the long Thanksgiving weekend it will be gone here although I think it will be an all snow event up north.

Today will have a slight chance of rain and snow before 2pm, then a slight chance of rain showers after 5pm. Mostly cloudy 🌧, with a high of 41 degrees at 1pm. Six degrees below normal, which is similiar to a typical day around December 1st. Cool and cloudy but not super cold like mid week. Calm wind becoming northwest around 5 mph in the afternoon. Chance of precipitation is 20%. A year ago, we had cloudy skies with some clearing in the afternoon. The high last year was 52 degrees. The record high of 71 was set in 1921. 4.2 inches of snow fell back in 1914.❄

The sun will set at 4:29 pm with dusk around 4:59 pm, which is 45 seconds earlier than yesterday. 🌇 At sunset, look for mostly cloudy skies ☁ and temperatures around 40 degrees. There will be a north-northwest breeze at 5 mph. Even without the sun, that should basically kill off the snow. Today will have 9 hours and 36 minutes of daytime, a decrease of one minute and 58 seconds over yesterday. Loosing less than a minute today.

Tonight will have a chance of rain and snow showers before 10pm, then snow showers likely. Cloudy 🌧, with a low of 29 degrees at 3am. Two degrees below normal, which is similiar to a typical night around November 24th. Light northwest wind. Chance of precipitation is 60%. New snow accumulation of 1 to 2 inches possible. In 2017, we had mostly cloudy skies, clearing in the early hours of the next day. It got down to 30 degrees. The record low of 6 occurred back in 1986.

I’ve been very happy so far with the change to the 719 bus, starting at the underground location at the plaza and then heading directly to South Swan Street. 🚌 If anything, this has made the busses few minutes early to South Swan sometimes but it’s fine for me as I often get out of work at five and three bus stop is right in front of my building.

It’s going to be very cold come Thanksgiving which sucks for the heating bills 💸 but I guess I can’t control that living in the suburbs. I’m driving Big Red a lot less these days, so that will help save money and I am trying to come up with affordable meals for dinner that are packaged in bulk so I can avoid going to the transfer station as long as possible. There are a few inexpensive electronic components I need to get for projects I’m building this winter, and that SSD drive plus money for Christmas donations in the name of family members, but I’ll figure out how to make it all fit. Money is saved by the fact it looks like I won’t be taking any road trips or camping in the wilderness, ⛺ and that I’ve quit drinking alcohol.

As I mentioned yesterday, my foot is sore👣 from where I stepped on📌 the thumb tack yesterday. I hope it’s not infected but if it is, I’ll go to the doctor get it checked out. The tack was holding VMS display to the wall so I also have to be a little concerned with lead poisoning from the paint but I can’t imagine there was so much lead on the tip of a pin. It’d not horribly painful but noticeable from time to time.

Tonight I want to finish building the board that will use the lolin32 board to drive my VMS sign. It’s built on a breadboard now but needs to switched over to perf board.🔬 The 240 MHz 32 bit processor is much quicker than the Arduino 8 bit processor but the killer feature for me is the 1.25 MB of programmable ROM which means I can store a lot more data internally and it also has built-in Bluetooth and Wi-Fi, the prior I plan to enable soon, although I’m not happy with how much memory the Bluetooth library uses when loaded – nearly a MB alone.

Today I’m going to call about getting my truck state inspection done hopefully either on Friday or Saturday. 🔧 I’ll check the lights but I expect no issues with that, everything is working fine now, at least everything that the inspection shop checks for. They rotated the tires the last time they did the oil change so I don’t need that. I should think about getting the wheels aligned as it’s been four years but not right now, as I haven’t noticed any unusual wear on the tires.

As previously noted, next Monday is Cyber Monday 🛍️ when the sun will be setting at 4:24 pm with dusk at 4:55 pm. On that day in 2017, we had rain, drizzle, cloudy skies and temperatures between 46 and 35 degrees. Typically, the high temperature is 44 degrees. We hit a record high of 67 back in 1979.

A Narrow Rough Road

Are Birds Actually Government-Issued Drones? So Says a New Conspiracy Theory Making Waves (and Money)

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Are Birds Actually Government-Issued Drones? So Says a New Conspiracy Theory Making Waves (and Money)

"Combine all these conspiracies and you get Birds Aren’t Real, a nearly two-year-old movement that claims the CIA took out 12 billion feathered fugitives because directors within the organization were “annoyed that birds had been dropping fecal matter on their car windows.” The targets were eradicated between 1959 and 1971 with specially altered B-52 bombers stocked with poison. They were then supplanted with avian-like robots that could be used to surveil Americans. "