Day: December 6, 2020💾

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Breadboard vs Perfboard

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I used to build all my finalized projects with old fashioned perf board, solder and jumper wires. But solder is kind of a pain - it's much too easy to accidentally bridge the pins and sometimes it grows whiskers - and when you add components or sensors or make wiring mistakes - you end up doing a lot of soldering and desoldering. Bad solder joints can lead to endless frustration when you have noise in the signals. 

Breadboard like this is inexpensive when buy direct from China, plus is so much more flexible and actually is pretty reliable and long lasting once the wires are seated. Changes are super easy - just unplug the wires, no desoldering required. 

And it seems like with the latest in low cost microcontrollers (costing less than $5) - fewer external sensors are needed as more things are on board. For many projects I a just a handful of sensors and things like power transistors or relays and power supply is all that has to be done off board. 

Sunday December 6, 2020 — Albany, NY
Map: Owasco Flats WMA
Thematic Map: 2020 Presidential Election in Albany County

Temporal Map

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That qgis temporal (time) map I posted earlier this morning on the blog about positive Coronavirus cases is pretty neat.

But they are kind of a pain to make right now as the feature is very incomplete in QGIS:

  • No print layout design tools are available for export in qgis so you have to manually screenshot and paste the legend as an image and are limited in formatting options
  • No ability to create GIF animations directly from qgis, must export multiple images and create the GIF animation in GIMP
  • The shape file you make it from must use a date format field, it can’t process strings yet
  • You can’t do a linkage on the fly but instead do the linkage manually which leads to the creation of very large Shape files or GeoPackages due to repeated shapes in the file for each time period
Map: Shindagin Hollow State Forest Ortho

Pollution from car tires is killing off salmon on US west coast, study finds | Environment | The Guardian

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Pollution from car tires is killing off salmon on US west coast, study finds | Environment | The Guardian

In recent years, scientists have realized half or more of the coho salmon, also known as silver salmon, returning to streams in Washington state were dying before spawning. The salmon, which reach 2ft in length, are born in freshwater streams before making an epic journey out to sea where they live most of their adult lives. A small number then return to their original streams to lay eggs before dying.

Fears for a million livelihoods in Kenya and Tanzania as Mara River fish die out Read more The cause of the die-off has remained a mystery but a new study, published in Science, has seemingly found a culprit. When it rains, stormwater carries fragments of old car tires into nearby creeks and streams. The tires contain certain chemicals that prevent them breaking down but also prove deadly to the coho salmon.