Refinements

A couple of days ago I installed my Arduino (a PIC microcontroller) to record the temperatures from sensors I had buried in the concrete floor slab months ago. It seemed to have worked, but, of course, it was the test program that collected readings every minute. I don’t need or want anywhere near that much detail. So I modified the program to collect readings every hour. When I went to load the new program from my laptop into the Arduino I realized that I had given away my USB cable. So today I went to the thrift store, took them three of my extra Ethernet cables and bought a new USB cable for a dollar.

The CAV thrift store has all their cables in labeled bins and all their little black power supplies in bins labeled by voltage. What a dream! (Everywhere in Seattle thrift stores they are just a jumble of transformers or cables.)

I’m not a ‘C’ language programmer, and all my programming skills — such as they were — are rusty beyond belief. So when I see an error message from the compiler I have to do considerable research to learn what it is trying to tell me, and even more research to write code that the complier will accept without complaint.

Tomorrow I’ll load that program and see if it works right. In the meantime I had upgraded my operating system (which comes with the Java run-time module) so I had to upgrade my Arduino software. One of the functions I had been using was deprecated (no longer supported), so it may not work right. Just have to try it to see.

We surveyed the shed full of music for the community chorus. There are 40 file cabinets of mostly music! Most of them are well organized (either sorted by composer or by title). We decided that it is not helpful to make them all the same. We will simply label each drawer and indicate the drawer in the catalog.

We also discovered a lot of other stuff in that shed. There are books on music (which we plan to give away), archives of news clippings, recordings, and office supplies. Extranea will be collected in a box to give away. Tuesday we get started with actual cataloging.

>>> Next <<<

Today I built the kiva ladder from latillas I bought at Olguin’s sawmill the day before. The ladder is a bit crude, but it should hold up. I also hauled it up onto the roof and propped it up against the mechanical room. I think I will caulk the joints between rungs and rails to keep rain water from collecting and rotting the wood.