A week on

Not much caching, not getting too far with the twitter chicken piface project but much further on my analogue cigarette cessation project. Since Friday I have had four thin roll ups and spent the rest of the time on the e cigarette. Using menthol mix much of the time it's helped me start to clear my lungs of a lot of brown gunk which is actually tar and very brown it looks. Of the times I have had a roll up I have only had about half because the e cig makes me hate the taste of the analogue thing, hail the digital fag.0

Counterbalance forklift

After a week of training I passed :)

Cutting down on cigarettes

A couple of years ago I tried an e-cig but found that it was alright for a few puffs but died quickly. However over the past couple of months two guys at work have been using a ego-t e cigarette so I thought lets try one. 20 quid for the unit comprising of juice tank for the liquid nicotine to go in, carboniser that heats up the liquid to steam and battery with USB charger.

The juice is about three pounds for about 13ml which lasts about a week. So for a 20 a day smoker at nearly six quid a pack that's nearly 50 quid a week. For me on rolling tobacco at about 14 quid a week I'm saving 10 quid a week, having pure nicotine without all the nasty chemicals and much healthier.

I have been coughing up a lot of crap off my lungs which is good and the few roll ups I have had I've only smoked about a third of it before throwing it as I now really dislike the taste, certainly better than all the attempts I have had with either will power or nicotine replacement stuff.

The juices are available in hundreds of flavours including my favourite being a red bull flavour which is even better with a few drops of the menthol juice added.

If you smoke, try one of these ego-t e cigs you will get the hit you need and can even puff them indoors as they are steam vapours and not cigarette smoke. If I can get onto these and stay there I can eventually lower my nicotine intake to the liquids that are zero nicotine, well it's early days I'll keep you all posted.

a snowy cache day

Out with frodo today to get some caches, after the snow ruining saturday i was edging to get out so we risked it in the car to find that the roads we needed were clear, apart from the road up to white horse hill, but we didnt need that. Once up at the parking spot we had a bit of difficulty parking as the car slipped and slid into a parking place, once parked up we were on our way to the first cache. The snow had started to blow up into a mini white out as the winds blew the snow and what was on the ground, the views were just white as the snow falling had put a stop to the nice views up here. As we worked our way through the caches we couldnt find one big enough or with enough space for the two tb's so will have to dip them and find somewhere else to drop them off. Frodo enjoyed the snow and the hunt for the snowball, he also got hold of a big chunk of ice that he started to chew, a bit cold for me i thought. Lots of red kites flying around up here today too, so between finding carefully hidden letterboxes and traditional caches we watched the birds circling in the sky, so thank you pebbles&co for bringing us up here. I also left the pc running to download the piface image for the raspberry pi. The project i wanted to set up was the chicken reading tweets but am struggling to get the twitter python code to work but at the moment it doesnt want to know so need to find a short python script that works, any ideas let me know. Now back in the warm with a lovely cup of tea, feeling so much better that we have been out to burn off some energy.

my raspberry pi and geocaching adventures: my tv pi project

my raspberry pi and geocaching adventures: my tv pi project: It all started when I saw skpang's portable computer project. From that point I knew I had to try and make my own one. Once I had sourced ...

Pifi project

A good friend of mine has made a portable wifi access point with his pi, more details at this link http://blog.drsolly.com/2013/01/hurrah-for-piwi.html?m=1

Tv project continued...

This is my third tv project project one ended up broken on the kitchen floor, tv 2 I cut the wrong chip off but still have the screen in case I ever need to replace screen on number three. Then there is project tv three.

I tried and tried to get this to work on USB power but even when I found a 5v point and connected the USB power up you could hardly see the screen, so I was left with resoldering all the wires I had carefully cut and ordered a 12v 1amp power supply which arrived today.

After cutting, joining, soldering and electro taping the wires I powered it up with the pi connected and bingo it works.

I didn't really want to run it as 12v as I liked the idea of running it from one psu but it wasn't going to be.

It now means when I get home from work tonight I can get back to using the pi on my settee without having to run leads to the big tv which puts me off of running it at night. I can't really use the hdmi tv upstairs as my partner is asleep so isn't fair on her. But now I got the tv project running it means I can take my pi to events, hotels and know I can run it.

Please if you enjoy my blogs click on one of the adverts, once I reach the set amount google will pay out and all money made will go towards buying new projects for me to make and blog about. Many thanks in advance and thank you for reading.

Pi face has arrived

I ordered it back in November and had to go onto a waiting list, whilst awaiting postman for my 12v dc lead for the tv project (which doesn't like being converted to 5 volts for some reason). I quickly opened the package, hmmm can't remember ordering any add on boards, ah yes pi face board.

It's basically a smaller version of a gertboard and although they are only selling to developers as they write the codes and program's I still managed to get one so tonight if I get time I will have a quick play with it.

Regulated power supply

Today I decided to make my 5v 3a regulated power supply project up. I didn't have to purchase anything as I had the bits floating around the house but a rough guess would be under a tenner.

So this is what I had:

1x 13amp uk 240 volt power lead off an old electrical appliance
1x 240 - 5v 3amp fairy light power supply
1x 7 port powered hub
Some wires
And a car cigarette lighter socket voltage reader.

Firstly I wired the 240v lead into power supply and replaced the blown 13amp fuse.

Next I wired in the 5v output wires, desoldered the power jack on the powered USB hub then soldered the wires to it.

I then checked the voltage which was 5.25v there is a screw to change the voltage up or down but didn't need to touch this.

I then put it all back together before deciding to add the voltage reader which I connected to the power lead going into the USB hub and then turned it on , then bingo it worked reading 5.1 volts which is close.

Taped the wires up and ready to go.

More post

Received a 7" screen today so I can rebuild my tv project, this one is double the size to last one so should be able to cope well with entering text on it.

Also got my hobby tonic bits through to convert the psu power to 5 or 6 volts and more importantly down to 3a as the psu kicks out about 26A

Raspberry jam n cache

Went to raspberry jam at Milton Keynes today, got to see some good projects and find my led projects all work fine, problem is my board is a rev2 and they were written for revision one.

Also got to do some drive by caches as I popped over to see my dad over Bedford way before making the journey home.

The last cache of the day involved one that looked like fungi, must admit if I hadn't known I probably wouldn't have touched it.

Psu project

After finding that I'm always restricted on the pi to add ons due to the limited amps on the power pack and also the hub, I thought I would invest in a cheap psu unit.

I have already ordered a 12v to 6v which I'm awaiting on from hong kong but for the moment I have made a 5v power lead using the lead of an unregulated power supply that I was having problems with, but first I needed to get the unit working.

On opening it up I found the correct wire to start up the psu it was the green which I soldered to a ground, straight away the fan powers up, one section done.

Next the brown and orange needed attaching as per end of lead, so this was another one to solder together but these were to be done inside the psu to keep things tidy.

Checking the power I could see that the 5v lead was giving 5.05v but after running through a seven port hub which has pi power lead, wifi, keyboard it lowered to 4.95v perfect and 24 amps more than plenty to run with, this should stop the pi rebooting due to not enough amps.

Cutting all the connectors off the wires and cutting the leads I didn't need to a shorter length it was now a bit of a tidy up and solder any wires I had used to give a good connection. The USB hub had poor soldering so I didn't in the end use that just used the 5v lead I cut off the adapter and soldered to the 5v and ground.

Tv pi part 2

Here is a sneak view of the ledborg on my tv project

Vets then ftf s

Frodo needed to go for injections today for his back leg, being an old dog means we are restricted to 6 miles max whilst out, however a few years ago 30 miles would be a good day. With no problems getting there frodo dragged me into the vets had his injection and soon dragged me back out.

Got home and put the kettle on and started to wait for my postman with lots of bits n bobs for me. Kettle boiled and phone bleeps, cache gone live, 2, 3, 4, 5 where are they 1.6 miles away so straight out the front door we went and luckily postie was outside with my mail.

We parked outside the first cache, phone data let me down but the name gave me a clue and soon found it, never knew of this old pump here so learnt something new. We parked up and walked the rest, now I had phone data and was able to find the caches with my iPhone. The caches were easy to find and nice sizes which makes a nice change, maybe this year people will go back to putting quality out and not quantity.

After a few muddy paths we had them all and a quick email to cache owner to thank them. We stopped at the dip where frodo often paddles but he had a drink and didn't want to go in. Back at the car I had to try and dry him as he was rather muddy but excited for another walk so early on in the morning.

So there we have it a nice start to the new year with 5 ftf s big smiles here.

Happy new year

Happy new year all and may 2013 be a good one.