Newsflash!
The Cannibal Special is back in business.
It turns out it was a faulty temperature sensor just as I had surmised. The main thermistor had gone south and was reading 5.45 ohms (140 degrees by it’s specifications) at 40 degrees.
The hot tub guy was here, double checked my findings ($50) and replaced the thermistor ($65) in about 10 minutes ($50)… Again, I’m in the wrong business.
Anyways, those of you who both read this and are close enough to visit; let it be known that the hot tub is back online. I just changed out the water, the filter, and did all the chemistry and it’s at about 108 degrees right now.
Oh, and a new cover is on order which means I won’t be changing the water so much anymore. That’s a good thing in my opinion.
In other news; between the hours of oh, 7:30 in the morning and about 5 pm you can get a look out of my window on the south side of the house. The camera runs 24/7, but right now I’m running a camera I found and it doesn’t work all that well in the dark… And it gets dark early here and sun rise is usually 30-45 minutes later than the rest of Colorado. Yay valley living!
I’ll eventually have a much nicer camera online and might even interface a little iButton weather station to the whole thing just for S&G’s. Of course that means writing software, but I haven’t done any code in a month or so and it might be fun. It’ll be very similar to the web site – PegaThing interfacing I did for Peg’s yacht back in Baltimore.
You can see the current incarnation of this marvel of technology (and recycled parts, duct tape, hot melt, and left over Sticker Station code) at: http://home.comcast.net/~rihahn/
Right now the whole thing runs off of a cheap $19 digital camera that has kludged streaming video capability, but I want to improve that by using an old BT848 video capture card and an NTSC camera. I can get away with this because NTSC is 512 x 384 and I’m sending 320 x 240 images to the web site…
Anyways, the BT card I have, but I’ll need to dig up a composite camera somewhere. I might even include a web page controlled PTZ (pan tilt zoom) so everyone out here in WebVille can play with it and look around.
If I go that far I’ll mount the camera up in the roof of the game room upstairs (4 stories in the air) in a dome. This’ll give folks a 360 degree view of the valley with tilt and zoom… So you can all peek in on my neighbors or count the cars over at WalWorld. (grin)
Yes, this is just this weeks “point of interest”… Makes one wonder what I’ll be into next week…