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better communication system than prayer
Tuesday, October 1 2019
After I got home from work, I lingered around the house until a guy from a heat pump installation service called. Gretchen wants to install "splits" in the basement and perhaps elsewhere to dehumidify and heat, and I had some questions. How much power do they use? Can they heat hydronic fluid? In so doing, I learned that they use no more than ten amps (and so would require no special wiring) and that using them to heat hydronic fluid would be impractical. Fortunately, any rebates we get for installing splits would not require the removal of our oil-fueled boiler, which could be used to fill in the gaps of the heating produced by our woodstove and however many splits we might install.
The evening was unseasonably warm and humid, and I quickly broke into a sweat when carrying heavy slabs of bluestone to the east end of the growing stone wall in the forest. This burst of summerlike heat seemed to bring on a wave of mosquitoes. It took them awhile to find me, but once they did, they began to accumulate around me until they formed something of a cloud.
All this wall building has been good for my physique, and for the past few days I've been able to feel that good kind of exercise ache in my muscles. I still have a ways to go on my weight, however, as (and I weighed myself this evening) I'm up to 179 pounds completely naked (but with a gut full of tacos). I should be closer to 170 or 175, particularly going into the gluttony season.
Back in my laboratory, I noticed that my Arduino LoRa sketch claimed to be broadcasting at just a smidge over 900 MHz instead of the 915 MHz that the public LoRa channel is supposed to live in. So I tweaked the frequency setting on my LoRa gateway to the value being displayed on the Arduino serial monitor (which is something it seems to allow), and that was all it took! The next transmitted packet made it from my Arduino to the gateway and then on to a console page for my gateway that I have hosted at TheThingsNetwork.org. It was officially a better communication system than prayer. That qualified as a huge advancement, though I have a ways to go. I would, for example, like to figure out how to do bidirectional communication and then test the range. If I can get this working reliably, it would be fun to build a homebrewed GPS tracker that doesn't require a cellphone plan. Then we can go back to watching the dogs move across a Google Map like we did for that year we had a Whistle subscription for Neville the Dog.
For linking purposes this article's URL is:
http://asecular.com/blog.php?191001 feedback
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