Christmas eve, and Mary and Joseph are settling down in the stable.
Mary and Joseph have arrived at the stable. A few shepherds are hanging around tending to their animals.
The animals are on the way in the Ark. This year, they’re joined by two Christmas lobsters. If you didn’t know that lobsters were present at the birth of Jesus, then you should watch Love Actually.
Animals on the Ark making their way to the stable. Two Christmas lobsters have joined the party.
Christmas morning! The shepherds have come to the stable with their flock to see the new baby.
Shepherds and some of their flock gathered to see the new baby
The wise men from the East have gathered to marvel at the new star. As usual, Lt. Cmdr. Data has joined them as their guide.
Wise men have gathered to marvel at the new star. Lt Cmdr Data guides the way with his star charts.
All the animals have arrived at the stable to see the new baby!
The animals, joined by the Christmas lobsters this year, have left the Ark and arrived at the stable. Some of the tree ornaments hitched a ride as the Ark passed by.
I’ve got a number of power supplies that I can use to supply power to the various projects that I’ve got on the workbench.
There’s the obvious wall power and a variety of wall warts of different voltages and current ratings. I’ve got wall warts and power supplies ranging from 5V all the way up to big chunky 28V power supplies.
A power strip mounted to the side of a bookshelf with a 5V wall wart power supply and flashlight plugged in
For projects that require a beefier power supply I’ve got an unregulated power supply that gives me up to 30VDC or 25VAC. It doesn’t get used too often, but comes in handy when it’s needed. There are also a few 13.8V power supplies that I can steal from the radios in a pinch.
Power supply offering unregulated 0-30V DC and 0-25V AC
Most of my projects don’t have big current draws though, so more often than not, I’m just using batteries to power my projects. One that I use most often is a 12V battery pack made by wiring 2 quad C-cell battery holders together and putting a standard 3.5mm DC barrel connector on it.
A battery pack of 8 C-cells connected to a Sparkfun RedBoard
DC barrel connectors can be easily attached to those snap connectors used for 9V batteries providing another power source (here’s one from Sparkfun if you don’t want to make one).
A 9V battery connected to a Sparkfun RedBoard
Some battery holders I have also use those snap connectors, so I can have battery power sources ranging from 3V to practically as high as I need.
Batteries in a variety of battery holders
I’m often using mostly used batteries pulled out of other things like TV remotes, smoke detectors, etc. Usually they still have plenty of juice left to power my smaller projects.
While charging up some old sealed lead acid (SLA) batteries pulled from my battery backup UPSs, I got to thinking about how I could put them to use as an additional power source. I’ve got plenty of three terminal voltage regulators that would provide the voltages that I’d need.
I sketched out block diagrams for a couple of possible concepts. One would switch between several different voltages but provide just a single output, while the second would provide multiple outputs and have toggle switches turn to each one on or off.
Block diagram for a potential battery powered power supply with a variety of switched voltages
Block diagram for a potential battery powered power supply providing multiple voltages
Probably wouldn’t do 3.3V, but the others would definitely be feasible. 12V would probably be just a direct connection to the battery rather than going through a voltage regulator. Since I’ve got 2 SLA batteries, I could even put them in series for a 24V source and give myself a wider range of regulated voltages.
Still in the concept stage for this and haven’t started building anything yet. Seems like it could be a fun project.
After plowing through most of Florida and causing much devastation as a Category 4 storm, Hurricane Ian is heading toward us as a much milder, but very large Category 1 hurricane.
NHC forecast track for Hurricane Ian, 30-Sep-2022 0500EDT
The tropical storm force wind field (yellow blob) is about the largest I can remember seeing from a storm. The forecast track for Ian has been shifting more east over the past few days after the storm crossed over Florida, giving it a chance to regain a bit of strength before coming on shore again. Good for us, but maybe not so much for places further north along the coast. Looking like Ian will make another landfall around the Pawley’s Island/Myrtle Beach area of SC.
Flooding is pretty much the main concern, and with a projected high tide of 9 feet, there’s definitely going to be some of that in the lower areas
The NWS Chas has upped the tide table to 9ft at the time of high tide today around 12PM. This presents significant flooding for many areas, especially if we are seeing heavy rains at that time. #chswx#Ianpic.twitter.com/oQNvnFqdfn
Not expecting anything too serious to happen here at the house. Patio furniture got moved into the garage, and we’re set to deal with any extended power outages if that happens (hopefully not).
I’ve added a nice big Barco MDCC-6230 6 megapixel monitor to my work computer. The monitor comes from a radiology diagnostic workstation that was being taken out of commission, so I managed to get the monitor and an nVidia Quadro P1000 video card to drive it.
Out of the box, I had a hard time getting Fedora to use the resolutions the monitor was capable of and it would only run the Barco monitor at 1024×768.
Thanks to the collective knowledge of the Internet, I figured out how to use xrandr to get the video card to drive the monitor at its full resolution (3280×2048) and arrange the displays the way I wanted them.
# Create a new display mode. Modeline info came from the Xorg log file.
# (II) NOUVEAU(0): Modeline "1640x2048"x49.9 188.50 1640 1688 1720 1800 2048 2051 2061 2097 +hsync -vsync (104.7 kHz UP)
xrandr --newmode "1640x2048" 188.50 1640 1688 1720 1800 2048 2051 2061 2097 +hsync -vsync
# Add the new modes to the video card outputs connected to the Barco
xrandr --addmode DP-1 1640x2048
xrandr --addmode DP-2 1640x2048
# Configure the video card outputs
xrandr --output DP-2 --mode 1640x2048 --pos 0x0 --primary
xrandr --output DP-1 --mode 1640x2048 --right-of DP-2
xrandr --output DP-3 --mode 1600x1200 --pos 3280x848
Unfortunately, whenever I logged out or rebooted, the computer reverted to the original 1024×768 configuration. Getting the display configuration to persist across logins and reboots meant getting X Windows configured properly. It took a while, but I figured out a working set of xorg.conf configuration directives that worked (placed in /etc/X11/xorg.conf.d/10-monitor.conf).
The Xorg log tells me some of the configuration directives aren’t used, but everything works so I’ll leave it alone for now.
Now my work computer desktop has a total of 3280×2048 + 1600×1200 pixels (across two monitors) of workspace for me to do stuff in. I wonder if I can get Xorg set up so that the Barco gets used as a single monitor instead of two virtual monitors.
