Mostly from an email to a friend:

I ended up playing with the iobridge yesterday (iobridge.com). I can now read the temperature and turn a light off/on in the shop from anywhere in the world. Boy, that’s got to come in handy sometime or another. Hi.

Actually, it wouldn’t take much to be able to switch between heating and cooling on the shop’s thermostat (or I could just buy a smarter AC controller). The small iobridge microcontroller is setup totally across the internet, i.e. no computer-language programming required. I have another board that does require low-level programming to scratch that itch I get from time to time. The iobridge will talk to the other board by serial connection and allow the passing of commands and the collection of data. The iobridge will also control X10 wall-plug devices directly (that’s how I turn the light off/on).

The computer I’m using in the shop I just bought from bestbuy for about $200.

Jeanne needed a computer in the bedroom for a little solitude while writing; so I went looking. Bought her an Acer R1600. It runs XP, drives a large monitor, and runs really cool to the touch (uses very little power). Liked it so much I went back and bought me one for the shop. Added a USB WiFi device to each to keep from running Cat5 cable. They hit the Belkin router in the living room just fine.

Break

About this blog going dormant, I figured it out: I was no longer focused enough on the yard to generate discussions and my ongoing activities mostly fell under the theme of my other blog, i.e. recumbent bike riding. But now that I have my part of the shop appointed with work benches and tools I’ve started piddling with electronics/web control/embedded computing again. I use to do that kind of think at work. I’ll drop the “yard” part of yard.piddling.info and shift this blog to piddling of all kinds not recumbent.