So I had a really weird dream couple of days ago. I was sitting in a Thai restaurant. I know it was a Thai restaurant because I was on the phone and telling someone I was in a Thai restaurant. During the phone conversation, I start talking about a girlfriend (???). Then after some transition I don’t remember, I am outside and exchanging snowballs with some girl (I am supposing this is my girlfriend of the dreams). Now the slightly weird part… In my dream, I suddenly start saying “This can’t be true… it’s a dream, she’s not real” (something to that extent). I then move forward towards her and she disappears and her coat falls to the ground. The next thing I remember is entering a house and realizing it’s my parents.  Just thought it was weird that I actually thought to myself in my dreams… it was kind of a weird feeling.

In other news, it’s finally been raining here so it’s not like 100F everyday.

That’s really it I suppose. I have been pretty sick the last week or so, but getting bettah now. Housing was a big scandal for a few days, but I think it’s all set now. 2 more months of summer vacay and I have like 3289428309 things due. Yay. * sigh *

Yesterday was roofing day at LEAFHouse. We started work early, at 6am. Unfortunately the final layer of the roofing that arrived was not the one we ordered, but we did put the insulation down.

The insulation involved two layers. The first was foamy (smelly) layer that was around an inch thick. This is the gray stuff in the pictures above. The second layer is a more dense material that apparently has fiber glass in it. For both kinds of insulations, we had to cut holes in them to go around the pipes and upstands on the roof. The first layer was kind of messy but it was easy enough. The second layer was harder to cut, but more importantly you get this powdery fiber glass stuff all over you … and it sticks … and cuts… It’s not exactly harmful, but it’s very annoying. The stuff sticks onto your skin and keeps pricking . But after all that…

The last layer didn’t come through as we ordered, so we had to decide what to do… it was kind of lame.

The guy with the camcorder is our PR guy – Peter Kelley. He came out to video tape us working and… to mow the grass. Yes you heard right.

It took him a good 3-4 hours because the grass hadn’t been mowed for a good 7 months. Anyway, back to the camera… it was awesome! :nerd: The video quality was quite nice and it had a shotgun mic on it. This sort of mic apparently picks up on sounds nearby and in a small “viewing” angle, so it’s good for canceling out noises in the background.

Hopefully this will give us a good bit of video to play with to show on the national mall.

Besides solar, I think I am actually sort of enjoying my break. It hasn’t been boring at any point yet. When I have a couple of days off, I now have no work to due (unlike in school when I would have homework anyways) and it wouldn’t get boring because it won’t be for like weeks on end of nothing to do … if any of that made any sense.

I see a lot of people travelling to different countries… makes me want to do the same… meh :bummer: .

In other news, some bill passed and we might get our work-permits pretty soon (about freaking time… been waiting for our greencards for like 7 years now). So I should be able to find a regular job for next semester!

The smart house aspect (SHAC or Smart House Adaptive Controls) of the solar house is run by a team of 2 people basically (with the help of an advisor whose helping us out with communications with other teams). I am the “team leader”, which means squat in a 2-person team

This past saturday, Anthony (the other guy on the team) and I sat down and went through a bunch of sensors and made sure they worked. A lot more stuff will happen in the next few weekends, but it was still pretty fun sitting in a room filled with wires, chips and adapters of all kinds (there you go nina, just to satisfy the perv requirement for my posts :silly: ).

We now have a functional humidity and light sensor. I can also dim my table lamp from my PC! We need to get a better interface for the light dimming, but we know it’s possible now and how to basically do it.

How do all these work? :nerd:

At the heart of everything is the Temp08 and a class of devices called 1-Wire devices (Wikipedia Article). The Temp08 allows the PC to talk to these 1-Wire devices through a serial port with some fairly nice commands. The biggest advantage over other more well packaged sensors (or sensors that work right out of the box) is that these 1-Wire sensors are CHEAP … and SMALL! A lot of the parts, you can even order for free from the Dallas Maxim site as samples. I order about 10 temperature sensors and several voltage sensors (they sense voltage potentials at their inputs).

These sensors plug directly into the Temp08 with a telephone cable (any cable would do fine, but telephone cable is easy to find and it has 2 pairs of wires inside a nice sheathing, three of which we use – Data, Voltage+ and Voltage-).

The lighting is a done using an interface that talks to DMX devices and acts as an adapter between DMX and a PC serial port. DMX in itself is a very simple protocol. Lights are grouped into channels. Each channel gets 1 bit of data (0 – 255). If the channel gets a 0, all the lights in the channel will go down to 0, if the channel gets 255, all the lights are at their brightest, and if they get 100, somewhere in the middle, etc. So a DMX packet is basically a string of n numbers, where n is the number of channels you have. Each packet is delineated by some start and stop code. The lights usually talk to dimmer modules/racks/packs that actually take the DMX signal they are getting from the DMX controller (in our case, the PC) and fiddle with the voltage each light that’s connected to it, gets.

Hmm… Well another long ass post for Aditya. Hope it was enlightening ^_^

My summer is slowly turning into somewhat of a school semester, at least workload wise. The following is how is breaks down (or how I break down I suppose )

• 65% – Solar
• 20% – Research for mentor
• 10% – Working on other projects for people (like the prof who needs a website)
• 5% – Sitting on the couch taking a break, playing some 360.

It’s not terribly bad since I actually like doing all these things, but it gets tiring.

For solar, I am ending up actually having to go to a lab and building on small circuit boards. Should be fun. I am actually applying Comp. Eng. skills for once

I get to make a light sensor and a switch that flushes a ROM chip’s data into the system. Pretty nifty eh?

Gotta run out to the site to get some work done. Check us out at www.solarteam.org/webcam.