Posts

Moving from Map My Run to Strava I have been running a little while now and am always in the habit of taking my phone with me to get some monitoring in on my progress with the aid of GPS and so on. I have been using a really nice app called mapmyrun. It has given me months of good service and what with the moderate amount of running I have done, I have committed a fair few hours worth of data online. Meanwhile I have decided that it would be great to get out running with a group of people rather than on my own all the time, so I have joined up with a very friendly local running group in Caistor, Lincolnshire. Quite a number of them use a different app called Strava, and I thought that I would give it a go based on some positive recommendations from members of the group. You might wonder what this article is doing in the software section of this site… well, read on. ...

Purpose This is a brief memory aid for me with some small, and perhaps useful, tips when writing articles using reStructuredText_1. I am aiming to keep on top of this document and maintain it as a living thing; when I find something new and useful, it will be appended. ...

The Publishing Process This brief article focuses on only one part of using Pelican as a static site generation tool - the day to day usage once the set up is established. There are loads of really good articles on how to get started with Pelican and I am not about to add to that growing pile; there is just no need. I don’t use the default make tool that comes with Pelican, because having a Python programming background made me feel much more comfortable with utilising the ever excellent Fabric tool. ...

Further Thoughts This post follows on quite quickly (for me at least!) from my last one regarding my latest tests and reflections on environmental issues with some thoughts about how to measure ground temperatures in a reliable way. I am also going to take a look at the difficulties I might face in trying to automatically interpret cloud cover the whole year through. Finally I am going to share some thoughts on how I might approach packaging the system for deployment in the open air, and what to do about supplying power and communications. ...

Title Case As a rather inexperienced writer, it is the little things I struggle with, as well as the big things you might add. I find that one of the most annoying is getting title case correct. There are a lot of style guides about which may or may not help; I find some of them cryptic at times, and rather than being strict rules, they seem to be more matters of style. Until recently I had been taking style advice from yourdictionary.com’s site, but I always found having to undertake this task manually a bit of a bore. However, as with most programmers (or even ex-programmers like myself), I find that as soon as I am faced with a repetetive task I look to find a way of automating it; and thus it happened with this. Five minutes later and I had turned up Pat Pannuto’s Python based titlecase package. ...

Latests Tests Since the last part in this series I have continued to conduct experiments comparing and contrasting the two variants of MLX90614, the wide field of view BAA and the considerably more focused BCF. Whilst undertaking these ‘in the field’ tests I have also come up against a few, what you might call, environmental problems which need addressing before I can move from the prototype phase to the implementation phase. ...

I finally have some energy back and am getting on with some projects again. It is about time really. I have spent most of the summer evenings not doing a great deal; just feeling like I needed the time to recover from the rigours of a very busy working day. I am normally one of these people who is not comfortable with just sitting down and meditating on things. I think on the whole it has probably been a positive step to sit back and de-stress in front of a book or two. ...

Multiple MLX90614 Sensors Nearly all articles you might look for regarding trying out an MLX90614 with an Arduino contain examples of using one sensor at a time. This makes sense as probably 99% of people are going to prototype a system with only one sensor in it. Quite a few articles make the incorrect assumption that having more than one sensor in a circuit is not even possible because the device slave addresses are hard coded. They do all come out of the factory with a default slave address of 0x5A, but this can be changed with a small amount of effort. Now I plan to use two of these MLX90614 sensors in my cloud detection project so there was no two ways about it - I need 2 sensors, hence two slave addresses. Below I am going to take a look at the code to change the slave address on one of these devices, and then a way of actually implementing the change. ...

I’ve been making a slow but steady stream of improvements to the blog this year which began with a migration from an ancient installation of Wordpress to the static Pelican HTML site generator. Many other blogs explain how this is achieved so I won’t bore you with it here. Post migration I decided to pretty much ditch all my previous posts because many of them were related to programming and were rather out of date. Oh, and in my experience, re-reading stuff you wrote years ago is never good for the soul. ...

A little bit of work stemming from from the soil temperature monitoring project; this is an aside on DS18B20 temperature sensing device address discovery with the Arduino. Being that I am going to have a handful of sensors in the ground and therefore not easily accessible for identification I need to find a way of easily finding out all the device addresses in one fell swoop. ...