If anyone out there is still trying to use one of these Watt / Volt Meters:

Very Old Westinghouse Wattmeter

You might want the instructions.  I’ve scanned and uploaded them here, if you want a print size scanned copy e-mail me and I’d be happy to mail it to you.  Then go buy yourself a clamp on multimeter unless you’re using this in a black and white movie

Westinghouse PY-5 Portable Single Phase Wattmeter Instructions / Parts List

Instructables has decided to force users to pay a monthly fee to continue using basic features of the site. They’re removing a long time features of “View all steps on one page” and added no improvements.

Pay for additions to the site are :

Clearly some MIT thinking hard at work here, thinking with your finances and not with the mindset of “what your users want and are willing to pay for”. Hell, had they come out with some innovate tools to getting Instructables up quicker or anything

I’m waiting for the return fire of the open-source collaborative true community solution to the problem, aka someone returning fire in much the way Xiaonei has to Facebook.

This comic reminded me of the good days of video games.  Myst has to be the first game that really pulled me into what was truely computer gaming, back when playing games meant having a notebook sitting in front of the computer with all sorts of scribbles of code and cryptic pictures sketched out.  Anyone else ever play Desert Strike on SNES and wonder why you had to manually enter a 8+ character secret code to resume progress, a quick brute force calculation says its going to take me 22 months to get it entering 500,000 passwords/second. I don’t know about my controller skills today, but I’m betting in my prime I could only guess about 1 password/minute, I think the online calculator is going to explode if I try to put a fraction in the guess/second box! Those were to good old days, especially if the dog got the sheet of paper with those codes on it, resulting in another all night session with a 2-liter of Surge

I spent a few hours today searching for a notch or band reject filter this morning.  I ended up finding an awesome resource for Texas Instruments, it’s a datasheet that basically spells out circuits and formulae for all basic active filters:

• Notch Filter ( 60 hz filter, 50 hz filter, buzz or hum filter )
• Band Pass Filter
• Band Reject Filter
• High Pass Filter
• Low Pass FIlter
• etc

You can get the PDF here.

If you are running LabVIEW and a Compact RIO ( cRIO ) controller, you may need to use the system manager to view your memory or processor usage at one point or another.  The only difficulty is that LabVIEW auto-fills the machine name and no port number!

To get to the system manager, open up your project (not the individual VI you are running).  From the project menu, click

Tools -> Real-Time Module -> System Manager

Once System Manager Opens, you’ll have:

NI cRIO System Manger

The first thing to do is to enter the Machine Name / IP Address.  This is the IP of the cRIO that you are trying to communicate with, in this case my IP Address is actually “10.0.0.2″ rather than the auto-filled value.  If you use the project name as was automatically inserted it will not work!

The next step is to configure the port number, in this case I’m using port “3363″, again this value is empty by default and will not work!  You may be using a different port, but I’m pretty sure that 3363 is the default, leave a comment below if it’s not.

Next select options you are interested in*** on the Resources, VIs, and Alerts tabs below.  You can now click “Start Monitoring” and you should be off an running.

*** One very important note, if you selected a low Update Interval (every few seconds) you are very likely going to see high processor usage, this is normal as the cRIO has to use extra clock time to send you statistics, try lowering your update interval to see a more normal usage when just the VI is running. ***

As always, Black Friday brings all the shady web retailers into the spotlight for a day as they each try to vie for cheaper deals on TV’s, Hard Drives, Flash Drives, Computers and Monitors.  I decided to entirely skip my annual pilgrimage to Staples for cheap hard drives, as they were more expensive than the standard online prices by a long shot!

I was looking around for online deals this morning, and ran across the eCOST hot sheet in my inbox.  I immediately saw a 500GB eSATA drive for $39 after rebate, a free 8GB flash drive and a cheap 16GB drive.

The 500GB was a VOX drive, regular price of $79, with $40 in mail-ins.  Seems reasonable enough.

I decide that it’s a great deal, add it to cart and then think about checking on the rebates:

First Rebate

Second Rebate

So I start reading through their rebate terms, and I first run into “Purchase must have been made between 11/27/08 and 11/28/08 firsthundred customer” – then I find “Only the first 200 customers purchase EXSA-35C-500G7K on 11/27/08 to 11/28/08 are eligible to redeem this rebate”.  So I decide to call them and figure it out.

I called up their customer service, which, to their credit answered in about a minute with no hold.  I also got a guy who actually speaks English, so they’re ahead when compared to any normal retailer customer service already – however I asked him about the rebates.  He checks it on his computer – “Hello sir, we have 618 of that item left”.  So I again asked him about the rebate and whether they were metering product sales or if they were just selling products.  He said they sell until the stock runs out.

So we have at least 618 hard drives they will probably sell, at $79.00 each, with 200 getting $40 off.  The manufacturer eats $8000 in profits, yet will profit by $16,720 on the remaining 418 drives.  I can’t imagine that eCOST only had 618 HDD’s to start the day, I would imagine they buy in larger units than that.

Of course, you also have to consider that “. . . for the typical rebate sizes that you see, the [actual rebates submitted] range is from, two per cent to about 50 per cent.” ( http://www.cbc.ca/consumers/market/files/money/rebates/marketing.html ).

So now if you take the first 200 people who purchased this HDD, and only 50% who are eligible will actually fill out and return the rebate.  Now you further have disqualify people who purchased more than one or are ineligible for other reasons and you have that $8000 in loses chewed back down to <$4000, not a bad racket.

I had some old content that is worth keeping around from the past mentions page:

Trivia!

Why are automobile radiators painted black?
Automobile radiators are painted black because black has the highest coefficient of emissivity. This means that black radiates heat most effectively of any color. You may have heard of a black body radiator, the coefficient of emissivity is unrelated to this phenomena so don’t get confused!

Why shouldn’t you store leftovers in the “tin” can that they came in?
The cans that you purchase your fruit/beans/etc in are actually made of steel which has been tin plated. The problem is that the steel and tin are electrochemically active, this means that the tin and steel will exchange electrons, causing rust! The reason that the cans don’t rust before you get them is that the inside of the can is oxygen free (otherwise there would be lots of botulism). The reduction reaction on the steel requires oxygen, so if you pop open your can of fruit and toss the remainder in the fridge, when you get it back out to finish it you’ll be eating the iron atoms (rust) that have started to form in solution!

A friend of mine (and the rest of the internet) is using WordPress so I thought that I would give it a try.  I had been intending to hand write all of my online content, however college dictates otherwise and I’m hoping that sacrificing some personalization (that I don’t have time to do) will allow me to increase content that I will be able to post, which is ultimately more important!

Stay tuned for updates. . .

Trivia!

Why are automobile radiators painted black?

Automobile radiators are painted black because black has the highest coefficient
of emissivity. This means that black radiates heat most effectively of any color.
You may have heard of a black body radiator, the coefficient of emissivity is unrelated
to this phenomena so don’t get confused!

Why shouldn’t you store leftovers in the “tin” can that they came in?

The cans that you purchase your fruit/beans/etc in are actually made of steel which
has been tin plated. The problem is that the steel and tin are electrochemically
active, this means that the tin and steel will exchange electrons, causing rust!
The reason that the cans don’t rust before you get them is that the inside of the
can is oxygen free (otherwise there would be lots of botulism). The reduction reaction on the steel requires
oxygen, so if you pop open your can of fruit and toss the remainder in the fridge,
when you get it back out to finish it you’ll be eating the iron atoms (rust) that
have started to form in solution!

Before you ask, soda cans are also painted on the inside to prevent oxidation from the acids and carbonation present in soda water.