Archive for February, 2008

EnvStick USB Temperature Sensor

Friday, February 29th, 2008

The EnvStick is cheap, homemade temperature sensor that plugs into a USB port. It provides a simple way to collect a room’s ambient temperature. I made it for fun.

EnvStick Features:
- Temp sensor (+/- .5 deg C)

- USB 2.0

- Windows/Linux software

- Poll up to 100 times/minute- In-circuit programming- Only 11 components- Indicator LED

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Free GPS Visualization

Thursday, February 28th, 2008

I dug out my 9-year-old Garmin GPS the other day and brought it on a snowmobile ride near Grand Lake, Colorado. It gave me a chance to use the great, free visualization tool GPSVisualizer.com.
You can use this tool with any GPS or GPS-enabled phone.

Here are the results - click for a larger image:

Gravel Peak, COHere is elevation projected on a satellite image. You can see me doing little hill climbs at the highest altitude (in purple), and then jacking around a lot while everyone else did bigger hill climbs (in blue, under the “Gravel Mountain” waypoint).

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