Want to see videos of lasers shooting down migs?



This website has some very cool slow motion videos of mosquitoes. The first couple are mosquitoes in flight - captured at 6000 frames per second! Very interesting to watch how the wings work - there are micro-ornothopter improvements in there somewhere.

However, the 3rd video is where the money is. Sorry PETA - there were mosquitoes injured and/or killed in the making of this clip - and it is awesome. As the mosquitoes fly by, a laser burns their wings off - some go limp and so presumably are killed before hitting the floor.

Probably not the safest idea, but if this laser is in any way actively targeting these little pests - whoa that's impressive....

For those who are slightly confused, migs are what my family calls mosquitoes.

Update: There is more details about the technology - these guys claim to have built a device with parts from eBay that identifies (right down to male vs female mosquitoes), tracks and fires upon the pests when they fly between two fence posts up to 30m apart!

Canadian Tire of all places sells a must have tool for electric RC builders and pilots. A DC current meter that can measure over 10A. This is a clamp style meter (funny that the site calls is a Clap meter). It retails for $59.99 which is decent enough, but this week it went on sale for $20.99!!! Less than $25 taxes in gets a tool that can measure up to 400A of DC current! (BTW, it needs 2 x AAA batteries - the first time I've bought a meter that did not include batteries...)



I saw Mark from Cellar Dweller use one about a year ago to balance the up / down thrust of an electric heli and it immediately went to the top of my wish list.

So I just picked one up tonight and tried it out. It's no bazillion dollar Fluke(tm), but for $21 it works quite well. Measured the current draw on one of my planes @ 13.6A (11.1V - 150Watts!). (I think I saw a 16A on the first test, but too much stuff was blowing around the shop, and the battery in the plane was not fully charged.)

One a side by side test with an inline current meter (also Mastercraft), the inline measured 3.08A and the clap :-) meter measured 3.2A.

AC current test was measured while my furnace was running. The reference meter was a cheap (picked up on sale for less than $15 taxes in) PowerFist (Princess Auto) AC clamp current meter. It read 40.1A while the Mastercraft read 38.9A.

That's acceptable tolerance for my needs.

So I've been working on my furnace monitoring kit. And now I have basic weather logging enabled. I am fetching climate data from Environment Canada and adding it to a logging tool called RRD. This is a clever fixes size logging data store. It is meant for recording data on fixed time intervals. In my case I'm recording cycle counts, kWh used and outside temperature once every hour. It spits out graphs like this (hourly for 7 days):



I have created a full page to track weekly, monthly and annual usage.

There is a script (furnace.pl) constantly running that pings the microcontroller every second which returns the current status of the furnace (heating or not).

My crontab looks like this:

0 5 * * * /home/me/furnace/logparse.pl
5 5 * * * /home/me/furnace/hourly.pl
10 5 * * * /home/me/furnace/catchup.pl
20 5 * * * /home/me/furnace/enterdata.sh #legacy - generated by catchup.pl
0 6 * * * /home/me/furnace/fetchclimate.pl
5 6 * * * /home/me/furnace/graph.sh
10 6 * * * ftp -inv < /home/me/furnace/ftpscript #upload graphs to flyinglow.ca/furnace

These are works in progress. You can follow my furnace online (a_furnace).
0 0-23 * * * /home/me/furnace/twit.pl #tweet the daily usage up to the hour
0-59 * * * * /home/me/furnace/lcdstatus.pl #update an LCD display (and spin some servos)