Mom not feeling well so we decided to pass on this morning's Easter breakfast festivities. It was a quiet day overall.

Spent some time with the Arduino again. Breezed through infrared motion sensors so moved onto the next project which featured an ultrasonic motion sensor called a HC-SR501. This gadget can determine the distance from itself to the nearest non-transparent barrier then print that distance to a terminal. It can determine how far away that barrier is in centimeters. Took me a while to type in the sketch and found a bug in the lesson's version. Really enjoyed analyzing situation, determining the problem and correcting said problem.

HC-SR501

But even once I had solved the programming problem by getting it to compile and upload, the unit just keeps printing "Out of range." No matter how I try to influence the sensor, nothing happen. So now I have to to determine why that is.

Sidebar: In the lesson I discover that the speed of sound is affected by the ambient temperature. So determining distance accurately has to factor in the temperature. I've already wired up a thermometer in a past project so I should be able to wire one into this distance calculator to that I don't have to insert a software constant when I run it.


No. 1208 Baise Road, Wish Storehouse, Xuhui District, Shanghai, China 200237

I’ve earned my living using computers since 1980 and have experienced the refinement of the technology since then. At some point it would likely be fun to make comparisons between my first Radio Shack TRS-80 Model I and today’s 27-inch all-in-one machine. Even with having spent decades hammering away at keyboards to earn a living, I still sit in awe of where it all got to.

Radio Shack TRS-80 Model I

Just today I: scanned numerous news outlets (general news can be so depressing), paid bills electronically, gathered a series of recipes for a party, and visited both Lagos, Nigeria and Baffin Island, Canada via Google Earth. Wrote this blog and posted it to the Internet. (A neutrino of presence in the universe of the Net.) Many of these activities intermingled at the time.

This electronic miracle has accelerated mankind’s development. I’ve gone from four-function calculators that cost $100 to online banking. I can bring the outside environment into my cave, and I can reach out from my cave to affect that outside environment . This machine informs my political decisions and brings all  things material to my doorstep via Amazon. (Interesting that Amazon is the name of two of the world’s great networks: South America’s  Amazon, largest river in the world, and Amazon, the digital network irrigating the world with packages and data flow.)

Have to share this. Time to think about numbers.

Watt is the unit of power (symbol: W). (The watt unit is named after James Watt, the inventor of the steam engine.) One watt is defined as the energy consumption rate of one joule per second. 1W = 1J / 1s. One watt is also defined as the current flow of one ampere with voltage of one volt. A watt is pretty small but a hundred of them give you a decent light bulb.

Ten million (10⁷ )  such bulbs would give you a billion (10⁹) watts.

So a billion watts is a lot of bulbs. (If you wanted to build a cube from 10 million bulbs it would be roughly 215.5 bulbs wide, deep and high.)

A billion watts is pretty impressive. Then we take that billion and replicate it a billion times. We now have a billion (10⁹) billions (10⁹) = 10¹⁸! Let’s now multiply than by one million (10⁶). We get an enormous number a million billion billion (10²⁴)!! That number is called a yottawatt. (I would have gone with lottawatts.)

So a yottawatt is huge.

Scientists claim those colliding black holes they monitored with the Advanced Laser Interferometer Gravitational-Wave Observatory (whew) blasted out 3.6 x 10²⁵ yottawatts. 36 septillion yottawatts !!!!! (Our sun puts out about 385 yottawatts.)

Now that I have that enormous number off my chest, I can get rid of the article that brought it too me. Clearing off the desk being cluttered up by a really big number.