Is forum going silent, or software acting up?

[mike90045]

I check this forum daily with the link  http://www.microcogen.info/index.php?action=unread
and it now returns " No Messages"    I tried a test post to a topic a few days ago, and the reply to that did not appear, I had to dig down through the forums to find it.
Ideas ?

[LowGear]

I check it most days but nothing is listed as new since my last log-in.

[buickanddeere]

  The gods at the EPA who know what is good for us dumb peasants . They have made the hobby more difficult and expensive .

[mike90045]

  The gods at the EPA who know what is good for us dumb peasants . They have made the hobby more difficult and expensive .

Well, this post showed up as a new one, so I guess it's forum traffic being low.
The EPA is not staffed by gods of any sort, it's run by bureaucrats that are pushing a social agenda, as demonstrated by the lame emission test per volume of pipe, not per unit of work done.

[LowGear]

What does an incompetent administrator do when he / she is found out. 

"Fire the Bastards!  Now we can get some good stuff accomplished."  "Hey, my son-in-law is looking for work."

[mike90045]

I hate the FB groups, because you dont get to see ALL the postings, only the ones FB thinks are interesting to you, and the ads.

[Carlb]

seems kinda of qute

[Henry W]

site is fine. most of us have been busy taking care of things. I have lots to post but need to find time to do it.

[mike90045]

this last week, there's been several posts, so I guess all is working right.

[mobile_bob]

As far as i can tell the forum is working as usual, however the traffic has all but stopped.

i for one have been incredibly busy her and have had very little time to devote to projects, updates or responding
to the posts on the forum.... an i feel bad about that and wish i had an extra hour per day that i might put to use here.

fwiw

i have been working on a micro controller project,  it came up from a need at our water filter plant here in our little city.
if something happens to go wrong there we don't know about it for up to 12 hours at a time, as the operator only checks
on it twice a day to take readings and document for the state chlorine and turbidity levels, check clearwell and tower readings and a bunch of readings of the two micro fiber filter units.

we have had several serious failures that happened while no one was around, one of which resulted in a "farmer insurance" commercial event (when the operator opened the door to the building a 2 foot tidal wave of water came out carrying all sorts of stuff across the drive and lawn.

that could have been a very costly problem had the water level gotten about a foot higher, the building cinderblock structure likely would have been stressed to the point of failure and a few more inches and 10s of thousands of dollars in electronics would have been under water.  and we all know how electronics likes taking a bath.

so in my spare time (enter sarcasm here) i designed a master/slave microcontroller system with 8 inputs  and several outputs, two of which are used to dial a cell phone i hacked an integrated into the system (ya trackphone for 19 bucks out the door)

the master controller monitors the 8 sensors, flood, chlorinator failure, turbidity, ambient temps, clearwell level, tower level
and a couple others i forget just now.  if any of the sensor go to fault mode, the master see's that and dials the phone to either myself or my water operator (switch selectable for who is on call)

the first version would then put out beep codes when either of us answer our phones and let us know of the failure, and then it will hang up and redial every 15 minutes until someone comes and corrects the failure and resets the controller.

the second version i added a slave controller to integrate a voice recorder chip, so that when the call is made, there is a sequence of beep codes and also a verbal recording such as "plant flood", "chlorinator failure" etc.

still got a bit of cleaning up and fabrication to get it all into a little box, and then hook it into the system and let it go.

the upsides is this, apart from the sensors being different, and the recorded messages and beep coding changes, the system in my opinion might be really useful in monitor/control of a offgrid cogen system... giving the owner a bit of freedom in knowing if i run to town i am only a phone call away from my system calling me and letting me know there is a problem.

and thinking about it a bit more, it might not take much more to include the ability to call the monitor/controller back and instruct it to effect a shutdown.

yes it is based on the parallax bs2 stamp micro,   and it appears that the whole world is going with arudino and variants,  its just too bad that i have so little time to learn how to use them as there seems to be so much open source work being done with them and there are so much stuff available to work with them.  heck even the chinese relay boards are all low logic control, and i prefer hi logic control! and yes i know there are work arounds and dual use boards, but 10 years ago there were lots of stuff that worked with the bs2 or comfile products (bs2 compatible)

anyway, as time allows i will try to post more about the system.

bob g

[BruceM]

Nice project for a micro-controller, Bob.  Bravo!

I've done some work with Arduinos last year - and while successful I came away unimpressed except with how cheap the processor boards are.  The non-usb downloaders (USBasp, tinyUSB) are flakey, often taking 2-3 downloads to get an error free load.  (I never have USB on embedded processors as this triples the power consumption.)  The freeware AVRdude has serious problems on some Windows machines with USB port allocation for USBasp or tinyUSB. I also found some basic bugs in the C compiler like undocumented oddities in declarations for variables in interrupt handlers, as well as basic math errors relating to 16 bit multiply not generating a proper 32 bit result in a 32 bit variable...requiring all to be 32 bit.  I have developed contempt for "open source" products, especially ones with are collections of other people's open source programs like the Arduino IDE, and their many bugs and flaws. I find that my time is worth more to me than the frustration of working with buggy software. I also found the Arduino Forum to be a farce as far as any serious technical issues.   My next applications will be back to PIC18F, as I also found that PIC parts at twice the clock speed (equivalent processing power) consume about half the power of AVR on 5V, and the Pickit 3 programmer/debugger is solid.

For those who like the delightful simplicity and clarity of Basic/Basic Stamp the Picaxe 40X2 or 28X2 (both PIC18F parts) are a big step up in performance from the Basic Stamp at a big cost savings, but you should have not troubles in conversion.  The tech support is exceptional- the company monitors and answers questions that aren't quickly resolved by other users. 

[mobile_bob]

Bruce:

thanks for the heads up on the arduino stuff,  now i don't feel bad about avoiding the jump over to and having to learn
another programming language.

yes there are lots of stuff that is cheaper to work with than the bs2, however i am comfortable using them, and stocked up
on a dozen or so for a very reasonable price years ago from an ebay seller... i think i bought a dozen and i think only one had one I/O pin bad/dead... i think iirc i paid maybe 17 bucks each for them back then.

while i am sure there are faster micro's out there and likely lower power consumption ones too, the bs2 suits my needs more than adequately.

i was very late to the micro game, having to work with simple relays, using basically relay logic you have to get very crafty  to get even relatively simple operational control systems working, the bs2 was like jumping light years ahead for me.

of course i still like tube tech 

now having said all that, i suppose if i needed the absolute lowest power consumption, higher speed and cutting costs for production, i would have to step into the 21st century?

for now however i am very pleased with what can be done with what i am working with.  especially after starting to work with these little recorder chips,  how cool can these things be!!!

i can actually get all 8 fault messages on one 6 second chip, and at less than 2 bucks already mounted on its own pcb, they are hard to beat....  and even easier with a 20 second chip, all on its own board, with battery, mic, and speaker for less than 5 bucks delivered?  they really open up the door to interesting project development.

for a fellow like me that is more of a mechanic than an electronics guru, this sort of thing really presents options i only dreamed of maybe 15 years ago.

just wish my eyesight was better, soldering these tiny little wires on .1" centers gets a bit tedious when working with little pcb which of course are the much more readily available prototype boards that are in my budget at this time... although i am starting to work with pcbexpress to see if i can make up the boards online and order them premade for me?  will see how that works out, as i am sure they will be significantly more expensive than using generic protoboards, they should however be a bit easier to work with when it comes to layout and soldering... that is of course if i don't try to crowd too much into too little space.

fun stuff nonetheless

bob g