Blogs getting started and site getting cooking...
- Details
- Category: Kyle's Blog Entries
- Published on Thursday, 19 May 2011 21:14
- Written by Kyle Wilson
- Hits: 130
It was a slow day at work, but the site seems to be getting rolling 
Sherrill has successfully created a blog entry and posted it. Jason also created a blog entry, currently it is parked in the unpublished state as Sherrill should be the one to release it and it's worth making sure that process goes smoothly. Lorna is going to start blogging soon (there were password problems this morning, I reset her password, so that should be ok) and then I just have to coerce Alyssa into getting blogging :}
I figure that these are pretty much expected teething problems along the way. So far they've been pretty easy to make right (and with two blog entries successfully posted, I feel pretty good that things will go smoothly from here). It does mean that site maintenance is now much more critical as any loss of content doesn't just nuke my ramblings so I'm going to have to keep my backups cleaner and more frequent (and should finally try a restore from backup on my home test system).
I'm also realizing that I need to do a better job of managing 'presence' across the board. I've now missed several facebook chats that were related to problems getting access to the web site. I'd rather be clearly not present and let folks give me a ring than have messages left in a chat session that I don't see for an hour or two
I know that Ed was interested in borrowing 'The Art of Electronics' last time we were at his place. I've been digging through it for bits of inspiration on various things, but I'm going to make a point of getting what I need done so that I can leave it with him a week from now when we're over there (assuming he hasn't gotten a copy from a library by then). I can live without it for a few weeks if I've dug out the specifics I need ahead of time.
I've also been poking at computer controlled three phase induction motor drives. It looks like IGBTs (insulated gate bipolar transistors) are the device of choice for that sort of thing. The drive techniques seem to 'chop' the DC at pretty high speeds (8 KHz and higher) to control the effective drive voltage (and the drive voltage varies with the speed of the motor (and thus the effective AC frequency of the simulated drive). I had missed the fact that for power applications you really want to run the device either full on or full off as the power dissipation goes way high if it is in the linear region (power is voltage times current, so if either voltage or current is almost zero then the heat dumped into the IGBT is pretty small).
This probably applies to my winding drive for my toy ball bearing thrower as well, which means I've got to pretty much completely rethink the drive arrangements as I was considering a current source drive (which on reflection would probably be really prone to melting at inconvenient times).
Lorna has found the site K12 that has a bunch of home schooling curriculum related material on it. There is a keystone online school that we're seriously considering using as a source for cohesive online courses for Alyssa (with our material supplementing that stuff as we go). We've got the course catalog and the cost is livable for what we need. I'll try to post more links here soon