Yes, today is my birthday and have had a wonderful vacation/weekend with my daughter and granddaughter up on the Blue Ridge Parkway. Taking in all the sights and we even went gem mining and found alot of cool stones. although Lexie wasn't too much into finding gems, she was just as happy to play in the water and have fun in her own way. yes, i am very blessed! :) 


on the projects front, i have a number of projects on the back burner right now. my biggest one is a remote weather station utilizing a sparkfun usb weather board, mounted in a ten-tech enclosure with the wind direction/speed/rainfall sensors, humidity, temp and light. all over an xbee link to a PC running Weather Display software. the biggest thing i wanted to do is have this solar powered and because the usb weather board is mounted in an enclosure, and after some testing i found i needed to aspirate the enclosure for accurate readings. so i added a small 30-40mm 12dc fan that I'm going to run at around 3-6vdc. i purchased a solar panel charging controller from all-electronics and a 18w Coleman solar panel i purchased from walmart online, by the way is a killer panel and i suggest that everyone should buy one (more later on this).


I will post pictures and complete arduino code when finished and a link to my Weather Underground Station data so you can see for yourself.