Making up for Lost Time

TL;DR: I have some LEDs in mind for the sunrise, Arduino clocks are inaccurate in the long term so I need a separate module to keep time, an LCD screen will also be used to display the time when I request it to do so.

With the tea-making aspect sorted next up to tackle is the LED sunrise feature. Sunrises are one of the few things I know beyond a shadow of a doubt I love. I lived as a stranger in England for a while, with absolutely nothing and nobody to answer to outside of office hours except myself. I was on a fair wage and had a car which basically means I could do whatever I wanted – so what do I want?
I feel I might write about this properly in future but, briefly, I was at a loss while in England, a complete stranger with very little to occupy myself with in the evenings. So I shifted my circadian rhythm back an hour or two, this way I had exactly enough time to do what I needed to do in the evening after work and go straight to bed. The spare time in the morning was much easier to occupy as a lonely soul than the late evening. I would leave for work early and stop at a fishing spot on the River Trent to watch the sunrise. I think this shifting of my free time is why I had such a productive summer. Sitting there as the day began encouraged me to focus on the future, a full day of potential was on its way and I had the time to plan out how I was going to seize every opportunity before the problems of the day even had a chance to think about me. Free time in the evening encourages reflection on the day past which is of course also very useful but I think a surplus of free time, the like of which I had, is best placed at the start of the day. Placing it in the evening might develop into futile obsessing over how I shouldn’t have spent an hour scrolling through Facebook, placing it in the morning means I can spend more time planning how I’m going to avoid doing the same thing that day, based on how I’m actually feeling that day.

The sun, well into its rise over the River Trent, taken before my last day working in England. You’ll notice most photos of “sunrises” I have are at least a little while after the actual rising – the photo never does it justice anyway so I’d rather just enjoy the best moments as they occur and take a photo for future reference afterward. The photo is more as a reminder of how amazing it was a few minutes before the photo.

At weekends I would do something similar, I’d set my alarm for 4 am or earlier and drive for miles to watch the sunrise in some beautiful patch of the Peak District, spend the day walking until I was exhausted enough to sleep when I got home and do exactly that.
A sunrise in the Peak District is truly spectacular. You can visit it during the day and be absolutely stunned by the harmonious contrast of the limestone faces and grassy hills as well as the odd water feature effortlessly flowing through the channel that its been so carefully sculpting for itself over the centuries.
The water in the Peaks somehow seems more fluid than normal, as if it is free of eddy currents and impervious to all obstacles and external forces. You know that feeling where you think there’s one more step than there actually is? As your foot falls the absence of an obstacle is baffling and terrifying as you readjust your momentum to avoid falling. Isolate that very first moment, before fear sets in, you’re belief that a stair is there is still not quite shaken despite feeling its absence, perhaps you have ascended. Obstacles you know are in your way no longer have any effect on you, your foot just continues on its path downwards, untroubled by the rules of the world that everyone else has to adhere to – not you, not now. That’s how I imagine the rivers and streams in the Peak District flow, with a supernatural sense of absolute fluidity, every movement exactly as intended, never hindered or impeded by the rules that every other being and non-being follows. Except, for the water, that sensation isn’t followed by a rush of fear as we realise we were wrong, the rules of the world still very much apply to us, the world just isn’t as we pictured it – and it might be about to get a lot more hostile in the form of a nasty fall if we don’t return to following the rules immediately. For the rivers of the Peaks, this feeling of moving unencumbered isn’t followed by anything – that’s their entire state of being. So visit the Peak District and marvel at these superfluid bodies yourself. But before you go, know that visiting in the day you only see one shade of everything, arrive for the sunrise and you can view the infinite permutations that each perfectly formed piece of the landscape goes through as it approaches its resting shade of splendour.

A few sunrises from the Dovedale, Thorpe and Ladybower patches of the Peak District.

I could write a lot more about my love for watching the sunrise but given that I’m talking about recreating it with an LED I feel like the more I describe the beauty of what it is simulating, the more I prime myself to resent the end-product. There’s little to say about the LEDs, they’re warm white cooker hood bulbs and I have four of them, I only intend on using one, two if necessary.

You may think the title refers to what I said about moving my free time around, it doesn’t. It’s actually the fact that not all clocks are created equal. The onboard clock of the Arduino loses about two seconds every hour – not good for an alarm clock. To make up for that lost time I’d have to take the lid off and reset things at least once a week which does not appeal to me at all. I feel like if I start to write about the concept of “losing seconds” here I’ll quickly stop making sense so I’ll leave my views on the subjectivity of time passing for something that lends itself to talking about it at a higher level of abstraction sometime. For now, just know that it means I need to order a separate clock to keep time and an LCD screen to display the time, I’ve worked with the DS3231 clock module before so I’ll buy that. It also has an onboard temperature sensor which might be useful if I have concerns about the temperature being reached inside the casing – hopefully not. This module might need reset every now and then as it forgets to count a second here and there but not nearly as often as once a week.

21st Jun 2020 0

Mastering Entropy

TL;DR: I’m using a relatively low powered cartridge heater to heat the water so that it can use the same power supply as the Arduino. For aesthetics it will be inserted into a sort of electric hob style spiral set up made from copper.

I said previously that some part of my brain had sketched a parts list for this project, however, now that I sit down to materialise that into an order form, it is becoming clear that it skimped on the details. It’s becoming increasingly apparent that a heater, a light and an Uno board does not constitute a parts list for this project. Finding a suitable heater is tricky, thankfully, as I mentioned in my last post, I’m interested in 3D printers.
There was a mild interest before with my uninspired Arduino build but this year at uni I had the pleasure of working to prototype some sensors and anytime something I needed didn’t exist I would just go home, design it and send it to the technician, the next day it would be sitting in a bag with my name on it. Completely bespoke, a perfect solution. Or at least perfect within the confines of my designing capabilities. I defy anyone to not be completely spellbound by 3D printers after having used them to do something genuinely useful. Imagine a world without compromise – if something is too big or too soft or too red, you can just tell this machine to make you a smaller, harder, bluer version. And it will . . . Madness. This obsession will no doubt lead me to buy one and Amazon is keen to be in on the action. I’ll go shopping for a first aid kit and the screen will contain the absolute minimum amount of medical supplies that it knows I’ll tolerate, the rest being a mosaic tile arrangement of: 3D printer parts at low low prices; stylish coffee makers crafted from exotic looking wood and shiny metal; and books that promise they’ll help me get my life together. Amazon really does know me, and now, so do you.
Thankfully one of these printer parts is the heater used to melt the printing material, which I think looks about perfect for heating a single cup of water.

Simply dipping it into the cup as an immersion heater would never suffice though, far too inelegant. Plus, as any Irish person will know, there is a horrible stigma around the use of an immersion heater – the cause of many’s a family argument:
“Who turned the immersion heater on/off?!!”
“The water from the central heating is plenty warm!”
“The shower ran Baltic after 5 minutes, I’ve near caught pneumonia!”
“Our electric bill is sky high because of that thing”
“Tell *insert family member* to quit using their xbox/laptop/electric heater all day if you’re worried about electric, I need a shower!”
Clearly an immersion approach won’t work. I think I could rig the heater up to a hot plate and use an enamel camping mug pretty easily though. I’ll use a copper wire to form a spiral that dips out at the centre to wrap around the heater. Copper also has the benefit of being very nice to look at.
I don’t think I explained it very well at all so here’s a photo:

The big question is will it work? The heater I want has to be small and take a 12V supply, this limits power to about a 50W, or, 3% of a typical kettle. I could have a heater similar to a kettle but it would require a separate power source as the Uno board (brains of the operation) can only accept a maximum of 12V. So, it’s either cap the heater at 12V too or provide it with power from somewhere else. If an immersion heater approach is inelegant, having two different power supplies wired into the clock is abhorrent.

I’ve done the maths around it a few times and it checks out that a 50W kettle would nearly boil a cup of water in about 20 minutes, which is fine as I’ll be asleep anyway. The problem is, this isn’t a kettle – it’s basically a hob and saucepan, which the internet slates as about 50% less efficient. I’m optimistic though, comparisons on efficiency are difficult to make, especially when I’m building this hob myself and can tweak it to make it more kettle-like. One solution I suppose is to put an insulating sleeve and lid on the cup to ensure it retains all the heat it is given, however, the inclusion of a plastic cup-cover is going to make designing this thing to look as good as it has a right to be (it is a bespoke, hand-built alarm clock after all), considerably more difficult.
For now I know I want a cartridge heater from a 3D printer, some copper tubing (the type used for refrigerant systems) and a 12V power adapter with enough juice to power the 50W heater and an Arduino Uno. I definitely don’t want the heater robbing the board of power.
This is where the mothers lifting cars to save children legend becomes germane, the brain has told the muscles to try and save the child, knowing if things get out of hand it can always take the reigns again and ensure its own preservation returns to being number one priority. It has forgotten, however, that it shares a blood supply with the same muscles it has commanded to perform a very bloodthirsty task. The muscles begin, politely, with their usual allowance of the body’s blood supply but that doesn’t cut it, so they start robbing blood from every other organ in the body, including the brain. The brain is now left with no blood to fuel it. It might very well want to slam the brakes and say hey, we’re in major trouble here, forget about the child, I need that blood to keep us safe. However, without the energy it’s being robbed of it can’t scream its message loud enough to overcome the bedlam besieging the muscles as blood floods into them from all directions. The whole process leaves the muscles torn apart and a brain that has known true anarchy for the first time, now unsure how willing the body will be to return to the dictatorial regime which up to now there had been no alternative to.
In a much less interesting way, if the Arduino turns on the heater which takes 50W from a 50W supply, that leaves nothing for the Arduino, so it can’t send the stop signal until the heater has reached temperatures where it melts its connection to the power supply, at which point there will most certainly be a smouldering puddle of plastic releasing every carcinogen under the rainbow on my bedside cabinet.
All of that isn’t completely true, the heater and Uno have a slightly more democratic way of splitting the power but there’s definitely the risk of a necessary stop command not being sent if the supply is overloaded.
A 60W supply should be fine.

21st Jun 2020 0

Hussle and Motivate

TL;DR: I have an Arduino Uno from an abandoned project that I want to find a use for, a cup of tea being made will all but guarantee I get out of bed in the morning as opposed to checking my phone. A sunrise lamp is a good feature.

A couple of years ago I bought an Osoyoo (knock-off Arduino) Uno CNC plotter kit with the best intentions of building a CNC plotter from scratch, maybe even fitting it with a hot point to make a CNC wood engraver / house fire starter or a “3D printer pen” in a bid to be able to say I made my own 3D printer.

“I, Caleb Halfpenny, have made the thing which can make all things.”

Or words to that effect. In reality, knowing what I now know about the technology, if a competition broke out between myself with my “3D printer” and a toddler, armed with some Play-Doh, I’d just have to hope the child becomes as distracted by the smell of the clay as I always did. I like to picture the intuition that these projects were ill-conceived and destined to disappoint as a tennis player in my brain. A perfect tennis player guarding my physical response receptors, swatting away the neurons obsessed with this silliness before they get the chance to manifest into the actions that would absolutely and undoubtedly lead me to either burn my house down or be embarrassed by a toddler.
In reality though that intuition wasn’t there at all, those tennis ball neurons never even made it over the net as their server limply set them into motion, holding his racket with the grip of a teenage boy holding his younger brother’s hand to cross the road. The feeling of wanting to keep his kin safe and the overbearing teenage fear of being ridiculed causing the emotional scale to net out somewhere around apathy, but it’s an overwhelming apathy, closer to an anxious, confused impasse than real carelessness. The two sides of the internal tug-of-war are pulling with everything they have but neither can gain an inch, all their efforts merely increase the tension in the centre of the rope.
I wanted to pursue that project so that I could advertise it as some engineering feat I had accomplished independently, which would be great for a quirky interview answer – something I valued very highly then while desperately searching for a placement role. I didn’t want to pursue the project because it would take up a lot of placement application time and I didn’t really have a use for a CNC plotter.
So, I resolved not to build the machine, but the tension in that rope didn’t release, it remained as potential energy; untapped potential energy. Since then the unused Uno board has been as present in the back of my mind as it has been in the top of my wardrobe and I’ve always been keen to finally put it to use.

Now, today, I think I’ve found the use for that board. It’s been brewing for a while now; I want an alarm clock to ensure my phone isn’t the first thing I look at every morning and as I considered alarms I grew attracted to the concept of a simulated sunrise and that of tea/coffee preparation. But today the notion hit me that I could make those myself. “Sounds like a nice project” I thought, and went about my business. Somewhere inside though an obsession had began. I realised this myself the next time I went to check in on the idea and some part of my brain had stuck a post-it note to it with a parts list and rough design. Now we’re moving.
The power of having a good morning routine is preached about everywhere and at university it is evident. At university you live on your own terms mostly, if you don’t feel like getting out of bed, there’s no immediate repercussions forcing you against your will. Most days I wake up and go by 9 a.m. at the latest to either attend uni or get to the gym outside of peak hours, this is usually good enough motivation. The weekends though, where I give my body and mind a break are where troublesome habits become clear. I think letting my phone dictate when I get out of bed is a mistake. Using the alarm on it is convenient but it ensures the first thing in my hand every day is also capable of holding my attention for the entire day, and it certainly doesn’t encourage getting out of bed. On a day of low motivation I should be able to rely on my alarm clock to give me a reason to get out of bed. Sometimes the phone does this – a calendar reminder or a text from a friend wanting to go for breakfast, but more normally the phone does the opposite. I can interface with the entire world and live my life through it without getting out of bed and so I probably will, at least until I get hungry or need the bathroom. While I can live life through my phone, I prefer not to, I prefer to get up, enjoy a cup of tea with breakfast and do something a bit more involved like go for a walk at least. The phone has one key advantage in the morning routine though that allows it to win out most of the time – it’s already got my attention. And it sure knows how to keep it. YouTube knows how much I enjoy watching the sun rise so it has to have a bright red icon to catch my attention first. Facebook knows how much I enjoy a good breakfast so it has to bombard me with memes to distract me from my mild hunger. Instagram knows I’d love to get up and be active so it shows me only the prettiest of people, in automatically playing videos and captures my attention before even my own body has a chance to let me know it’s getting restless.
This is for the most part a passive experience though, I don’t actively engage in or even enjoy the morning routine, it’s like talking about the weather – inoffensive and could lead to something better – learning there’s a heatwave on the way, or seeing a post from a friend that shows them having fun. I’ve never went to bed at night excited at the prospect of checking my phone in the morning, or set my alarm for earlier than normal so I can enjoy the first posts of the day in real-time. So I need a wake up call that I can engage with actively, that encourages me to get out of bed, and boiling a cup of water is absolutely perfect for a few reasons:

Starting obvious, a cup of tea has caffeine, which of course takes it’s name from café, which is where a French maid would work. Caffeine being the French maid that walks around behind your eyes dusting off cobwebs when you drink a caffeinated beverage.
I enjoy tea actively rather than passively. One of my favourite things is to bring hot tea to my face and blow on it, basking in the fragrant steam that rises over my face and rejuvenates my eyes. My eyes which I have so cruelly exposed to this harshly arid world again, after a full 8 hours of tranquil bathing under their lids. They get it the worst in the morning, immediately they dry out and so the lids get shut again to spare the pain but they’re already so dry that the lids feel coarse as they close – that didn’t feel right, try again – same result, the pain is too much – I cry slightly, moistening the eyes and hence readying them for another day in this hostile world. This is of course the reason humans cry as a natural reaction to pain, so that the pain of dry eyes in the morning can be alleviated without the brain having to be fully awake.
I also just enjoy drinking tea, you know, like a normal person.
I, for one, can’t drink lying down. At the least I’ll have to sit up in bed to avoid waterboarding myself with scalding tea. My chest now being exposed from the duvet is good priming for taking that next leap out of bed.
This is the most important point of all, all the others rely on me drinking the tea, what’s to stop me just lying on and boiling the kettle later? Well, I am. If there’s one thing I’ll credit myself for it’s not being wasteful. If that water is boiled it’s being used. I’ll do everything in my power to only use one pot when cooking, to the point where it has to be driven by a desire for efficiency rather than just laziness. Old jeans are now garden-work jeans, T-shirts, pyjama tops. I’ll use books I don’t like as work surfaces (my copy of Camus’ “The Myth of Sisyphus” was cut to shreds while used as a cutting board. Imagine finding a book about why life is worth living shredded with a scalpel on someone’s bedside cabinet, like some sort of violent protest to the concept that life has meaning. I’d be worried. I didn’t disagree entirely with the book, I just found the way it was written to be absolutely impenetrable – of course life has meaning. Doesn’t it?). So the thought of letting all the energy put into heating that water go to waste is . . . absurd.

A model illustrating point 2 in a much more photogenic way than I could myself. By Andrea Piacquadio on Pexels.com

That’s the motivation then, I want an alarm clock that inspires me to get out of bed, so it should make tea. A gradual illumination of the room is apparently the preferred wake up call for the ancient parts of the human body, which I have to assume are the only ones that matter when I’m sleeping, so that will be a nice feature to add. I have the brains of the operation in an Uno board and the ability to program it myself so I’ll just buy some lights and a heater, the thing will practically build itself. I can swap out the cheap looking white plastic housing these sunrise alarm clocks typically use for whatever I please. It’s going to be a great little project to work on and I’ll use the end product every single day. Fantastic!

20th Jun 2020 0

Introducing the Teamaster 2000: Take the Misery Out of Making Tea

TL;DR: I’m documenting making an “Arduino” Uno alarm clock with LED sunrise and tea making features, hopefully in an entertaining way. Yes, I know no-one will have the patience to get through the writings of a man who makes a TL;DR this long. Maybe it’s a defence mechanism, seeing a block of text like this in the TL;DR section will drive people away so they never read and criticise my work. Maybe I’m just that vain that I think even people who have better things to do and just want to check out a quick summary would be better off spending time here because I’m just such a good writer. Maybe I’m just trying to make something I’ll be proud of and give my as yet latent inner writer an arena to create an Honest Expression.

This blog post, and entire website really, serves to document the tale of calamity and consternation that is the making of my alarm clock. For now this will just be a placeholder so I can find my bearings and make sure I’ve made the right call by using WordPress. In future this will be followed, either appended here (if that’s even possible) or in subsequent blog posts by the aforementioned documenting of one misery-averse man’s quest to introduce tea to his tragically Mrs. Doyle-less morning routine.
The general concept is to have an alarm clock which begins gradually illuminating the room half an hour before get-out-of-bed-and-push-that-boulder-up-the-hill o’clock, mimicking everyone’s favourite star that isn’t called Adele. As if recreating one of the most beautiful natural phenomena conceivable isn’t enough of a task, the alarm clock should also have some water prepared as if it were for chocolate at the Sisyphusean hour every morning. Throw a tea bag in and I can start everyday with a sunrise and a cup of tea.
An “Arduino” Uno is the brains, controlling dimmable LEDs of cooker hood eminence and a cartridge heater as found in 3D printers as well as communicating with a real-time clock and LCD screen.
As for the blog, it seems a little weird to me to be writing this way, flip-flopping between tones of reflection, commentary and planning but a typically concise style of run-down such as a report would ruthlessly highlight the irrelevance of the majority of what I want to write about. I want to write about all the mishaps and “side-quests” along the way and I know for me, as a reader, any other way of writing leads to me getting a little irritated by the more trivial anecdotes in a meandering story. If stories are written entirely in the past tense I find myself thinking “well the ending has already happened and I’d wager that this part had no bearing on it, the writer obviously knows this so why are we here?”. This feeling is exponentially greater when there’s an irrelevant aside in a report or an article. It’s very difficult to make insignificant side-stories so engaging that I forget they’re a part of a larger story with a pre-determined ending, while every “ed” suffixed verb chips away at this illusion. I do know how to enjoy a book, I don’t always treat each scene as means to an end but there are moments even in the best books where I find myself getting tired and searching for the main narrative. These books can be about time travel or life and death and be penned by writers I adore – I’m writing creatively for the first time and it’s about building a clock.
As is obvious from what I’ve said, the old adage “couldn’t see the forest for the trees” rarely applies to me, I’m often focused squarely on the forest. Why focus on one tree when you can look at them all as a forest and form an aggregate view – surely this is better to understand trees (says the engineer). To craft a tree with textures so nuanced and colours so brilliant that it overrides my internal default of wanting to use it to characterise all trees and instead makes me want to understand it alone and how it grew to be so enchanting, that’s a tall order. Thus, shifting through tenses to give the illusion of a currently developing story is best for me – as far as the reader knows there is no forest, only the individual trees they have been introduced to. The fact that the ink of the final words is just as dry regardless of the prose they employ is oddly inconsequential. That’s how I honestly feel and so that’s why this will be written as it is, because it’s for me, really, so I can try my hand at writing something I might enjoy reading.

My use of punctuation makes sense to me but I’ve never fully learned where commas are necessary or the best places for hyphens, semi-colons and full colons, so apologies if it irks you. As an absolute final aside, purely for my own reference – the URL for this blog post’s editing page is my new site’s address followed by /42. A coincidence obviously, but a profound one.

19th Jun 2020 0