I've recently moved into a new position that's more of a management-type role, and so don't have much action solving problems for which I can document solutions (although I was pleased to learn recently that one of my coworkers was having issues similar to the one documented in the article "Resolving difficulties with using certs" and in searching for a solution he came up with mine!) So, my mental energies being not so completely drained each day, I decided that I should probably give this whole "hobby" thing a try. It's been a very long time since I've had the time or energy to try getting involved with a hobby, so for me it's a very new thing!
Being an IT/science/parenting geek, I settled on some criteria I figured I could use in deciding where to put my efforts. First, it would have to be fun. Obviously. Secondly, I felt it should also be "productive" to some extent. If I was going to devote time to a hobby, it meant time would have to come away from my chores and spending time with my family. I felt that it should somehow contribute back to them in some way, even if it ended up being tangentially. Third, it needed to be relatively inexpensive. We don't have a lot of disposable income, so by definition I couldn't dispose of a lot of income on it. Fourth, it needed to be something that I could use to engage my daughter in eventually and get her interested in some kind of sciencey/techie things.
I finally decided that something that I'd wanted to do for a LOOONG time was dabble in electronics. How long? Well, when I was five years old, I took apart a radio that belonged to my mother. I carefully pulled each component off of the circuit board inside and meticulously laid each one out on a retaining wall in our back yard. I've always been fascinated by the field, and have a collection of electronics hobbyist magazines I've gathered over the years. And, depending on how much I did, it could be done relatively inexpensively.
I knew, also, that I wanted to get into playing around with microcontrollers. Electronics are fun, but electronics you can build and then program gives you two bangs for your buck! Having followed its development for a while, as well as seeing a significant number of projects out there to whet my appetite with, I knew I'd be going with the Arduino platform. It's relatively inexpensive, has a wealth of information available from the community and is easy to build on. Is it the best microcontroller platform? Probably not, but it would give me a number of quick and easy successes early on to help keep my interest.
But, what kinds of projects to start with? It's easy to say "I want to build projects using a microcontroller", it's another to actually decide on which ones to do. Fortunately, the decision was made for me. My old daily driver beater, a 1989 Buick LeSabre that was originally my wife's (I ended up using it as I have a long drive to the office and it got GREAT gas mileage), died. It was a good car, but in the last year it had really (and literally) started to fall apart around me. Since we couldn't get by on a single vehicle, we went into a mad press to find a replacement.
We found a couple of options, and the one we settled on was this spiffy silver 2001 Chevy Impala. It's a bit of an old man's car, but sporty enough to not be totally embarrassing to be seen in. It's roomy and comfortable to drive, and actually gets reasonable miles per gallon. This was important...if I really kept myself to a reasonable speed, the Buick typically got 30-32 MPG. Obviously any significant drop in mileage would end up making it a costly investment. But, I've been checking it at each fill, and have been averaging between 27-29 MPG (I do mostly highway driving), so no real complaints. Also, that's been with A/C which the Buick didn't have (another serious plus for this car!)
I've always been a car guy. In the past, it was all about muscle cars and performance, but I've come to appreciate the bells and whistles that come with more modern rides. Now being a father, the idea of extreme performance has become anathema to me (and, really, you're limited to at most 65 MPH anyway. What does all that performance buy you?) So, that settled it, I was going to use my new car for the base of my electronics projects. There's a few that I've had rolling around in my head for a few years, but I never had a car worth putting that kind of effort into. Since I spend over an hour a day in my car, it made sense to put the effort into making the car more comfortable and user-friendly.
With all of the above in mind, I've settled on a framework on which to design my projects around....When my wife and I were in Las Vegas to get married a couple of years back, we were fortunate in that the rental car place ran out of sedans of the type we'd registered for. We thus had to settle on getting around town in a fresh-off-the-truck, only 500 miles on it, brand new Infinity G35. Man, that was a nice car! At one point, while climbing out of it I noticed the Nissan emblem on the door jam. I realized that the body of the car was almost exactly the same shape as an Altima, and it finally made sense to me: a 2010 Infinity is nothing more than a 2015 Nissan!
The Infinity owners pay through the nose for the privilege of "beta testing" all of the new features that will eventually be old news and put in as standard on the "lower quality" cars. Big dummies. But, as long as the luxury features work, they get some really nice perks: touch screen navigation and vehicle control, high performance, low fuel consumption engines, quiet, comfortable rides, etc, etc...In thinking about some of the features I liked in that Infinity, I decided that what I was going to do was build a low-cost luxury car using the Impala as a basis.
So, that's what this series of articles will be about: the journey of my car from family sedan to home-brew luxury beast. And, since these modifications revolve around an Arduino-based control system, the next article will be about my first steps in using that platform...
No comments:
Post a Comment