Digital Dad®

Three-Way Switches

Ah yes, the three way switch. I did a routine swap out of two switches in the hallway upstairs and wouldn’t you know it one switch ended up controlling the primary on/off and the second switch would only turn the light on if the first one was in the on position.

First, some background. Three-way switches enable you to turn on or off a light from two different locations. When you look at a three way switch it has – lo and behold – three connectors, not the usual two.

Of course, make sure you have the power off before you even think about doing this stuff.

When you wire two three way switches you’re really wiring one big switch, typically separated by several feet. A big tip is that two out of three wires are used simply to connect one switch to the other. The last wire is used for incoming power or outgoing power.

My mistake was looking at the switch, not the diagram that came with it. Two of the three connectors were gold, one was black. i assumed that the black connector was the hot wire and the two gold connectors were for connecting the switch to the other switch.

In fact, as noted in the diagram on the switch package, the hot wire is down by the ground connector and it is colored gold like one of the connector wire threads. Confusing! Lesson learned on making sure the switch diagram makes as much sense as the connector colors.

There’s no shortage of web-advice on the topic – just turn the power off first!

The Moronic Inferno

I’m at McCarran airport here in Vegas about to fly back to Seattle after a day or so at CES. It was a bit lighter this year, good news in that it reduced the hordes to something almost manageable.

I stayed at the Venetian, which was weak, although it looks fancy. I was locked out of my room three times by their lame card key system. No coffee maker in the room. Bouchon is pretty nice for breakfast, though.

I’ll skip the Microsoft stuff except to say I spent time with a Dell notebook loaded up with Windows 7 and it was pretty sweet. Get that beta!

A few things that caught my eye:

• TVs. Who knew there was so much more to do with TVs? LED LCDs, OLED, super thin, 3D, wirelessly connected, connected TVs that include Yahoo widgets – geez.  My 56” Samsung DLP is looking pretty long in the tooth! The LG 3D home theater was quite stunning.
• Acoustic Research had a nice easy set of wireless speaker connectors – connect the box to your stereo speaker outputs and plug the small receiver box into your speakers somewhere else in the house. Looks like a high quality way of avoiding speaker wire, but I didn't get a price. Probably pretty cheap.
• If you still want to run wire the folks at Flatwire (aptly named had some cool, very flat, speaker wire that you can paint. Buy it at www.flatwireready.com.
• Nice electric bikes from ELVMotors
• AR also had some nice wireless outdoor speakers that doubled as porch lights. Might be nice on a deck.

Looking forward to getting back.

Having Some Fun With The Looj

I wrote about the Looj, the gutter cleaning robot from the makers of of the Roomba, about a year ago. How can you not get excited about a gutter cleaning robot?

I was waiting for it to show up at the local Lowe’s so could look at it hands-on before I bought it, but fall was upon me once again and i had gutters to clean.

I found it for $99 at Amazon with free shipping. Amazon has a  great and simple return policy so I went for it. It showed up in a pretty bug box and I unpacked it with great anticipation. The unit is pretty simple – a battery pack (NiCad, interestingly), a rubber auger attachment, a remote that snaps onto the main body, and a charger. It also comes with a belt holster if you want to really geek out. The charging cycle before use is quite long so I charged it overnight and figured my son and I could give it a go the next morning.

I have an older house, circa 1966, although the separate garage was re-built in 1990 after a fire. My first stop was the garage, which is built into a hill, so it’s very easy to set the Looj into the gutter toward the back and make any adjustments. I kept in mind one of the comments on Amazon - “make sure you keep your mouth closed when you start it” – yuck! The Looj settled nicely into the gutter, which had a good layer of rotting pine needles in it. It has two treads on the bottom and using the remote you can go forward and back, and adjust the direction of the auger.

Two things that drive the effectiveness of the Looj:

1. Gutter bracket height – the Looj is very low profile (2.25”) but if your brackets are bent or obstructed then you’ll have a problem here.
2. Gutter width – iRobot now has a template on their site for you to measure yourself, but the Looj will only work if the flat bottom part of your gutter is at least 3.25” wide.

I didn’t have a problem on the garage – the Looj worked fine. It made a tremendous racket and mess but that was fun for both of us. It gave my car a good splatter. You have to go back and forth to really get the stuff out but it does work.

I wasn’t so lucky on the main house with item #2. These still had older gutters and they didn’t have the width I needed. The Looj didn’t sit flat on the bottom and therefore didn’t have the traction it needed. If it’s not sitting flat it will also turn over in the gutter. If I couldn’t use it on my house I couldn’t keep it.

A new 22’ fiberglass ladder will run you over $200. Plus, it’s dangerous. If your gutters are wide enough I would definitely get a Looj and give it a go. If it doesn’t work for you then the Amazon.com return policy is easy – just repack, slap on a return label and you’re done. Plus, it’s a fun thing to do with your kid!

Three for the price of Two?

Hmm…seems like a novel idea but it looks like you would need a custom faceplate for it to work.

“Looking at the street pricing, these things once cost $15 to $20, but you can snag either 15A or 20A triplex receptacles on Amazon for $5 plus free shipping on orders over $25.  Wall plates aren’t included.”

Courtesy of BoingBoing

Simultaneous Audio

Well the Kitchen A/V system is rockin'. I actually eliminated the living room amp and ran the living room speakers off of the kitchen set up. Perceptive readers may wonder "but that's two sets of speakers in the kitchen and one set in the living room." Yes! I wired the kitchen speakers in series, so they are effectively one set as far as the amp is concerned (plus to minus is one line, minus to plus is the other). Now the kitchen is Speaker A and the living room is Speaker B.

The Dell XPS One is driving most of the music, although I have a tuner on the amp and I also ran a Zune dock straight into another input to bypass the PC. This makes it easy to play tunes while someone else is on the PC.

One challenge is how to p;lay the audio from the PC speakers and the external audio simultaneously. Right now I have to pick a default audio playback device - the internal speakers or the external USB to RCA audio adapter. What I really want is to run both at once so that I can just turn on the amp to add big speaker sound when I want, rather than right clicking on the speaker icon and changing the default!

I haven't figured it out yet . . . any suggestions?

Kitchen Computing

A while back I noted the plan to finally replace my crazy oven with a sweet 36" black glass induction cook top (or hob, as they say in the UK). That's part of a larger project in the kitchen which provides an opportunity for me to re-think my kitchen A/V and kitchen computing in general.

Up until now we had an Apple G4 off the kitchen for general use (email, web) and I dropped an Advent wireless speaker underneath the sideboard in order to pipe in audio from the system that powers the living room. Not bad, got the job done, albeit lacking in a few areas:

• Audio quality was via radio, not wired, so it was pretty compressed
• Audio was mono to boot
• Audio was controlled via the hall closet (ugh).
• The G4 was getting long on the tooth; The OS was pre-Tiger so it wouldn't play nice with my music, video and photo server as I had to manually reconnect every time; for some reason I couldn't get Safari to run so I had to use Firefox which kept asking me to "start a new session"; the keyboard died; it would randomly not connect to web sites unless you refreshed a few times; Upgrading to Leopard was not advised since it would slow down the system significantly;
• The biggest issue I had with the G4 was the lack of parental controls. This is something that Vista does very well. More on that in another post.
• No TV

The main challenge was to bring A/V control into the kitchen with something that connected seamlessly with my music collection, supported TV in, looked good, and provided a solid computing platform.

I went with the Dell XPS One (Red). Yes, I know, I just had my Dell m1330 repaired, but it met all the criteria without breaking the bank. It takes coax TV in, with a remote for across the room control. I'll run the Zune client on there that manages my server full of music with all of my playlists. It will show random photos from my collection of almost 20,000 family photos on my server as a screen saver. The browser has solid parental controls. It has a wireless keyboard with a built-in trackpad in addition to the mouse. It has SPDIF (digital audio out). It's all-in-one with a great 20" display.

I paired it with a Dell 948 printer (Red) that upgrades my ancient HP 932c to a printer that also has a scanner/copier in it. Quite handy. The only ding is that it's not a touch screen but frankly the software for a touch screen kitchen user experience doesn't exist yet, so it's no big deal. Yeah, I'm not counting the HP unit on purpose.

So now I needed to solve the audio problem. I installed four Speakercraft CS3s in the ceiling. These guys have a great full range sound and have a diffuser that radiates the sound down and out to fill a room. They have a great mounting system as well using only a Phillips screwdriver, assuming you know how to cut a round hole in the drywall. They come with grilles but I kind of like them without. I ran a bunch of Audioquest cable from the speakers down underneath the countertop that will show off the XPS One.

Obviously the Dell doesn't have the amps to drive the Speakercrafts so I am on eBay now looking for a solid two channel receiver. I did look at the Decco amp at my local Magnolia, but it seemed rich at $800. There are plenty of Harman Kardons and NADs and such for less than $100 on eBay. I am also looking for a 12" powered sub to cover the low frequencies and act as the table under the counter to stack the sub, the receiver, and then the printer on top.

How will I get from SPDIF to the amp? If the amp doesn't have SPDIF in, which most non-home theatre amps do not, I'll just use a USB to RCA DAC device that I can pick up for $30.

This should all sound pretty rockin' although my only snag is in the remote (as usual). The Dell has a solid one for the Media Center and PC, but the amp will have it's own for volume (or not if I go retro!). I suppose I can get another learning remote but the Harmony I bought for the TV room is just not impressing me anymore. We'll see - maybe just adjust volume manually under the counter? Might be the simplest solution.

A Smart Twist on Burglary Deterrence

This one caught my eye - FakeTV. This little box shows a series of random lights in a dark room to simulate a TV broadcast when you're not home. Starts at dusk, turns off at dawn. Much smarter and more effective than plain old lamp timers.

Probably more interesting to watch than most of the stuff that's on.

At $40 it seems like a pretty good deal. Invented in Minnesota and sold here.

Induction

I've blogged about my completely possessed electric range in the past - I concluded that there's a fault ASIC in the control panel and no amount of rewiring will fix it.

We're upgrading and I'm looking at induction. Induction cooking uses magnetism to generate heat in the conductive pots and pans (those with a steel or iron core - not aluminum). It's more energy efficient, faster and more accurate than both electric and gas.

So for me this is a three bagger - new cooktop, energy efficiency, and some weird technology I can show off to my friends!

We're going with the big Kitchen Aid model . There are others, by Wolf, GE, etc. but the KitchenAid seemed to cover all power requirements (look for wattage per burner), looks good and we like the KitchenAid brand. It requires a 50 Amp circuit so don't go dropping this thing into your countertop without getting an electrician in there.

Remote Controlled Fire

We just finished up a renovation here at the homestead.

We have two fireplaces - upstairs and downstairs. The downstairs fireplace is circa 1966 - white painted cinder block in a weird wavy pattern floor to ceiling. As a capper, the fireplace is terribly inefficient, sucking warm air out of the room and throwing it up the chimney.

The renovation was two-fold. First, replace the goofy cinder block with floor to ceiling "river rock" from El Dorado.

The second part was to tun the fireplace into a super high efficiency gas furnace. I thought about an efficient wood burning one, but I wasn't keen on the maintenance and there's new technology to make the fire look super realistic. Also, I can use a thermostat on the gas furnace to keep the entire floor warm while heating the upper floor from underneath (about 1500 sq. feet). I went with the Travis model with "Ember Fyre" technology.

This isn't a DIY - you need to hire a gas plumber to hook it all up plus I needed someone to do the rock work. It was worth it.

The best part is that the whole thing works off an RF remote. I guess an IR remote would have been better so I could have programmed it into a macro in my Harmony, but it's still pretty cool to have remote controlled fire.

Kudos to Rich's in Bellevue and Smart Renovations who did the work.

Hallelujah - a gutter-cleaning robot

iRobot,the folks that ship the vacuum cleaner Roomba, just announced something that i have been waiting for. It's called the Looj and it cleans gutters by remote control. Really.

The base unit is $99 and sits in the gutter with a couple of treads at the bottom and whirly thing in the front. You place it in the gutter and use the wireless remote to run it down the length of your roof (and back). It plows through the junk and throws it over the side (not crazy about that part).

Here's a video of Colin Angle, co-founder and CEO of iRobot, demonstrating the Looj:

I have sections of my roof that are very high, above uneven ground. One section is right under the power line to the house. I am seriously not interested in climbing the roof anymore and sprawling down to scoop out my gutters from above, or climb the ladder from below.

I haven't tried this yet but I will. Stay tuned. Hopefully it will end up at Lowe's!