Beer and Robots
This week is the first that the weather has started to turn towards cold. Nothing too bad as of yet, but it’s getting more comfortable for me… and “too damned” cold for Geetha.
This change in temperature allows for the perfect conditions for brewing beer. I’ve been involved in Zymurgy off and on since I was in college, and have brewed most all types of beers to varying success during that time. At one point in time I was a purist, brewing only All grain beers… Now a’days I’ve given into extract brewing… And I have found that Northern Brewer provides very high quality kits, and strongly recommend them for beginners and lazy long time practitioners as well. This year Geetha and I will be putting up 3 batches: California Common, Bavarian Hefe Weizen, and a Belgian “Strong” ale. That’s 15 gallons of beer… hmm…
My second Fall hobby is robotics… Specifically the design and building of little autonomous devices that skirt around the house under their own power… Mostly I’ve built straight from kits as to learn the basics of circuitry and electronics… This year I’ve jumped off the deep end and have actually aquired the equipment necessary to actually program embedded microcontrollers, specifically the microchip PIC based MCUs (16F877A). Long and short? I’ve been spending quality time wrapping my head around hex numbers and assembly programmers, and toying with such fun stuff as hardware based PWM, and the like… Yes, declaring my geek pride to the world, but for some reason these types of challenges I find so totally intriguing…
That’s it for now, I may create new sub-sections of the blog to account for my adventures this year into these two hobbies… Maybe even perhaps draft some “how-to” on microcontrollers as the general information available to newbies is relatively scarce…