As I work on the various electronics projects I’ve now got going, I often hit points where I need to make something else before I can finish what I started. I need to make the tools to make the tools, as it were… because it’s a recursive process. Hopefully I’ll hit an end state other than taking up fly-fishing instead!

Last night I made this little 5V power supply to power my RC components when they are on the bench, to save on battery hassle. I just tested it with a 9V battery and a cheap Wal-Mart 120VAC-9VDC power supply and get the same amount of servo jitter, i.e. noise. So sub-sub-mission accomplished and onwards to the next sub-mission (a trainer cable, if you were wondering).

Forgot to put this up. Fiat, my brother’s BF, made this gorgeous watercolour and ink for the Princess and I, and gave it to us at our wedding. We had it professionally framed and it graces our home, where I kept walking past it and thinking, “need to take a picture of that for Fiat…”

Finally got around to it!

This inclinometer, based on a 3 axis accelerometer, gives me the pitch and bank angle relative to acceleration vector (i.e. at rest, local gravity). I’ll combine this with the electronic compass to compensate for inclination, and will have heading, pitch and bank angles…

Stick this on your hat, and the information on head position can control your viewpoint in a computer game, or some servos aiming a camera on a radio controlled car or plane. In both cases, I’ll need to output thru a joystick or a radio-control transmitter, with a few digital potentiometers. I have a couple from Analog Devices but they are SMD, hard to prototype with. I could also use an LED plus a light-sensor, or a regular potentiometer plus a stepper motor, all of which I have… I’ll probably try them all.

My sensors got in over the week, and after some running on today, I managed to find a soldering iron to cable them into the arduino prototype shield. I decided to start with the HMC6352 electronic compass, and made this little demo.

The led that is lit is within +/- 45 degrees of North, and for debug purposes it also outputs the value on the serial port. I’ll be doing some stuff which I hope will be a little more interesting soon, but I’m waiting on (yet more) parts.

Now that we’re married and I’m probably here to stay, at least for a few years, in the US… the Princess and I decided we needed to get a little more serious about investing our money wisely.

After much reading, three progressively-more-complex spreadsheet models and four interviews with a financial advisor I have come to trust to give me some facts to feed my growing understanding of the basics of 401k’s, retirement, and investment 101, I’ve come to the conclusion that what we need is a four step plan:

1. Max out pre-tax savings in our 401k’s, including for 2007
2. Continue to rent, but keep an eye on home ownership as prices stagnate/drop
3. Reign in some of our discretionary spending to create more surplus income
4. Invest that surplus income in tax-friendly ways, shooting for 7.5% net return, long term

You can never tell over the short term — the bottom could fall out of the stock market, or the dollar — but I believe that this secures our retirement at 59 on the 401k’s and creates the possibility of earlier retirement if the non-tax-deferred stuff really goes thru the roof before then. If not, we’ll at least be comfortable.

Our status on the four step plan is done for steps one and two, good progress on step three, and actively researching step four. In particular, my 401k was pitiful, I wasn’t even maxing out my employer contribution!