Month: June 2008 Page 1 of 2

We have lots of pictures this morning. First of all, we are very proud of cousin Dayanita from Monterrey. She and Lorena’s cousin are the same age, go to the same school, and just celebrated their graduation from sixth grade. Our understanding is that Dayanita was one of the academic stars of her class. CONGRATULATIONS Dayanita. We are looking forward to saying that in person when we go to Monterrey in the fall.

Dayanita y Adrian en su graduación

The second set of pictures were taken by our friend Catherine at the going away potluck we had for the Yee family at our house. We had a GREAT time, but ate way too much food. You can click on the thumbnails to view a bigger image. Our friends, Gary and Sidony are returning to live in Florida. Gary will be working in the Boynton Beach Mall. That is the mall that is about a half a block from where Lorena and I lived when we first got married. Lorena and her friend Vanessa used to push Kelly around the mall just about every day. We are definitely going to have to go there for a visit. The potluck started around 12:30 and did not break up until 5:30 that afternoon. We all had a great time, especially listening to some great stories by Jim and Madelaine.

Finally, Bryan sent a great photo of his niece and Kelly at the Y2K party we attended at his brother Gary’s house on December 31, 1999. I just loved the photo and thought I should post it. We really miss all the Joyces out here.

We all started drawing again last night. We are still working on the Secrets to Drawing Realistic Faces book by Carrie Stuart Parks. I think we will be on it for awhile. Kelly was the only one who finished her drawing yesterday and I present it here for your viewing pleasure. See if you can guess who it is. She already posted it on her private blog, so people who have access to that cannot guess! Christian and I should be finishing up our drawings in the next few days, so I will try to post those, too. It was really great to sit down at the dining room table, turn on some classical music and just draw. We are not great, but as we go through the book, I think we are getting better.

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We were going to have a couple of couples over for dinner Sunday after meeting, but at our bible study, we learned that Sunday will be the last meeting for our good friends Gary and Sidony. So we turned the dinner into a good-bye potluck and invited over the whole meeting. It is sad to lose them, but we also found out that a recently graduated engineer from Virginia Tech and his (soon to be) wife will be moving down from Virginia and joining our meeting, so that will be nice. We have another swim meet tomorrow morning. It is a home meet so I will be able to get into the gym for a workout tomorrow. I will try to take a few pictures of all of the above to document all these events.

Here is an amazing article that starts out by saying:

A new study has linked vitamin D deficiency with an increased risk of death, especially from cardiovascular disease, in the latest evidence of the important role the vitamin plays in human health.

Low levels of Vitamin D are associated with high blood pressure, diabetes, and obesity. An, if you do not get enough Vitamin D, you will die sooner. The amazing deal is that it does not take much to increase your bodies Vitamin D production:

The chief source for vitamin D is sun exposure, since the ultraviolet rays of the sun trigger vitamin D synthesis within the human body. Ten to fifteen minutes a day in the sun is sufficient.

I have read that people who garden live longer than people who do not. I always figured that was because people who garden get more exercise and they are right in amongst all those oxygen generating plants. That is all probably true, but this study shows that the act of being out in the sunlight, all by itself, is a huge contributor to a longer and healthier life. This surely seems like some good information to have. I am going to return this to my daily program. When I worked at ATS in Corvallis, I took a half an hour walk almost every day down to the Subway for lunch (You will remember that is where I met the famous Jared.). Not that I am lifting weights more and aerobicizing less, I plan to start walking in the afternoons for a half an hour or so. If I do not get to it during a break at work, I can take a walk in the neighborhood with the family when I get home.

A special note to Christian: This is the cell phone/PDA you should get. You can even program it in Python.
A second special note to Christian: Here is a book available online that will teach you Python.

I heard the author of a new book titled Thrilled to Death in an interview on the radio on the way to work this morning. He said that if children are not bored when they grow up, they never have the opportunity to develop the imaginative and creative parts of their brains. The name of the author is Archibald D. Hart and the subtitle of the book is How the Endless Pursuit of Pleasure is Leaving Us Numb. What he said rang true to me. Some of it was pretty scary. He said that children today are over-stimulated. They have PlayStations, XBoxes, Televisions, the Internet, cell phones, and a million other things that stimulate them all the time. With overuse of the brain’s pleasure circuits a condition called anhedonia can occur. A symptom of this is profound boredom, not bred of having enough to stimulate, rather from having too many things that stimulate. Boredom bred of too little stimulation helps children develop the creative and imaginative parts of the brain. Boredom bred of too much stimulation can lead to anhedonia which can be a significant contributing factor in depression.

Dr. Hart believes that, due to the ubiquity of overstimulation in the youth of today, there will soon be an epidemic of drug addiction and other addictive behavior. People will turn to anything that works to help them overcome the boredom and lack of stimulation when the pleasure centers of the brain shut down from overuse. Quite a few thoughts entered my head while I listened to the interview. First, I was thankful that we have never had a television and that we read and did a lot of art with the kids. Second, I realized that I need to exercise a little more control in our household with respect to the amount of time the kids spend on the computer.

A big part of the problem appears to be that parents are so busy, they put their children in front of a television or a computer game so they (the parent) can do something else. Either that, or they send their children to day-care or after school-care that does the exact same thing. One of the best parts of our experience raising Kelly and Christian has been doing things in the evening with them after work. Right now, all we do every night is read our book on multiple worldviews. I think it is time we got back to our art program. We sit together, listen to classical music, and draw. It is not so much that we are becoming great artists, but, for every minute we spend drawing, we will not be on the computer and we will be talking to each other.

Happy Birthday Bryan. Seeing Bryan turn fifty has gotten me to thinking again of the importance of enjoying one’s age. It is a lecture that I often give to Christian and Kelly. I am more thankful now than ever that God created time and that it only goes one direction. To not be able to return to an earlier age to fix something we did wrong or revisit something we enjoyed greatly is a blessing. It keeps us looking forward and helps us focus on the now. I never would have imagined that I would enjoy being forty more than thirty, and fifty more than forty, but I do. The beauty of belief in Christ is that the stronger the belief, the better it is to be older and closer to the time when we will be with Him.

From our weight loss chart, you can see that Bryan was able to lose over fifty pounds from when we started in February. He only has eight pounds to go. As soon as he loses that eight pounds, I am going to owe him dinner and I am going to very much enjoy buying it for him. He has done an absolutely stellar job of getting his weight down. While my weight loss line looks like a sine wave because I keep falling off the wagon on the weekend, the whole competition thing has kept me going and I am down close to twenty-five pounds now. Lyle is sticking to it, too. Now that he is back from convention rounds, he can refocus.

First thing this morning, I popped over to my buddy Eric’s blog and read his latest post on how he and his wife Audrey picked their new baby’s name. It is a great name. I highly recommend you check it out and read the whole thing. The most telling thing about the post, though, is what it says about the author. Eric is the engineer’s engineer: Teutonic roots, born in the seat of automobile engineering and manufacturing in the Midwest, Rose-Hulman graduate, given to mathematical descriptions of virtually everything. I can think of no better way to illustrate his engineerness (if that is a word) than to just quote from his post:

My formula for dealing with females is as follows. First, you analyze the situation and reach a conclusion. Then, you take the inverse of the conclusion and multiply it by the degree of uncertainty (a mood-based variable). For instance, if a female asks you how she looks, the analytical left hemisphere would interpret this question as a solicitation for feedback on improving her looks. You conclude she is asking you to identify necessary improvements. But with my formula, you would invert that conclusion and it becomes “no improvements are necessary.” Secondly, you ascertain her mood. If she is really happy or really sad, the degree of uncertainty is very high. In the case of very high uncertainty, the answer to her then becomes, “Wow! You look absolutely fabulous.”

On another note, we had a marvelous weekend full of social activity. We had three families over for dinner on Friday night, vegetated together as a family on Saturday, and then went out to dinner after meeting on Sunday with a couple of families. We were with our good friends Gary and Sidony and their two children Warren and Kiera on both Friday night and Sunday. Sidony is one of those mystical types who has premonitions and dreams that, whether they are really true matters not so much as that they make for great and often scary stories. Some, mostly female, members of our family love to listen to those stories, but then are scared to death to be anywhere by themselves for the next several months. I am trying to look at the up side to the situation. My hope is that the extra trips to the second story of our house to accompany the fearful will translate into some lost weight.

Weight loss note: Lyle is in an amazingly good place in the whole weight loss death match after having gone through a whole round of conventions. Bryan hits another milestone. Ken tanks again on the weekend with another round of carbo-loading.

Last night was a very interesting night. Christian and I went to a swim meet at a YMCA north of Raleigh while Lorena took Kelly to her piano mini-camp. There are four other girls in the camp with Kelly. They are about the same age as Kelly and they are very serious about their studies, both of piano and at their government schools. All four of them have Asian parents–three from China, one from Korea. They are part of a government school subculture to which Kelly has not really had a lot exposure. Lorena talked to their mothers before and after the class. It dawned on me that we probably have similar thoughts about each others’ schooling methods. They asked Lorena how I could possibly teach all the high school subjects Kelly needs to get into college. There are so many subjects it is not possible to know them all well. When she told me that, I marveled that people who had such a profound interest in the education of their children were so unaware of the abysmal state of the government school teacher education and certification system.

While I might not be perfect in all the subject areas, I work hard to select good programs and materials to help us. The bar is not very high to be better than even the very best government schools. They also wondered how Kelly could get into college without a high school transcript, but they did not know about CLEP testing. They did not know that homeschoolers have better academic and social preparation for college in addition to their well documented superior performance on nationally normed standardized tests. The funny deal is that they were all talking about this while Kelly was taking a class from an absolutely stellar teacher in music, the one subject I am most horribly unqualified to teach. Thankfully, the least of their worries was whether or not Kelly was well “socialized.” Nevertheless, it is great for Kelly to be around nice girls whose families are very interested in assuring their children get the best education they know how to give.

Note: After I wrote the above harangue, I found this article. Boy did this guy get it right.

I have been wracking my brain to figure out a cool new project for the summer and I finally think I have found one. I think we could make a great youtube how-to video in the process. We have a little Dremel tool that we have not really used very much, but that can be very useful for a lot of things. It all has to do with a business opportunity we have at Quality Corners. We need to make some small intricate router cuts on the edges of some parts. I figured out how to do it with something called a pantograph. Here is a very cool little java script that gives a good sense for how they work. The concept is that you can engrave two dimensional and carve three dimensional designs using the pantograph. The thing that makes it particularly appealing in this case, is that it is possible to trace a big pattern while cutting a small pattern or trace a big pattern while cutting a small one. It would be very cool to design and build a little machine to be able to make designs and wooden bas-relief sculptures. Grandpa Milo and Grandma Sarah have an amazing bas-relief chest that it would be fun to try to make. I think we might good ahead and jump into making a prototype of a pantograph on Saturday. I am thinking that we can use some drawer slides as a base for our first pass. We will keep you posted.

Now that the research reports for the year are complete, it is starting to feel like homeschool is finished and the summer has arrived. Kelly has one CLEP test to finish before we are really done, but that should not take up too much of her day. I really thought we would slow down a little when the summer came, but it surely seems like we are doing more than ever. The kids have swim team practice every morning at 8:00–there is a swim meet tomorrow. Kelly is in piano mini-camp this week–yesterday she got to play a harpsichord, today she is going to a class and lecture from a professional piano tuner. Both of the kids continue with their regular weekly music (Kelly–piano, Christian–guitar) classes. We are reading through our worldview book each night. We did a couple of days in the radio book, but I think I am going to change that from a summer thing to a class the kids will take this fall. The book we are using from the ARRL lends itself to self study. The kids are doing fifteen minutes per day of Rosetta Stone Spanish and Christian has decided he is going to continue on Mavis Beacon typing to get his speed up a little more. We are having a bunch of people over for dinner on Friday. I am hoping things slow down a little next week. I cannot believe I am saying this, but I think we had more time when we were just doing homeschool.

Question of the day: What has happened to Bryan and Lyle on the weight loss chart?

Kelly and Christian have finished their annual homeschool research reports. You can read them by clicking the images:

We really had a wonderful weekend. It was full of parties, sleepovers, swim meets, etc. For the record, Kelly became completely enamored with face painting when we went to the library, Christian got three firsts (100m freestyle, 100m breaststroke, and 100m butterfly) and a second (100m backstroke). Rubix and Kiwi got way out of hand at the party. Here are some pictures. You can click on them to make them big.

Proverbs 16:32 He that is slow to anger is better than the mighty; and he that ruleth his spirit than he that taketh a city.

Kelly is having several girls over for her birthday party this evening. They are going to swim, eat pizza, do crafts, and just have a great time. I will try to post some pictures when I get the chance. Next week, she is going to start a week of two hour piano classes (camp) with some other of her teacher’s students. I am not sure what all they are doing, but it will include a lecture by a piano tuner at one of the big piano stores and some instruction on playing the harpsichord. Opportunities like that always get me invigorated on whatever is the subject of interest. The last thing I did that fit into that category was to take one week programming seminars at the (now renamed) Oregon Graduate Institute. They were inspirational, educational, and we got free lunch, too! Maybe I can talk my boss into sending me to a Python class.

The kids have a swim meet this weekend in Wake Forest. After the swim meet, Lorena and I are going to drop them off at a bookstore or a library for an hour so we can make an appearance at a company party for our company’s successful laboratory trial at our BIG customer. Nothing ever goes perfectly, but we really did pretty well, so we are going to celebrate a little. With Lorena there, I will have to stay away from the chips and dips so there will not be a huge increase on the weight chart on Monday–or at least one that is not any huger than normal.

Bryan and I started our weight loss competition on February 1 of this year. Lyle joined us in mid-April. So far, Bryan is down 50 pounds, I am down 23, and Lyle is down an (adjusted for his late start) 22. I have been about as faithful as possible about doing my exercise and, after four months of only cardiovascular exercise, I have transitioned over to doing more exercise. A long time ago I read something that Kenneth Cooper said about lifting weights. He has done a lot of research on exercise and its impact on aging. He found that it is very important for people over the age of 50 to lift weights to avoid dramatic loss of muscle mass. There is a pretty good write-up on the subject here. In the past, I was always able to start up a weight program fairly quickly, but I am taking it very slowly this time. After a couple of days (Day 1: chest, Day 2: legs), I am pretty sore, but not so much that I am going to have to lay off for a couple of weeks or anything like that. I was thinking I was going to get up at 5:00 AM every morning to go in to the YMCA and lift, but based on both schedule and frame of mind, that is not going to happen. I have decided to just try to get up one day at 5:00 AM to go in and do squats (and legs) on Tuesdays and do dead-lifts (and back) on Saturdays, but do the rest of my workouts in the gym at lunch during the week.

The GPS for the volcano computer came yesterday. We have been making good progress on the system as a whole. We finally got Debian Linux running on the system with the right kernel patches so that we could talk to it via SSH. It is very cool. The GPS cost under $70 and will be perfect for what we want to do. The next step is to add a little circuitry to the end of the GPS cable so we can take the PPS (Pulse Per Second) signal from the GPS into the Linux computer. After that we need to add a patch to our already modified Linux kernel and write some code to get the two devices to talk.

Evan is currently in the process of getting the camera to talk to the computer so we can take pictures. We are getting the technical challenges out of the way. Soon it will be time to start in on the programming. I need to specify a format for the configuration files and start thinking about how we are going to package the whole thing in some kind of a enclosure. All we probably need to do is find some way to attach a metal bracket directly to the computer enclosure onto which we can mount a power connector and the GPS and we will be done. We have been thinking it would be cool to add a UPS weather module or two (thermometer, barometer, anemometer) so you could time, place, and environmental condition stamp the images.

On another note, yesterday was my second day of weightlifting. I am trying to avoid the macho thing of lifting too heavy while getting started. Yesterday I did squats, lunges, and calf raises. I kept it pretty light and am kind of amazed that I am a little wobbly but not really sore at all. We see how I feel in a couple of days.

Yesterday was the “official” last day of homeschool. We still have a couple of minor things to clean up–Kelly has a little math, they both have a little bit of reading, the reports are finished, but need to be formatted so we can post them on the web, etc. It all works out well because tomorrow the kids switch from evening to morning swim team workouts. Both of them got their ribbons from the time trial swim meet in which they participated Saturday. While the kids were swimming, Lorena and I went into the workout area at the new YMCA. Lorena works very hard on the elliptical machine. Both of us have been going about 40 minutes per day.

Last night, I started lifting weights again. Lorena will start doing some weights, too, as soon as the kids start their morning swim workouts when the gym will not be so crowded. I love to lift weights. At 52, I know I have to start in slower than before, but I really do not mind. The plan is to do five minutes of cardiovascular work to warm up followed by a weight workout followed by another twenty minutes of cardiovascular work. I am a numbers guy and have always written virtually everything down in my workouts for thirty years. There is just not as much satisfaction in writing down the three or four numbers for a cardiovascular workout (time, calories, distance) rather than the tons of numbers you get to write down for a weight workout (weights and repetitions for five sets of three different exercises along with the times and calories burned during the cardiovascular part of the workout).

I really enjoyed going down to work out with Lorena. It would be great to figure out a way to do that every day, but this summer, to make my schedule work, it looks like I will need to get up at 5:00 AM to get into the YMCA when it opens at 5:30. I hate for everyone else to have to suffer those kinds of hours, so I will try to revisit this again in the fall when school starts.

Note: We might be able to take some Chinese art lessons from this person.

We found this photo waiting for us when we returned from South Carolina this weekend. Congratulations to Eric, Audrey, and all the kids for their beautiful new baby girl. They picked a great name, too! America Laverne. I am starting to figure out the use of an alliterative strategy in the naming of kids. If you yell at the wrong kid, you can still make the case that you were really yelling at the right kid, but they just heard wrong. If your kids have names as different as say, Jimbob and Mortimer, that strategy does not work as well. If you name them Addie, Adriana, and Amercia, it has a chance. For those families with children as well-behaved as this family, the only reason to chose alliterative names is because they are very cool! I know several people were waiting to see this picture. Thanks for sending it to us and congratulations again!

We went to a graduation party near Greenville, South Carolina this weekend. That is a beautiful part of the world. To suggest that the people we met this weekend were merely hospitable would be a gross injustice and and understatement. We went to what was essentially a church potluck that set my diet program back by at least three weeks. We are talking about massive amounts of food. It is about a five hour drive from where we live, so we stopped at a Walmart to pick up some food to take to the potluck a little before we got there. I talked to the greeter there for about twenty minutes while Lorena and Kelly shopped and Christian worked on his PDA. He was a retired business man and a graduate of Greenville’s highly rated Furman University. He took the job as a greeter at Walmart so he could remain active, meet people, and get a little exercise. What a wonderful ambassador for Walmart, Greenville, and North Carolina. I left thinking he was a remarkable guy, but by the end of the weekend had come to the realization that hospitality seems to be ingrained in South Carolinian culture. It was very nice to be with a group of people who made lots of effort to be nice to us and to each other.

My friend, Evan from work has a Ph.D. in Electrical Engineering from Duke University. He will be marrying another Ph.D. Electrical Engineering student from Duke in a couple of months. She is hispanic and going through Duke on a fellowship she received through the Department of Defense. Her undergraduate degree is in Physics. Evan and I talked yesterday about educational choices for students entering their undergraduate education with an eye to going on to get a Ph.D. He made the very good point that, if you want to study humanities it matters a lot more where you get your undergraduate degree than if you study engineering or one of the hard sciences. If you want to get into Harvard to study sociology, psychology, education, or archeology, it is pretty hard if you get your Bachelors Degree from Southern Oregon Universtiy or Linfield. On the other hand, if you get an engineering or hard science degree with good grades from a school like Washington State, Oregon State, or North Carolina State, do well on the GRE, and have the added bonus of being hispanic, you can get into places like MIT, Stanford, and Princeton and even get good assistantships and/or fellowships.

While we were talking about that, I mentioned that Kelly was a big fan of Condoleeza Rice, who went to good schools at a young age, played Mozart with the Denver Symphony when she was 15 and accompanied Yo-Yo Ma in a concert at Constituion Hall, etc., etc. We looked here up on Wikipedia and found that she speaks Russian, German, French, and Spanish in addition to English. That got me to thinking about the kids language education.

They are going to finish their second year of Rosetta Stone Spanish next year. Both of them speak Spanish quite well at least partially because we speak it at home. When they finish with that second year, our plan is to start them on more intense grammar work from textbooks in addition to third year Rosetta Stone Spanish at a slower pace. The textbook work is partly to prepare them for the CLEP Spanish Exam, but also to provide them with a better working ability to read and write Spanish rather than to just speak and understand spoken Spanish. At the same time, I want to start both of the kids on a third language. We have assumed that should be French for a number of years now, but I am not sure that would be a good choice.

The kids speak a romance language and a germanic language. It very well might be better for them to get a language from a third language family. Lots of people suggest Mandarin. I think Russian would be a good option, too. Comments?

Other than the posting of Kelly’s report on the Lost Colonies and Christian’s report on Artillery, this will be the last post of the 2007/2008 school year. It has been a great year. Kelly is well prepared to move on from Junior High School into High School and Christian is ready to move on from Elementary School to Junior High School. I will hit just a few of the highlights for the past year and then describe a little about where we go from here. I will finish up with some of our educational plans for the summer.

Christian’s year

Christian finished his first year of Sonlight‘s two year survey of world history. He has finished up Elementary Algebra, Apologia General Science, all the Easy Grammar workbooks, and his final year of cursive writing instruction. Christian made some great strides in his guitar playing this year. His new teacher, Andrew Kasab is perfect for Christian both in motivation and instruction. This is really the first time he has had an uninterrupted year of instruction from the same teacher since he first started taking guitar lessons. Another area where we have seen an elevated level of dedication and improvement is in his Spanish. He finished Rosetta Stone Spanish I and is well into Spanish II. Christian did very well on the PASS standardized tests we took for this year. Next year he will move on to Sonlight’s second year of world history, Teaching Textbooks Intermediate Algebra and Geometry, Apologia Physical Science, and preparation to take the CLEP Freshman English Composition test by the end of the school year for six semester hours of college credit.

Kelly’s year

This was Kelly’s last year using the Sonlight curriculum. She did a one year survey of U.S. History. It provided a good coverage of the sweep of U.S. history, but Kelly did not feel that she got either a big picture view or an understanding of how major events, places, and people tied together into a whole until she studied for the CLEP U.S. History I test. In addition, at the end of the program, the instruction tended to be from a hard left viewpoint. We were glad Kelly could pick that out, but we were disappointed all the same that she had to. Still, because the course was relatively thorough and because of the less politically charged CLEP preparation course, Kelly had a good year both in history and literature. She also finished Teaching Textbooks Intermediate Algebra and Apologia Physical Science. She finished Rosetta Stone Spanish I and moved on to Rosetta Stone Spanish II. We are really glad that Kelly is hitting it off with her new piano teacher. Her piano planning has really gone to a new level since she got here to North Carolina. Of course, Kelly has worked hard, but a lot of credit goes to her new teacher, Brenda Bruce, too. Kelly also did well on the PASS standardized tests we took for this year. Next year she will go on to Geometry, Pre-calculus and Apologia Biology. We have started a big push to get her ready for the Community College. As part of that, next years goals will be to pass a good number of additional CLEP test. I will describe those in a later post.

Summer schedule

We joined the brand new YMCA that opened up near us at the beginning of May. Christian and Kelly are on the swim team there. They have their first time trials on Saturday and the first swim meet is the week after that. They will be going to swimming practice early in the morning, Monday through Thursday. Kelly will continue with piano and Christian with guitar through the summer, but at a reduced schedule. Their only solo academic pursuit will be to do 15 minutes per day on Rosetta Stone Spanish per day per kid. We have three learning projects we will do over the summer, but two of them are hobbies and one of them is a very interesting read-aloud.

• We plan to draw every evening when I get home from work. We are working our way through a great book on how to accurately draw faces. We enjoy this very much and have discussed it before in several places.
• We plan to study for the Amateur Radio Technician Class license with the thought that we will even go on to the General Class license if we have time this summer.
• We plan to read the world view book each night that we started earlier this week.

I just got a call in from Eric. It is a baby girl–8 lbs. 10 oz., 21 inches. Congratulations to Eric, Audrey and all the kids! As soon as I can confirm the babies name and get a picture, I will put it up here.

My buddy Evan and I continue to work on the volcano computer. We now have a solid specification for the first item we are going to send out for testing. I am writing about it here right now so we can have a documentation trail. The first computer will feature a single camera to reduce power, lower the cost and assure we have everything working as expected. Here are our approximate costs so far:

• Computer: NorhTec MicroClient JrSX $140 plus $51 shipping (from Thailand)
• Camera: Imaging Source USB 1280×960 color camera DFK 41AU02 – $870
• Camera: Imaging Source USB 640×480 color camera DFK 21AU04 – $350
• GPS: Garmin 18 LVC ~$80
• Miscellaneous: Circuit board stuff ~$59

So here are the material costs for several different camera configurations:

• Low resolution (640×480 color), one camera system: $680.
• Low resolution (640×480 color), two camera system: $930.
• High resolution (1280×960 color), one camera system: $1200
• High resolution (1280×960 color), two camera system: $2070

One of the most critical features of this system is its low power consumption. Here are the power requirements for each of the system elements:

• Computer: 1080 mA @5V
• One camera: 500 mA @5V
• GPS: 60 mA @5V

An additional thing we have discovered is that we have to put a circuit board between the MicroClient computer and the Garmin 18 GPS module. It is because there is latency if we use only the USB or RS-232 communication protocol and hardware. There is a PPS (Pulse-Per-Second) signal line that is only on the Garmin 18 LVC which has a bare wire cable leading from the hockey puck looking GPS module. It looks very easy, but we have to trigger the camera using the PPS signal to be accurate to within a microsecond. There is a kernel patch we have to add to our Linux kernel. A really good description of what we have to do is right here.

Finally, we get to the description of what the first pass of this computer will do. While we have come to an agreement with our friend at the USGS who will be putting the thing into the volcano, we expect to add a lot more functionality to improve the image processing, communication, and ease of use after we get it going. Here it is:

To start with, there are two things you will be able to do with the computer:

1. Upload and download image and configuration files using FTP.
2. Check computer status and start and stop capture sequences using an ssh client (like putty) running on a Linux or a Windows computer.

You will be able to connect to the computer in two ways:

1. Wireless
2. Wired ethernet

You will be able to get images and configuration files on and off the system in two ways:

1. Using FTP transfer
2. Taking the Compact Flash memory card out of the computer and putting it into a compact flash card reader connected to a Linux or a Windows computer.

Each run configuration file will contain the following information:

1. Starting time/date for camera 1
2. Starting time/date for camera 2
3. Image capture frequency time/date for camera 1
4. Image capture frequency time/date for camera 2
5. Stopping time/date for camera 1
6. Stopping time/date for camera 2
7. Maximum number of images to capture for camera 1
8. Maximum number of images to capture for camera 2

The filename of each captured image will contain the following information:

1. Camera number
2. GPS precise time of the capture