With Lorena and the Kids gone, I have been stuck at home alone by myself for the last few days. Jeff called me earlier in the week and asked if I could help him a little on the program his is writing in C for the GaugeCam project we are working on at NCSU. Jeff is doing the lab automation for us. Our hope is to be able to perform a bunch of functions that have to do with the lab equipment over the internet. We have a pump and a couple of lights we want to turn on and off. We want the light to move in an arch to emulate the kinds of bright spots and shadows caused by the sun. We also want to be able to read a transducer that measures water height so we can compare it to what we are getting from the camera.
The upshot is that Jeff and Troy came over last night to work on it. I got some sandwiches and some chips, showed Troy how I work on my programs at home, and worked through the programming problem with Jeff. Among other things, I found that Jeff is an oil painter and plays the guitar. He will fit right in with our clan! It was good to have both Troy and Jeff over at the same time. Troy really understands many facets of the problem we are trying to solve better than I. Jeff, because he is a mechanical engineer had some great ideas about how we could do some of the stuff. At any rate, I enjoyed myself a lot. We are using some Arduino micro-controllers for the lab automation, so I got pretty inspired to get our controller going with Christian, too.