This is one of those posts I have to start by saying it is a true story. So, Lorena’s number two brother, Jorge was in a wreck this morning. It involved two trucks that ran into each other swiping both the trucks off the road along with Jorge. Jorge was OK, but it scared him to death. The police showed up, the insurance guy showed and they had everything just about worked out when the owner of the property on the showed up. It took them an extra couple of hours at the scene because of damage done to the fence. Take a close look at the fence. It was quite impressive to me that the land owner actually convinced the insurance guys to compensate him for damage to the fence. It was also quite impressive that this could have happened just about anywhere in the world. I think insurance turns people into victims–not that we don’t need it, but give me a break. You have to think though that the guy was probably a soccer player. Soccer, of course is a big thing in Mexico. You see what happens when one soccer play light brushes another soccer player in a even the most unimportant of matches.
Day: May 18, 2016
Lorena arrived at an amazing milestone today. She rowed over 10,000 meters, burning over 500 calories in a little over an hour. I am sure she will get that time under an hour pretty soon, but the fact that she did over 10K in a single sitting on a Concept 2 rowing machine is an impressive feat. She has worked out hard on an uncompromisingly regular schedule for well over a decade now. Kudos to her.
I had a little bit of a breakthrough on my EKG project last night. I actually had the idea when I was completely away from the project for a few days. It caused me to re-read the manual where it said the readings from the EKG are sent down the serial cable in big endian order. Each value for a 10-bit number takes up two bytes. The high order byte can either be first or last. The receiving computer expected little endian order. I now swap the bytes before they are plotted or recorded and we get the beautiful plot above. You can barely see four little lines below the left side of the signal plot. Those lines make up the legend for the electrode channels. The system can handle six channels, but we are going to try to do just four on this setup. The next step is to get the graph to be a moving strip chart. The graph, as it is right now, just writes over itself.
I completely duplicated my current setup for a friend, Frank who is joining this project. He is way more skilled than I in a lot of this stuff–especially the electrical engineering parts. I need to order myself an additional three channels of electronics, but that is on its way to Frank right now.
P.S. We are thinking of cross platforming (Windows/Linux) and open sourcing (free as in both freedom and beer) the software and writing a user guide/tutorial on how to set the thing up if anyone shows any interests because there does not seem to be anything out there that is really hobby friendly. If I am wrong, maybe someone can correct me. Because of our day jobs we are still months away from that.