Riding the Hoar Frost Edge of Winter

The canal froze over! I didn't think a 100-300' wide, flowing canal could freeze overnight, but after light snow fall Friday night the clouds parted and the temperatures plummeted. Though it wasn't to the extent that you could skate down to the lake--which I am holding out for--it is a good sign for the season. Then, to contradict itself, the temperatures went to 40F on Sunday and it rained. Oh well.

I've been quite loaded with work the last week and we're down to little more than 7 hours of daylight so I haven't had many chances to get out and take pictures, but here are a few. You may wonder why so many people submerge their bicycles randomly throughout the Kinda Kanal; the simple answer is so that they can pull them out in the spring! It's a cleanup competition so this is the equivalent of stuffing the ballot box. Or maybe it's just reckless, Saturday night yutes.

No Escape
Having sighted them at every other destination in the world, I have now spotted the Andean flute musicians in the pedestrian markets of Linköping. These guys have a better distribution network than UPS and LDS combined.

Sunday Morning Recklessness
What could be better than rising at 6:30 AM on a Sunday and going for a jog along the canal? It's an opportunity to see the remainders from Saturday night, like the latest bicycle anchors. This morning was the first sighting of, who I now call, the Pillow Bicycler. He was nothing more than a young man on a bicycle with a pillow tucked under his arm, whizzing down the dark lane. The objects themselves are not even that extraordinary, except in the rare circumstance such as this when they are brought together. While searching for the base images to create my composite sketch of the Pillow Bicycler, I encountered this unfortunate picture advertising the Comfy Pillow. Very comfy indeed.
For the next few minutes, I pondered the nature of Pillow Bicycler. Was he coming from one of the fabled "pillow rumbles" on the south side of town, near the water tower? Was he diligently practicing for bicycle-pillow jousting, a century old tradition in Norköping? Or maybe he was a Montague, racing away from the house of Capulet in the early morning hours. Sorry, if this is a bit silly, but if you have any better ideas...(and by better I don't mean more realistic).

Circuit Theory Becomes Circuit Practice
Not satisfied with the introductory, copy-cat project of a battery-powered USB charger, I have set out to build a circuit of my own design: an accelerometer complete with LED readout (of some sort). What follows will be either glory or failure.

The heart of an accelerometer is of course......the accelerometer chip, which can be acquired at your local Elfa for approximately $15. The problem is that the chip measures 5 mm on a side (1/5th of an inch!) and contains eight (8) gold soldering pads each measuring 1.25 mm x 0.75 mm. In other words, and as you can see to the right, it's friggin' tiny.

The first attempt, soldering wires directly to the bare chip, was utterly absurd. The backup was to build a semi-sturdy foundation for the chip with the circuit board leads nearby and then solder to the chip's pads. The only suitable, non-critical material I had available (i.e. it was within the room) was a sturdy beer coaster. With a little donkey glue, meticulous stratification of beer coaster "squares", and the weight of a five kronor coin I was able to fabricate suitable substrate upon which to secure the chip. The wires could then be soldered from the circuit board leads to the chip pads with great care and profanity. Convenient mounting of the capacitor finished off the adapted chip socket to what you see here.
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And what do we get for a weekend's worth of hard work? Well, when horizontal the two outputs from the chip (X and Y) reside at half of the input voltage, but if we rotate (i.e. accelerate) the chip around one horizontal axis, one of the output voltages drops or rises, depending on the degree of rotation (acceleration). If we rotate the chip around its other horizontal axis, the other output voltage drops or rises in the same manner. Now that's worth a beer coaster and the beer that came with it.

Next? Signal shifting, amplification, and LED readout.