This is cheaper and safer than buying dubious quality LiPo batteries and chargers. You can power with 8 or more NiMh AA cells, and use the same cells and charger you use around the house for other things. You could even install a USB receptacle and have a less expensive, more powerful, but bulkier version of the popular Minty Boost.
This model has a diode bridge in front of the voltage regulator, which has the advantage that you can't blow it up by connecting input voltage the wrong way. Unfortunately, there's only a smallish (100uF) cap between the bridge and the the regulator input so it might not work well with AC input. The other problem with using input diodes is they waste about 1 volt power, so the dropout voltage increases to about 8 volts. I'll probbaly remove the input diodes to make this a more efficient DC to DC converter.
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On my list of things to try:
http://www.muppetlabs.com/~breadbox/sof ... eensy.html
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What Is DevOps, the philosophers ask?
The famous 2000 EDS superbowl advert sums it up better.
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;)
The Pentium III box that has been chugging away for years collecting weather data has been replaced by the old G4 iBook. This saves about a kWh every two days. Added benefit, the laboratory is strangely quiet now.We have over six years of minute by minute weather data for the premises.
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Wondering why your display is always looking funny? Different displays need different gamma settings and color correction. My cheapo LG E2241 (non IPS) display is very twitchy about display settings - if it's not exactly right it looks like crap. So I was wondering why each time I calibrated the screen the settings seemed to look bad again the next day. My gammas have to be adjusted substantially fo the cheapo LG display, to something like 0.65.
Oh yeah, this is the legacy computer from heck: ancient generic whitebox with ancient nVidia GeForce2 MX 400, CentOS, KDE, and the above 1920x1080 pixel which is kind of pushing the MX400 as far as it was designed to go. (I do have the current nVidia legacy driver installed, which they graciously still support.)
Now the fun starts: There are three different places where display gamma gets set in CentOS + KDE. First, on X startup, /etc/X11/Xorg.conf gets read. This sets up the settings for the login screen only, so just leave this alone unless the gamma is intolerably bad.
That in turn will be overridden by KDE, which appears to run the "xgamma" command to source in gammas it finds in ~/.kde/share/config/kgammarc. This file is updated by the Monitor Gamma tab in the KDE Display Setting widget.
This is turn is overridden only when you happen to run the utility nVidia provides with the driver, /usr/bin/nvidia-settings, which is invoked by the nVidia driver settings widget that gets installed in the KDE System menu. This utility stores its gamma settings in ~/.nvidia-settings-rc.
So to keep these three stooges of apps from messing up your settings:
- Remove the nVidia driver utility from the KDE menu so you are never tempted to run it, and delete the .nvidia-settings-rc file. The settings aren't used unless you run the nvidia-setting utility.
- Use only the the Monitor Gamma tab in the KDE Display Setting widget to set gammas / color correction.
- If you want to make the login screen look nice, edit /etc/X11/xorg.conf.
- You could "lock in" the values by running either xgamma or nvidia-settings from your .bashrc file. Or both, if you are not easilty confused.
And don't forget - with LCDs, "brightness" is really "contrast" and vice versa. http://www.poynton.com/notes/brightness_and_contrast/ has a pretty good sum-up of that.
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