Tried working on OSPi today on the porch. The fuse seems to be blown, I may have had something to do with this while cabling the external battery and battery manager. I left for the airport at 2:30 to pick up Libbie but stopped by Kroger first to get gas. I made an earlier trip this morning to get Lima beans and salad dressing but forgot to get gas. Her plane was early. We went home where I continued to do the IOS program. Libbie decided to change he hot tub water which involved me a little. We made shrimp and green beans with Mexican Cooking sauce for dinner before trying to turn the tub on again. While we had the dinner the tub was filling. Unfortunately it didn't start up with the new water. I'll deal with this tomorrow.

It's cold today. i continued on the Mote to garage interface and discovered that after the F: of temperature there is a space. The gateway treats a space as a delimiter so it wasn't picking up the temperature. I fixed with a routine that removed all spaces from the character stream representing the temperature number. I also go the router configured with fixed addresses for both the NCID display and the gateway by entering the mac addresses in the lan setup. When it sees those addresses it assigns specific IP addresses. This works. Melanie called asking for my dance lesson to be moved up to 2:45 from 3:30. The lesson went well, I picked up quite a few tips on the waltz. On the way home from dance I picked up a bag of mandarin oranges. They didn't have cuteys. this is the best orange ever. What flavor. I continued working on the gateway and discovered that the atmega part has trouble doing 115kbaud at 3 volts. I bumped it to 5 volts and it worked better although it risks the Pi I/Os since they are not 5 volt parts. I ordered some Moteinos from Low Power Labs since they seem to think their Moteinos do OK at the higher baud rates. I'll give them a shot. They seem to be running them at 16 Mhz but I can't confirm that anywhere. The Mega versions do run at the higher speeds. Dinner tonight was a salad and a bowl of beans in Mexican sauce. This morning my weight was at 229 which finally moves the needle off 230 all week. Got to keep going with the program.

I took a look at Energy Transfer pricing as well as SPH today. I am pretty devastated at the potential losses in these two holdings of mine. I dread to see the rest of the portfolio. I had too much energy exposure and need help.
I studied the Backup battery board from Moteino and decided they need a new case before I can mount the battery and controller. The plant room may be OK since there's room inside for the backup. On the porch I may need an external battery pack. I saw the FB post about Lori. She is in bad shape with broken arm, broken leg, broken ribs and broken vertebrae. She seems to be in high spirits.
Added an external case to hold the battery on the porch. Got everything mounted and wired, awaiting a flash card which is in another Pi in my office where I configured it. I got the gateway working for the Motes. It's reading the garage sensor but not the temperature, only the humidity. It also is not polling the status. Dinner was the last bean burger. i had that with some Lima Beans in Mexican cooking sauce which I really liked. Picked up another jar of that stuff today in Kroger.

I put the cover on the garage door motor today finishing that job. Now I need a Pi gateway to talk to the thing as well as talk to many other sensors that don't exist yet. I have lots of plans for this and am spurred on by watching YouTube videos. I tried a pre main banner but it didn't work. I think the best ocurse of action is to start main, call a banner page and do the unzipping, then return to main. This is beginning to make the most sense for me.
Did a Walmart trip to get an SD card for the Pi. I couldn't read the card from the outdoor sprinkler controller so I needed a replacement. i eventually found out the problem was the Dell computer Bios. Once I installed a Bios update the card reader worked perfectly and allowed me to write tow images, one for the Mote Gateway and one for the outdoor sprinkler. I didn't need the new Walmart 8 Gb SD cards I purchased but I certainly can use them on future Pi projects.
Dinner was a treat. It was raining so I didn't want to cook on the grill so I took the leftover frozen shrimp in the freezer and combined it with the Mexican cooking sauce I got once free at Kroger and made a delicious shrimp dinner which I will repeat with some veggies next time. Maria Stuarda was live from the Met this evening. I don't care for this opera and probably won't do the HD performance.

After the CBS Sunday Morning programs at 10:30 I went into the garage and started working on the garage door motor. Fortunately I have a step by step disassembly guide. All went pretty well but took a long time, especially with adjusting the open and closed stop state. I also hooked up the magnets to the Moteino and enabled the gateway transceiver in the house. The door worked well reporting the open/closed state as well as the temperature. I'm pretty happy with the results. I didn't put the cover back on. I'll reserve that for tomorrow. Dinner was a Trader Joes frozen italian gnocchi entree which was a pasta and spinach in a tomato sauce. It wasn't great from the microwave and would probably be better if cooked conventionally. The Superbowl was on tonight but I didn't watch it. I spent some time upstairs at my desktop computer instead.

Last night I got the Anarduinos sending packets across the room. My node was the garage mote sending temperature and humidity data that I previously added to the platform and worked on the software to packetize it. This morning I wired up the hall devices to the Anarduino and successfully got it transmitting door sensor status to another Mote which will be the gateway Mote. This is happiness. Next step was to locate a project box and mount it on the door opener. So far everything is going along smoothly. I'll have to disassemble the garage motor when the new gears get here since the old nylon ones are disintegrating. The opener is 10 years old. Weight loss is stuck at 230, same as yesterday but not unexpected. The first 6 were pretty easy now it will slow to a pound or two per week. Why did I let my weight get away like this?
Dinner once again was a bean burger along with a salad.

Updated the AVSA website with the current AVM and also uploaded a family pic to CVS for Libbie in Tiverton. My weight this morning was 230 even. That's 6 pounds since Feb 1 which is about right for the early part of this process. I expect the loss to slow down to about a pound or two per week but at least I'm in the groove. Weight at the Dr office last year was 222 with clothes so I need around 217 nude to equal it. That's 13 pounds in 7 weeks. It will be a challenge but a good challenge. Tried to get cereal in Kroger but once again they were out of shredded wheat. I had to go to Walmart to get the cereal.
Worked the rest of the afternoon on temperature conversions for the garage Mote. I finally have it converting from C to F and then converted to a string for sending in a packet. Now I have to configure a receiver to see if it makes it across the room. For dinner I had a bean burger with tomato and onion. I also had a salad with the meal.

Yesterday I reported I was at 232 but that was today's reading. I updated the journal today and got the date wrong. Yesterday was only 234. This morning I did my first over the air update of the NCID Display. It went fast, I was impressed. Did a little looking at the web code for the Huzzah. It looks straight forward. I think I can build a WiFi remote control for the thing relatively easily. I also set up the Arduino tool chain and libraries for the Moteino clones (Anarduino) and was able to burn a test program into one of them. Put FTDI headers on a second and a 433 Mhz antenna but did not burn it in. Will do that tomorrow along with testing the garage mote. Dinner was a bean burger using the cooking light recipe and grilled outside in the rain. It wasn't bad but kind of thick. I had it on a sesame bun with onion and ketchup. I had the last slice of pineapple for dessert. It was all pretty filling.

Left at 6:30 am to take Libbie to RDU for 8 AM flight. Later it started raining while I worked on taking the door opener apart. I'm figuring out how to mount a garage Mote to monitor garage door closure. The drive gear is falling apart. Found the part number for a gear and ordered it from eBay. The whole kit has the drive gear, a worm gear, various washers and O rings and some grease. It was $14. A new opener is $200 from Home Depot. I built the garage mote and discovered I ordered a 433 Mhz unit. I put a 915 Mhz antenna on the mote which I need to change to a 433 unit. I found code on github to run the TH02 temperature-humidity sensor that I'm also going to mount on the garage mote.
I finally lost a few pounds when I checked the scale this morning. Down to 232 from 236. Continued to diet by only having an orange and a slice of pineapple for lunch I went out and bought the ingredients for a bean burger using black beans but was too lazy to make them so I had the butternut squash casserole. It was delicious and was 140 calories per serving. I had 2 servings.

The Garage Mote from Low Power labs came today. Studied a lot about the Mote gateway, watching You Tube videos about this. Libbie found a problem with changing the values of the inventory. She consistently gets a crash. We had a salad again for dinner.

First day back home! I wrote a check for Esquires and put it in the mailbox. We ran over to the Jessie Rd site and checked the keys before putting them in the mailbox as well. We were going to take the mailbox but found out the new owner had a power bill in there so we left it behind. It has our name on it. I spent the day getting the Huzzah working. Soldering headers was straightforward. The issue was configuring the Arduino IDE with the correct version of the WiFi manager and with support for the Adafruit board. Got it all working after working on it all day. Dinner was a salad with Balsamic.

We got up at 6 and started cleaning the condo. I made many trips to the car with our stuff which really wore me out. We had a breakfast of shredded wheat and then out the door at 8:15. We stopped for biscuits at Mickey Dees in Lake Mary. Libbie met an interesting old lady who told her they have cookies 13 for $4 here and you get choose between oatmeal and chocolate chip. She said she comes here a lot and also buys $10 gift certificates for presents and people think they hit the jackpot. Too funny. We had a little traffic slowdown around Lake Buena Vista then got going again full speed. There were a number of speed traps out. We saw one in Georgia that caught 4 speeders at once. Gas stop at Brunswick byut the Mickey Dees had a long line for lunch so we drove to Darien and had a Wendys lunch. I had a single. There were about 20 young girls there ordering for lunch, they were a gymnastic team. Next gas stop was exit 170 in Florence, SC where gas was 1.49. Wow! I didn't think it could get any lower.
We got home around 8 which was longer than normal, probably because of the number of stops. Once home we ordered a pizza from Annas in downtown Apex. It was pretty good, not as good as NY Pizza but not bad. It was thin crust NY style. I originally wanted a CiCi pizza from McGregor Village but Libbie couldn't find them on the map. Maybe they're gone by now.

This was non stop cleanup day getting ready to vacate the place tomorrow. We left at 11:45 for Turandot in Bradenton. We bought the tix when we were there 2 weeks ago. The Sarasota theaters were sold out. We stopped on Clark at the Subway for a turkey sub before we got on the Interstate. The performance was wonderful, the tenor not so wonderful. The lady next to me decided to use the entire first act to unwrap gummy bears in crinkly cellophane. The guy next to Libbie decided he would join in on the choruses. ugggh. We stopped at Albrittons on the way home to get Honeybelles. We bought a bagful but they turned out to be not so good. They are overripe. I have always liked Navels better and will stay with my Walmart Navels for 50 cents each. For dinner we had our last wine and cheese at sunset then had a balsamic vinegar salad. I am going to start my weight loss program Feb 1. I need to lose 20 pounds before April 7.

I washed all the mouldings today with a brush. This wore me out. Libbie continued with scrubbing all the floors. The place is looking good. On the IOS program I switched the main list over to a tableview that can handle very large lists. It works well. I also finished up the icons on the results page with icons for tap, wish, wish report, inventory edit and inventory report. It looks great, I'll probably remove the menu for these items. We didn't have time to get out today since the Wisconsin party starts at 6. We were seated at table 2, a table for 6. One couple from ILL and one from Wisconsin. The other couple were a guy and his younger blonde date. The buffet was excellent, my favorite being the trout with a cherry glaze. Also a nice medium rare prime beef. Buckeyes for dessert along with a sugar cream pie that I never had before.

Still raining today but it's warm. It's Richard Nicholas's birthday. We had a long talk with them about videos and grandchildren. I got the camera app working in IOS but haven't figured out how to save it yet. It needs copying to a program folder then added to the database. Lots to do. Libbie started deep cleaning the condo for our exit on Sunday. This month went by too fast. For dinner tonight we went over to the clubhouse for rib night. I had a half rack of ribs with baked potato. Saved half of the half to take home for lunch tomorrow. We met a Canadian couple who bought in forest Circle 2 years ago. They said they were on #4. They needed a table for 3 but their third didn't seem to show up yet.

This shouldn't be as good a day as it is because it's pouring rain out. It's around 70 degrees. I had lots of success moving forward on the IOS program. The icons are nice looking and I have most of them working. Still need to implement a few more features. I made an appointment for tire rotation. Tire Kingdom offers this service free if you bought the tires there but it took an hour. The good news is the job is done.
We went over to pub night where I had the vegetable torte which was eggplant, squash and portobello in layers with a beurre blanc sauce. it was chocolate cake day so we had chocolate cake for dessert. The cake was a rich chocolate with chocolate mousse filling and coated with dark chocolate chips. it was the best chocolate cake ever.

The month is slipping by too fast. It's warm today, over 80. The majority of the snow in the yard has melted as viewed by the web cam. I finally got a good handle on the pinch to zoom as well as the layout problems. if I use the webview with the url mode instead of html mode I get a normal sized image that can be zoomed. With html mode the image is shrunk to a tiny little speck on the screen, not acceptable. We took the bikes to the Venice train station and rode the waterway. Unfortunately we did not recharge the batteries all week. I used the throttle to just keep the middle or yellow light on. the green one was totally off. I ran out of power about half a mile before the train station on the return which wasn't bad. We stayed on one side of the waterway to conserve power by not having to go up the hump on the bridge over the waterway. We felt that would use too much power. Dinner was a salad after the wine and cheese on the Lanai at sunset. I listened a little to Turandot but went to bed for the 3rd act.

More IOS struggles with the image zoom. I'm also having trouble getting the compiled screen layout to match the layout I did in the designer. We took a ride down the Legacy Trail as far as the Oscar Scherer park. Dinner was leftover reheated sausage slider from Moes Saturday dinner (this is Monday). I also had a nice balsamic salad. I made my annual doctors appointment this morning. it is for April 7 which was earlier than I expeced. I got on the scale and saw I was at 235 which means I have around 13 pounds to lose to match last year. I would love to take it down 15 pounds. Let's see how that works.

I'm still struggling with the ios screen layout. We left at noon going to Taming of the Shrew by the Bolshoi in Bradenton but by the time we got to Clark I asked Libbie to see if it was in Sarasota. It was so I did a U turn and went to the Sarasota Mall where we bought tickets and had a Subway sub for lunch. The theater was pretty crowded but it was a thoroughly enjoyable performance. Today's beauty of course was the beautiful Katerina in a red dress with big zipper down the front. The ballet was intense, erotic and fast paced. The Music of Shostakovich made it special, one of my favorite modern composers. During the sex scene in the bedroom they did the Shostakovich 101, one of my favorites and I've only seen Pilobolus dancing to it. Loved it. The Bolshoi has some talented dancers. We had pizza from the Italian Grill for dinner. They make this stuff fast since we left as soon as we made the call and when we got there in less than 10 minutes it was ready.

i don't know why I signed up to do this but I left at a little after 9 to go to Lake Mary to visit Jack and Tod about the NCID display. It was incredibly windy, my little car was getting blown around. I did 2 hand driving to control it. I got onto Lake Mary Blvd around 11:30 and stopped at the Marathon where I bought gas and also did a pit stop. Had a nice visit with Jack then Tod arrived. He's a pretty brilliant person with degrees in both engineering and marketing. We have a lot in common including Smoking Ribs in the backyard. Cynthia popped in briefly with 3 dogs that she is sitting then left. I got a demo of the new NCID software. Tod wrote some HTML that runs in a server on NCID. Very cool. We went to lunch at Cici's Pizza where they have a buffet of pizza, salad, pasta, drinks and dessert for 5.99 What a deal. We stopped by Cynthias to say goodbye then I left the Forest at 4 PM and texted Lib that I was on the way home. Arrived home at 6:30 after talking to Libbie near exit 245 on I-75. We decided to look for a pub for dinner when I get home. There was a beautiful sunset going on as i was driving. The wind which was terrible this morning was still present but had subsided a little. We went out to Mad Moes down Tamiami which was pretty good. I had the italian sausage with onions, pepper on a bun with Marinara sauce and an Amber Boch.

Back to IOS this morning. Much frustration and no solution on whether to use a webview or the imagezoom class. I'm having trouble getting this stuff sized onto the screen. It won't stay in one place after I compile and run it. I guess I have to learn more about laying out screens in IOS. After dinner I decided to redo the screens and use the webview control. I heard from a user named poison alchemist who did a mockup of an android screen and she also had some suggestions on what the screen should look like as well as suggestions for icons. For dinner we stayed home and had salad as well as cheese and wine at sunset. We watched the snow up North, monitoring our cameras on the house. I wish I could turn up the heat in the greenhouse to melt the roof because the temp is being reported by our thermostat as being 58 degrees. It looks like an ice storm is in progress in Apex.

libbie and I took a bike ride today while i also spent some more time trying to understand pinch and zoom. i have two techniques, a class called zoom image and the webview which natively allows pinch and zoom. We went to the Vine and Dine tonight. We were seated at a table of 3 other couples. The food was over the top, the wine was exquisite. I ate and drank too much. I was sick when I got home from the overeating and overdrinking. One couple was Mike and Lupa from SF-NJ, another couple from Nova Scotia and the couple directly next to me was from Illinois. Only Lupa and Mike were owners. We had Hors D'oeuvres with Rose, sea bass with a Chardonnay, sliced apple with baked tomato and gouda with Zinfindell and finishing the meal with a prime rib cap and Cabernet. Dessert was cheese and chocolate pate with a port. I tasted but did not drink the port.
Total for the night was $180.

I got the convention pages enabled on AVSA. I studied the pinch and zoom but got no where. I still don't have a good solution for pinch-zoom. Maybe I'll take a look at what I implemented in the B4A version. We took a walk in the morning thinking it was cold but half round the neighborhood I took my jacket off. In the afternoon we rode our bikes to the community gardens but turned around just short at Palmer Ranch Rd because there was emergency vehicles ahead on the trail. We didn't want to be looky doos. For dinner we went for pub night. It was pretty crowded, we took a high top and enjoyed the dinner. I had a glass of Cabernet with stuffed flounder and veggies. Since it was pub night we had a family style salad and garlic bread to accompany. Our server was a heavy set girl, Tomi. Today's beauty was a very nice sunset since there were a few clouds on the horizon that lit up when the sun went down. Nice.

The LSAVC website was finally launched this morning. Marjorie had some updates for me. I set her up as an admin. I basically took the day off from IOS and web site stuff and watched some Moteino stuff on YouTube. I think I'm going to order the gateway and a mote to play with at home. The package looks pretty attractive. We left at 3:08 for a 3:55 performance of Star Wars at Hollywood 20 downtown. Found out there is a parking garage next to the theater and parking is free with a movie receipt. We parked at the far end on Level D then walked a long way to the front of the theater. Watched a bunch of previews that were awful but the Zootobia one is very funny and I would love to go see it. The Star Wars movie was absolutely great. We saw Star Wars 1 in 1977 in San Diego over thanksgiving week when we were in Calif. That was 39 years ago. Wow, time flies! After the movie we went to Bangkok Thai. I had scallops Pad Thai which I didn't like as much as chicken Pad Thai. We had spring rolls and a glass of Cabernet with the meal. Later in the evening as I was going to bed i got an eMail from Winston that he was ready for the Convention files to be copied over.
I'll do it in the morning.

I continued working on rebuilding the website all day. It's coming along pretty good. It's too cold to go out bike riding so this is a good alternative although I would rather be working on the IOS project. At around 3:15 we left for Bill's place in Bradenton. We had a nice evening of tacos and wine with Cort, Bill, Barb and Corrie and Shane with their two little ones. It's a bit chilly but OK. We left there at 8:30. At the table after dinner we compared bird apps. Bill has Sibley, I have iBird. There are more features on iBird. I also noticed the bottom menu can be scrolled right to left to reveal more choices. I like this as a future feature for First Class.