Driven By Curiosity

I noticed that I jumped into the middle of this project without much background. There are a couple higher-level posts, but nothing too specific. So…

This project started with the desire to create a simple device. The existing solutions are all complex in various ways. Generally they are a little pricey and are actually rather awkward to use as part of the business. That’s really the biggest issue. Technically they aren’t that exciting — something that blocks the starter signal in the car under certain circumstances. Not hard. A 50 cent switch from Home Depot would do fine, but not in the car finance business. “Now please place the switch in the off position until you pay us.” Not quite.

So obviously a little more is required. There’s a bit of range in implementations from punching codes in on buttons mounted in the car to pager-based enabling/disabling. The codes are easy (and inexpensive), but have an issue with distribution. Particularly when a finance company purchases the note from the dealer, there’s not really a guarantee that the customers will want to make payments solely at the finance company. The pager system makes distribution easy, on the whole, although you could have some coverage issues in places like New Mexico and it will cost you more. It probably depends on the value of the vehicle.
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I was probably being too cheap on this starter interrupt project, but I decided to save $270 by using the AVRISP in-system programmer for my atmel parts (ATmega165 or ATmega128, and AT43USB355). I didn’t read the datasheets well enough and failed to notice that all support the JTAG programmer, which would have been a good idea. But it’s too late now that I have boards back.

I had decided that while serial EEPROM programming wasn’t quite what the AVRISP or STK500-type devices did, since you can define programming commands for such things as ‘avrdude’, I could probably get them to do EEPROMs as well. Hah. Not really. The signal names on the ISP connector are all the same as for EEPROMs, but they don’t get used the same. I did learn why the programmer software had such a fetish for 32-bit values: that’s how the ISP protocol delimits commands. Oh. So no dice on the AVRISP. I did plan for that with one of my boards having an external SPI interface so I could load up the EEPROM, but that’s a little awkward and if I can do it in software from the PC, I’d like to.
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Tools are always exciting.

I decided to use the Atmel AVR family for the starter interrupt project because it had a well-established GCC port and some other utilities available from Atmel to help with things like USB drivers and such. I have used other expensive tools in the past, and while they definitely tend to have advantages in terms of libraries and debugging, I haven’t seen anything to make me want to use them for my own projects. I expect to have some messing around in setting up any tool, and even more for free tools. Which is fine — it’s awful trying to figure out why something broke in something like VxWorks. The tool does a lot for you, but when it breaks you probably won’t know why. I got to watch a support guy spend a few days reading through auto-generated header files trying to figure out what was going on. Ick.
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In setting up my lab, I knew that I would need a decent microscope. In the past, I’ve worked with a trinocular microscope which gave us 2.5x to 22.5x magnification, had a fiber optic ring light, boom arm and 12″x18″ stainless steel stage. Pretty nice setup. As those run upwards of $700, it was obvious it wouldn’t be in the budget.

Paul suggested that we look around on eBay and see what was there. There is actually quite an assortment, from hobby-type microscopes to good lab equipment. I finally decided on a binocular model which had a 1x/3x objective lens (which you turn to select the magnification). It came with both 5x and 10x eyepieces. I’ve been using it with the 5x eyepieces and it’s been great for me. I think the buy-it-now price was $189 or something, plus another $30 or so by the time it was all said and done.
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Got an idea for a product but hesistate to run up your charge cards, borrow all the equity in your house, borow from friends, quit your job to get it into production?

Maybe that isn’t necessary anymore. My son used to work for a consulting engineering firm that billed time at $125/hour. At that rate even a simple project could climb to $100,000. That may still be necessary in some situations, but developments in technology and on the web make it possible for those with some engineering ability to do much of the work themselves for much less.

This site describes how we built starter interrupts with only two people, using a one room lab, stocked with $1,500 worth of equipment.

Think about it. If you can build a product yourself on a very small budget you can:

Avoid borrowing
Keep all rights for yourself
Sell for less
Target smaller markets
Afford to have a working prototype to sell/license, not just a concept

It’s worth thinking about.

More and more people share my feeling that our educational system is in trouble. Some of you respond to this by electing to school your children at home. Media reports of home schooled children doing well are common, but it is not an easy job. I think it is especially difficult in the math and science areas, even if parents are well educated themselves.

I am currently working with my son to design and build the starter interrupt described elsewhere on this site. We have learned it is possible to design our product, have the boards manufactured, buy and assemble the parts, write the software and create a quality finished product, by ourselves on a small budget.

We plan to detail what and how we did this on this site, as time permits. The point I am making is if home schoolers look around on the internet they will find inexpensive tools and directions for creating projects their students can use to obtain a quality education about state of the art science and technology.

They may also be able to profit from what they do. For those with the right abilities and desire it beats a job at a fast food place.

Look around the site and see if you can’t find something your students would benefit from.

If your interests are not in the hard sciences but rather in words, language and other “right brained” categories all is not lost. Free or inexpensive tools are available which will enable you to find fun and profit on the internet too.

I am writing this using a free program called Wordpress. The site is running at a webhosting service which costs less than $10.00 per month. I have seen postings by high school student who earn money finding an interesting topic, researching and writing about it, generating income by placing ads on the site and then selling the developed site.

The program is designed for non-technical users and the author has gone to great lengths to make it as easy as possible to setup and use. Inevitably, it still requires some knowledge to install and configure, but this is minimal. If necessary, you can always find a geek friend to install it for you.

Where do you start. Get on the internet and do searches on subjects that interest you. When you find good writers read their work and see how they generate their income. Keep looking for a subject which you find interesting but which is not being thoroughly written about. Start writing, editing, and re-writing. That will polish your writing skill, help you learn about the subject and give you practice using to program.

In regular publishing you try to be certain everything is perfect before you go to press. On the web you can always go back and change or delete your previous work. That means something is always better than nothing and you should publish your work before you have polished it as much as you would like.

It takes time for search engines to find and index your site. If you have something for them to find they can start this process. If the search engines have some of your material in their index there is a chance potential readers will find it and visit your site. If they like what they find they will link to you. The search engines see these links as a “Vote of confidence” and reward you by indexing your pages more frequently and including more of your pages in their indexs.

During this time you continue writing, editing, polishing your pages and your site gets better. Over time this can produce income, increase your readership and be fun.

No one besides myself and my committee has ever read my dissertation (which is probably for the better). This year more than 100,000 people will read the web pages I wrote about how to reapir a mobile home. The internet is a wonderful opportunity for aspiring writers of all sorts!

I think our educational system is in trouble. I have thought this for some time based on my own experiences (BA, MA, PhD), my reading, and my own children’s experiences (three who went through public schools).

This conviction was reinforced recently with an experience my youngest daughter had. She started in college intending to become some sort of engineer. For a variety of reasons, which did not include lack of math ability, she switched to education. After graduation she was offered a job teaching high school math.

That was when she discovered her B in Calculus 3 would not count as math credit in the education program because it was only a 200 level class! The education department has created and runs its own 300 level math classes which do count. Do you suppose these 300 level math education classes might be somewhat less rigorous from a math standpoint than calculus 3 as taught in the School of Engineering?

The purpose of this site is NOT to beatup on educators. Our three children were fortunate to have many dedicated teachers who worked hard to give them a quality education. However, those efforts were limited by budget, administrative, and facility constraints which limited what these people could do.

With our posts and pages on this site we try to show how educators and others can take advantage of the astonishing richness of tools and wisdom now available via the internet to give their students a state of the art education without a big budget.

Thanks for visiting