When I got back to the hangar, two friggin' bastards were blocking my hangar door with their RVs. I couldn't believe the nerve. Gary Sobek and Paul Rosales. Jeez, who do you think you are?! Just kidding. They were messing with me...they said they knew I'd go find 'em if they just parked in front of my door. It worked. I found them over at Dave's hangar and pretended to be mad that some funky looking homebuilts were blocking my door.
We talked briefly about the missing man formation we were gonna do tomorrow up at Rosamond. Before they left I got these shots of them as they were about to start up and head out.
If only Paul would have put that 3rd wheel where it belongs, they'd look even cooler together... Juuust kidding.
How long has it been since you saw a photo of some crap I just got in the mail, sprawled out on my kitchen counter? Probably the last time was before I even flew my -7. Well, some neat stuff came in the mail today.
What the heck is an iButton?! Well, thanks to Sean Lally (RV-10 builder) I now know. Check out the iButton web site to see the scoop. Basically an iButton is a computer chip in a stainless steel case. These things can do all sorts of neat stuff, but the application that I'm interested in is temperature monitoring and recording.
Basically you can get different iButtons, which typically cost less than 10 bucks each, for different temperature ranges and purposes and stuff. I went to the Maxim-IC web site and ordered a whole bunch of free samples.
The classic use case is for shipping seafood or whatever. You want to make sure that the fish is still fresh when it gets where it needs to go. So you slap one of these puppies on the crate. When the fish gets to its destination the receiver can zap the time/temperature data to a PC or a handheld, and instantly they can see the range of temperature that the fish was exposed to or whatever. Ok, I don't want to get too deep into the nitty gritty of this stuff...partly because (a) I don't really know all the details yet, and (b) I'm not in the business of marketing and selling this crap, so it's not worth my time. But let me say this...
These iButtons are totally "wireless" in that they are totally self contained...you don't need to run any wires to some data collector or something, since they are the probe and brain in one. They have 10 years' worth of lithium battery. They're controllable in a bunch of different ways. The iButtons themselves are cheap...what is not as cheap is the reader adapter thingamabob that lets you zap the data to your computer. It's only about 50 bucks, though. Apparently you just touch the "touch probe" to the iButton and it does its thing...either setting up monitoring or uploading the data to the PC. I've ordered a "Blue Dot Receptor" and a USB adapter.
Here are a few of the mounting options that iButtons can support out of the box. These are technically key fobs, but I can see screwing these to baffles, epoxying them to the inside of the cowl...or hell...just duct taping a friggin iButton to something under my instrument panel. Zillions of different temperature areas to monitor and play with. The beauty is that the data gets collected as you fly. When you get down, touch the probe to it and boom, you've got the data right there. No need to have your laptop onboard during the flight or whatever. These things are like the size of a nickel. Pretty cool.
Thanks for the heads-up on this Sean. I'll post more comments as I play with 'em.