Trent's 2014 Grow Log - COLD COLD COLD

HillBilly Jeff · May 16, 2014

Looks like our dirt days should coincide nicely. I got em sheltered in the garage as well. Might end up with some sun burn, but they need to get in the dirt.

TrentL · May 16, 2014

lucilanga said:
Show us your bench!

LOL in a bit, I still have to get some stuff set up.

Was working on an in-dash touchscreen computer back in 2009 for my old Ford F250. Even wrote my own DVD player in .NET which was touch optimized.

But I never got around to getting it installed; then later discarded the project when I sold my truck.

Looking forward to finishing it now that I bought a new (to me) 2005 F-350 6.0L turbo diesel 4x4 dualie. Need a backup camera for my big ass camper.

Project *should* be a lot slicker now that Windows 8.1 is out. I was going to have to do a LOT of custom programming to get the damn thing sorted out on Windows 7, and the touch interface sucked.

Now I can write my custom apps as Metro/Modern UI in .NET and do all sorts of slick stuff without having to re-invent the wheel on multitouch.

I cooked my old 12v DC stabilizer board last year so I need to get a new one built (protect the computer from surges when starting the vehicle...)

Never enough time...
Here's the truck.

sicman · May 16, 2014

the pics of your kids with their dates and firearms. so funny. im sure your daughters date was like :shocked:

plants look great.

i see youre in the big boy dually club. nice. am i crazy or does every old dude in town with a dually wave at you.

Devv · May 16, 2014

Instead of a stabilizer board, why not build a simple delay into the circuit. Once we're in "run" wait 20 or 30 seconds before power up....

But you're way ahead of me with what you're trying to do

lucilanga · May 16, 2014

DC stabilizer board you actually mean voltage peak limiter right ?
How much voltage does your truck inject into your power supply?
I figure out your stabiliser board sits in front of your power supply, that you use for generating 12,5,3V3.
How did you actually toast your stabilizer board ?

Devv · May 16, 2014

lucilanga said:
DC stabilizer board you actually mean voltage peak limiter right ?
How much voltage does your truck inject into your power supply?
I figure out your stabiliser board sits in front of your power supply, that you use for generating 12,5,3V3.
How did you actually toast your stabilizer board ?

I know during crank you'll get down to 9-10 maybe 11 volts, then once the starter is done you get an up spike. Then the alternator kicks it up to around 14 volts once your in run mode. So I'm guessing the stabilizer board is a series of capacitors and should be between the power supply and the electronics your running.

TrentL · May 16, 2014

lucilanga said:
DC stabilizer board you actually mean voltage peak limiter right ?
How much voltage does your truck inject into your power supply?
I figure out your stabiliser board sits in front of your power supply, that you use for generating 12,5,3V3.
How did you actually toast your stabilizer board ?

I haven't measured it yet on the truck. I'm still wrapping my head around the electronics in this thing. It has TWO big batteries under the hood.

Devv said:
I know during crank you'll get down to 9-10 maybe 11 volts, then once the starter is done you get an up spike. Then the alternator kicks it up to around 14 volts once your in run mode. So I'm guessing the stabilizer board is a series of capacitors and should be between the power supply and the electronics your running.

Correct; there's a bank of capacitors to protect the drop, and a bank of diodes to protect against the subsequent surge.
Here's a fancy one that sells for $85.

http://www.ebay.com/itm/M4-ATX-250w-output-6v-to-30v-wide-input-Intelligent-Automotive-DC-DC-Car-PC-/261257808318?pt=PCA_UPS&hash=item3cd42dc9be

(that one is kind of slick as it recognizes the ATX power signal, and you can plug a standard motherboard right in to it. The giada micro-itx board I have just takes a straight 12v DC power connection though, so I don't need anything that fancy.)

lucilanga said:
How did you actually toast your stabilizer board ?

LOL we won't talk about that. But it involves having a diagram upside down that showed + and - when I was wiring it in.

(On a related note have you ever seen an Intel Atom processor melt? I have)

Was testing off a deep cycle marine battery on the bench. MAN those things can deliver some serious amps.

lucilanga · May 16, 2014

Somehow I'd imagine a separate module for the stabilizer part. More like a surge arrestor.
I see your point about being fancy, very convenient on outputting ATX voltages and all.
Somehow I do not find that module could bear the necessary current, nor I find the design very high-power like circuit.
Those caps are a joke. Thumbs up on the input power connector though.

Runescape · May 16, 2014

TrentL said:

Dude, thats a pretty awesome build. What kind of processor does it have in there? Do you know any other programming languages?

TrentL · May 16, 2014

Agreed.

The wattage on the system isn't too huge. The Giada board I'm using (was a prototype they gave me) is tiny and peaks at about 20w on the dual core 1.66 Atom. They make even smaller ones now with the same features.

The screen is going; need to find a different ratio. I'm hoping to find a 1080p panel that'll fit in where the trucks big radio unit sits. But 1080p panels on aftermarket are still slim pickings due to everything being gobbled up by tablet manufacturers.

smallzi · May 16, 2014

sicman said:
the pics of your kids with their dates and firearms. so funny. im sure your daughters date was like

plants look great.

i see youre in the big boy dually club. nice. am i crazy or does every old dude in town with a dually wave at you.

HAHA. At least here in Colorado, many people are not fans of Duallies. They're great when you're hauling something heavy on dry road, but they absolutely SUCK in the snow. My subaru is more sure-footed on an icy road than the f-550 i drive for work.

TrentL · May 16, 2014

Runescape said:
Dude, thats a pretty awesome build. What kind of processor does it have in there? Do you know any other programming languages?

I do ....

6502 assembly (old school C64 days..

)
x86 assembly
PASCAL
COBOL
C
C++
Basic (all flavors, from 2.0 to .NET 4.5)
C#
Plus various oddballs like Lua, etc.

Also well versed in HLSL (high level shader language) used on modern graphics cards.

Picked that up a few years ago when I was tinkering with a from-scratch game engine in MS XNA.

Some videos here if you click my name.

Unfortunately, Microsoft scrapped XNA and I abandoned the project. Was too disheartened to re-start the damn thing over again in DX.

I had to actually buy some books on trig and calculus to do that game engine - it'd been 20 years since I dicked around with vector math and non-linear equations, and had to relearn all of it.

smallzi said:
HAHA. At least here in Colorado, many people are not fans of Duallies. They're great when you're hauling something heavy on dry road, but they absolutely SUCK in the snow. My subaru is more sure-footed on an icy road than the f-550 i drive for work.

Hence the 4x4.

I wouldn't buy a 2 wheel drive duallie in Illinois. We get snow too.

This video is a bit better...

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=O0WH_T0Za04

Runescape · May 16, 2014

TrentL said:
6502 assembly (old school C64 days.. )
x86 assembly
PASCAL
COBOL
C
C++
Basic (all flavors, from 2.0 to .NET 4.5)
C#
Plus various oddballs like Lua, etc.

Also well versed in HLSL (high level shader language) used on modern graphics cards.

Damn, is that what you do for a living? Or is it more of a hobby?

smallzi · May 16, 2014

2wd Trucks are extremely rare in CO, not to mention cheap. The added surface area on the ass-end drive tires is what makes duallies suck in the snow, similar to the way a snowboard works. I only know this because I've driven a dually through about 250,000 miles of snow.

That being said, you seem to be quite a code monkey, sir. I had six languages under my belt by age 18, but i kinda stopped screwing around when the patriot act was passed (if you know what I mean).

We still do a lot of work with PLC's, and eventually I want to use an arduino to control the environmental conditions in my greenhouse. Might have to bend your ear next season, Trent. Maybe we can swap some libraries.

TrentL · May 16, 2014

Runescape said:
Damn, is that what you do for a living? Or is it more of a hobby?

Started as a hobby, went pro in 1998. Got headhunted by a Fortune 500. Then got the shaft when they outsourced everything to Australia in 2008. So I changed things up and went in to datacenter / hosting (I also have a very strong hardware / networking background w/ CISCO, Microsoft failover clustering, and hardware construction).

My son is taking off after my footsteps... after Prom he flew out to LA. He won the IL state science fair in computer engineering and was invited to Intel ISEF 2014 in Los Angeles. He's flying back tonight and gets home about 3 AM. He didn't win any awards this year but got judged by NASA twice. His project was a C# program which was an adaptive artificial intelligence engine; it played a game, learned from it, played better.

https://student.societyforscience.org/intel-isef

Even though I don't do much programming anymore I still have software deployed through out North America. I've written communications programs, inventory and sales management systems, service scheduling / tracking systems, and a financial forecasting and analysis system still in use by Fortune 500 dealerships (think "green"). I haven't sold a new piece of software since 2008, but last year over 4 billion dollars in transactions ran through my code, and every day service technicians still clock in and out of workorders on my code and bill customers through them.

Now I'm in to building supercomputers for datacenters. My last build (Atlas) in our Bloomington Illinois center was put in production last July; it's got 320 Xeon CPU's, 4 terabytes of RAM, 312 terabytes of Storage (several RAID6 SAN's). Each supercomputer node hits the storage servers at 20GB/s throughput on redundant 10GB over copper connections in Multipath I/O.

it's capable of running 1280 virtual servers simultaneously. And it fits nicely in a rack. (God things are getting dense today).

We have 4x redundant 30 amp breakers powering it, set up in a 2x2 matrix of smart PDU's, each powered by an independent power rail. We could lose one of our two grid feeds and a genset / BBU and still be up and running at 100% capacity.

In August we crosslinked that datacenter to our Peoria datacenter w/ 10GB/s private fiber, so we can now replicate the entire set of VM's on it to another site. It's a beautiful setup, and really cool to see 1 gig per second data throughput from one city to another. (I can fail customers over from one site to another with no downtime sitting on my couch in my underwear...)
My office; I was doing some prototype development on Win8 back in the RTM period;

Prototype software running on a prototype Surface tablet before anything ever hit the market for windows 8...(we're a Microsoft partner)

You might get some clue about that Fortune 500 from this pic..

Me working at our Schaumburg facility before I moved everything closer downstate

An early pic of Atlas.. and my employee and friend Greg (now deceased) flipping the boss the bird..

Here's us getting stuff set up for it. Lance and Greg are in the shot (I'm taking the pic)

I had a severe case of Cabin Fever this winter...

Don't think it's all glamor, though.

I sat in this damn chair for 20 hours configuring shit last summer...

Runescape · May 16, 2014

TrentL said:
-C# program which was an adaptive artificial intelligence engine; it played a game, learned from it, played better.
-320 Xeon CPU's, 4 terabytes of RAM, 312 terabytes of Storage (several RAID6 SAN's).
-I was doing some prototype development on Win8 back in the RTM period;

-Lol. that sounds pretty neat. How complex was the game? Like tic tac toe or something?
-Holy shit. Sounds like a beast, man.
-Windows 8... Can't believe they took the start menu out, man. I heard its back in 8.1, but its not the same.

What are your thoughts on java, python, and linux/gnu?

kgetpeppers · May 17, 2014

Wow, your tech knowledge is impressive. Not bad!

TrentL · May 17, 2014

Runescape said:
-Lol. that sounds pretty neat. How complex was the game? Like tic tac toe or something?
-Holy shit. Sounds like a beast, man.
-Windows 8... Can't believe they took the start menu out, man. I heard its back in 8.1, but its not the same.

What are your thoughts on java, python, and linux/gnu?

No the game was about as complex as the board game "Risk". Not exceptionally complex but large scale enough to really work the AI out.

Start menu in Windows 8 is still a sore point with me too. It's not so much that they got rid of it, but they turned a hierarchical menu system (menus inside menus) and made it COMPLETELY 2 DIMENSIONAL. After installing the "usual retinue of apps" the start screen looks worse and more cluttered than my teenager daughter's bedroom and is pretty useless for a program launcher.

That server I built last summer smokes Los Alamos specs in 2005. The thought that governments built thermonuclear intercontinental ballistic missile technology on inferior hardware hasn't completely escaped me. And what do we use it for? Hosting parts catalogs and stuff.

Java/Python/Linux/GRU; not much experience with them. Been a Microsoft developer / partner for 20 years, and (now) also an Intel gold partner (which gives us access to prototype supercomputer technology, which is pretty cool). Getting black boxes from Intel off the UPS truck is always fun, but we can't talk about it. (Quad 15 core Xeons are pretty nifty though .... shhh don't tell anyone)

Wow, your tech knowledge is impressive. Not bad!

Wasn't trying to brag or anything. To me it's just a job. The fact I've been successful and beaten the odds with building a successful company doesn't so much reflect as much on my natural aptitude as it does my willingness to work 80-120 hours a week to stay on the sharp edge of the sword all these years, to avoid getting "stuck in a rut".

It's getting to the point that I'm having to do triage on my pure R&D time though. With 3 kids in high school and 2 in grade school, I have less time than I used to have and now have to rely more on my employees to keep the momentum pushing things forward. 10 years ago "I was the company", now I'm just a part of it.

Fortunately when I'm not answering escalated 3rd tier tech support issues I get 100% of my time to kick back and do the heavy thinking. I had a 500,000 R&D budget last year at my disposal just to "play" (which is where Atlas was born from...). Right now I'm kind of taking a break, giving the tech time to develop a little, and catching my breath before launching off on Gen 3 of the architecture. (Can't increase density yet until RAM and CPU make another generational step, and we're already on the cutting edge of the OS/Software end, so I'm "caught up" for the time being).

Devv · May 17, 2014

Deep stuff Trent! You're light years ahead of me!

I already told you what I do. Fellow employees tell me I'm smart, a genius. I smile, and say "I just know how to make it work, it's the people that develop and come up with all this cool stuff that are the genius"

I was born too late, I was already 36 when I got my first PC in '94. I am proud of IT getting me out of auto-tech land, and that I'm self taught.

Sounds like you have things pretty wrapped up. I like the redundancy you have over the single mode fiber. 10 gigs is nothing to sneeze at. I'm gearing up for that between campuses, the fiber is already in place.

So what do you think of "cloud based apps"? It seems all the major software vendors are trying to steer people that way. I see why, it's to keep a constant cash flow versus selling an app and not seeing them for years, return business wise. But to me, it's a waste of bandwidth. That and the programmers need to keep their stuff in pace with the constantly evolving browsers as most is web based. At least in the education sector. Talk about support issues!

So how are your plants doing?

Runescape · May 17, 2014

TrentL said:
And what do we use it for? Hosting parts catalogs and stuff.
Quad 15 core Xeons

Lol
and damn