My First BASIC Stamp Project

So I won a Basic Stamp kit from ebay last week. Last night I had a chance to play with it. I went through the included book, and got through most of it. In the end I built the following:

That is a servo on the left, the basic stamp has some code in it that detects the position of the potentiometer in the lower center of the breadboard using capacitor discharge timing and then moves the servo to match the pot's position. The 7 segment display lists a number between 1 and 10 depending upon the servo's position. The white colored LED actually flashes either red or green depending on if you're rotating the pot clockwise our counter-clockwise. It was fun to build and actually not that hard.

I am really excited about programming microcontrollers and I'm looking forward to my next projects. At some point soon I feel like I'll be able to finally hack the Furby. You can check out the code I wrote here.

Update for Riyad:I made the thing on the left spin when I turned the little white knob on the right. I did this using magic.

BMC: Basic Mountaineering Course

This weekend I attended the San Bernardino Sheriffs Search and Rescue Basic Mountaineering Course. This course covered all the skills necessary for an alpine search and rescue mission in the San Bernardino mountains.

The course actually started a month ago with 16 hours of classroom time. This weekend was the field exercises where we got a chance to apply the skills we learned about in the classroom. It was important to know the skills at a level known as unconscious competence, which means you can execute the task correctly without having to think about it.

• Here are some of the skills we covered:
• Ice Axe Self Arrest
• 2 and 3 Person Roped Travel
• Snow Anchors
  • Picket
  • Ice Axe
  • Deadman
  • Bollard
• Crampon Travel
• Ice Axe Travel
• Snowshoe Travel
• Snow Shelters
• Belaying
• Avalanche Beacons

All in all it was a great training and I had a great time and learned many valuable skills. I plan on attending the next two trainings.

Here are the pictures I took.