Tuesday 28 July 2009

"It's free? Thats not so bad!"

Wow, free computers! I love it when your in the right place at the right time. Well, slightly too late. The IT department at the college disposed of 50 computers/monitors and all the peripherals a few days before we heard about it, but we succeeded in obtaining a couple of monitors and towers for our own personal usage. I am personally excited about the free 80Gb hard drive which came with one of them, this means I can finally give my laptop the long overdue backup it has been ever so politely been begging me for ^_^

So, when I manage to work until 5 o'clock tonight and eventually get home, i reckon I'll be creating a brand new setup on my bedroom desk (fingers crossed I can find enough power cables) and when that is done I'll get down to updating my project blog up to the point I have reached so far (providing my memory holds up) So yeah, roll on 1700 hours!

Alex

Monday 27 July 2009

another blog

Hey, pointing you towards alex-gilbert.blogspot.com for my Project blog for, well, updates on my project. Nothing there as of yet but i will post pictures and information when I get the time. ^_^

Alex

Been a while

Been a while since my previous post, 3 months and 10 days too long to be precise. Not really done much since then to be honest with you, took some time off (where I didn't do a lot because I tripped in a rabbit hole and damaged my ligaments in my ankle) before coming home from university and started a summer job in the local college as a research student which I am a few weeks into by now. My project involves playing with batteries and generally messing around with electronics, although I do spend a lot of time on the internet "researching" (facebook and other hacking websites to be precise).

The project which I have been set involves playing with batteries, as previously mentioned. To elaborate on this I have to design a system which someone can connect batteries to to read the charge/discharge curves (voltage against time) and compare them with a brand new battery to see if they are recyclable after a few years usage or whether they are basically dead to the world and no use can be found for them. The batteries which I am looking at are the batteries from safety lights; the ones that turn on when power to the mains lights goes off. By law these need to be changed every 5 years in a publicly used building and cost a fortune to replace. Sadly this cant be overcome, but if I can find a way to recycle them then they will save money elsewhere by not discarding the batteries.

So yeah, basically what I've been doing over the past few months, more news on the project and pictures to follow when i update.