"Biomeiler" data logging

Since there are a lot of leave trees in my garden, every year in autumn it is a busy time to remove the leaves from the ways and meadows. I was thinking what else can be done with this amount bio mass, then simply let it rot. Depending on the sort leaves it may rot slowly and it can take several years until a leave becomes soil.
Once a day I stumbled across the concepts of Jean Pain, a french lumberjack and inventor. He did setup huge piles of shreddered branches and observed that inside this piles high temperatures are achieved. Within such a pile water can be heated up to 70°C,  this can be read on the internet.  The reason is, that the shreddered bio mass rots aerob, e.g. in the presence of oxygen. In the logical consequence Pain added a heat exchanger in the pile and so he could use the energy generated by the bacteria to heat his house and he also could produce methane - natural gas - to drive cooking stoves, cars and agricultural machines. Pain's work is documented in the book The methods of Jean Pain or another Kind of Garden (or as online version). B.t.w. the german word "Biomeiler" can be translated with "heating compost".

Dogorians wireless light fixtures run uracoli

The show Dogorians (http://www.dogora.com), a musical now (May 2013) playing at the Theatre du Soleil in France, needed some compact remote wireless light fixtures.

So, in conjunction with Daniel and Axel, we created some DMX driven remote nodes. This has been made in no time: 3 weeks from first draft to product delivery. We both created the software and hardware, for both the remote nodes and the gateway.

The on-field setup was easy: set the dip switch addresses, hook the gateway on the DMX light board, over !

DMX having a rather high transfer rate (250kbps), we had to use some low-level tricks such has writing straight from UART to TRX buffer (call it poor man's DMA :)).

We have future projects to make a full commercial product out of this first version.

At the moment, the code is not opened but feel free to ask for advice/snippets !

The boards ready to ship !

 The DMX to wireless gateway:

 Enclosures for the lights:

Close-up of a board:

Close-up of a boards, with JTAG programming wires:

uracoli "spotted" in the news

Le Monde, a major newspaper in France, published on December 31th, 2010, an article about a show (Vibrations, by Compagnie 14:20) I worked for, with a large picture of the juggler, Etienne Saglio. The juggle ball on the picture runs uracoli, and is one of 50 nodes used in the show. Happy new year uracoli !