Thoughts

In my last post,  Capacitive Touch Testing Platform , I experimented with soldering to aluminum. I had read about all kinds of tricks for such soldering: solder under oil, scratch the surface with a wire brush first, etc. I cheated and scratched the surface of the aluminum with the iron under a ball of solder. This post is just about the resistances of those joints, as well as some finishing touches on the CTTP.

I've been working on a project for a while now... about a year or more. Originally, I was going to call it SunJar, but that concept has already been developed and sold, and I intend to incorporate more functionality. And color. So it is going to be called MoodJar. Anyway, the last post I had on it was quite some time back, when I talked about solar cell characteristics . This post is going to be about the capacitve-touch I intend to incorporate.

The last time that I worked with Fourier Transformations was in Linear Analysis, nearly 3 years ago. Now I am taking a class in Mechanical Vibrations, and we are returning to this theory. The other week, while learning to use a spectral analyzer, we had to derive the first 3 Fourier coefficients for a sine wave, square wave, and triangle wave. All of that aside, after lab I played around with some fourier theory in Maxima. Maxima Maxima is a symbolic math program (similar to Mathematica) that I ran into last quarter in order to supplement Octave (Matlab equivalent). Like Octave (which does only numerical analysis) Maxima is completely free. I like the version of Maxima called wxMaxima , and I have that installed on Ubuntu. You can define an equation in maxima such as: s: a^2 + 7 = b*4 + a/3 Then you can solve for b in one step: solve(s,b) And it simply returns b = a^2/4 + a/12 + 7/4. You can do other cool things such as summation, integration, ...

For a while now, my Zune HD has been broken. I'll be working to fix it this summer. However, I'm beginning to question if my Zune HD FM Transmitter might have some usefulness in the meantime. I was driving to campus and I noticed that my Zune transmitter, even without a Zune plugged in, will transmit silence on whatever station it is set. Now, personally, I've never been a fan of either Zune or Mac products that only work with said branded mp3 players. It occurred to me that maybe I could "hack" my Zune transmitter to be able to play with any device. All I would need to do is hook up a 3.5 mm jack to whatever lines the transmitter uses for audio. Then I could have that protruding form the back with a wire or something so either head can still be used.