'indian summer' sounds so idyllic...

[adularia]

I wonder how many years I'll live here before I remember that biking in jeans in the summer is seriously ill-advised. Sad that the garment I thought of as consummately utilitarian is actually not the right thing at all

Comments

[randomdreams]

Web interface would be useful for turning it on 30 minutes before you get home. Fairly easy to implement the messy way: big relay in a box that the AC plugs into, to cycle the main power to the thing, and drive the relay via parallel or USB. The parallel version I've done. Sparkfun has a reasonable USB-16 pins of I/O breakout board that'd be just as good for driving the relay. Either can use a 2n2222 as the logic->power interface.

[randomdreams]

Oh and I was originally intending to say, yeah, jeans on bikes invariably sucks unless you can find some girly carpenter pants with no seams in the crotch.

[adularia]

Yeah, that was the original plan, and it's still worth doing from that angle and from the pure joy of having a Web 2.0 air conditioner. (I'd have to resist the temptation to do an AJAXy UI.)

Girly carpenter pants sounds like a win on several levels, since they tend to be made of light cotton twill that ordinarily fails the utilitarian part. I'm actually OK with jeans seaming in the crotch: soft undies plus (TMI!) an agreeable configuration of bits makes that work out. I've done the Lake Sammamish loop in jeans. It's just that denim gets sticky and gross and makes my legs feel like they're wrapped in sausage casings.

[randomdreams]

Here is the driver I use for parallel-to-220V, 30A. It's about the simplest setup I can imagine. It'd also work as the back-end to the sparkfun module. I haven't gotten good enough to DIY my own USB I/O yet, sorry. Anyway, I usually use an optoisolated front end for that, but I don't think it's necessary, and it's worked for 5 years for the spotwelder and a couple other projects. The relay's a Jameco #134949 and it'll run off anything from 3-12 volts; the circuit as shown works fine running off a 9V battery and accepting logic-level inputs via an optoisolator. I think if you run it direct, it'd probably need 5V through the relay, but you can get that from the USB line.

[corivax]

You should post your pictures of the sculpture.

[heinousbitca]

Also, I've shelved plans for the web interface to my air conditioner, on grounds that in practical terms you really only need two states: "on all the time so you can stand being at home" and "winter".

eh, there is the three weeks of fall and three to five weeks of spring, too. i know that four seasons, short though two of them are, is kind of confusing to someone from Seattle, but trust me, they're there. :)

[vixyish]

I don't think I could ever stand living in a place where you *need* a/c. :) I remember when loree and I were looking at apartments together up here, and the landlords would look at her funny every time she asked about it.