Computers & electronics
Early in my career I was tasked with designing and programming
a data acquisition system for the company I was working for. I taught myself
assembly language programming and successfully designed and programmed the
Tricon system. The lessons learned have led me to becoming an embedded systems
designer/programmer with the Microchip PICMicro
controllers. I am listed on their website as a consultant
under Genesis One..
A long standing custom in many churches was the lighting of candles. Insurance
companies have curtailed this custom for fire safety reasons. Electric
votive stands using flickering filament bulbs have been used for several
years to fill the need. These stands are usually manually operated buy
pressing of a switch to light a "candle".
The electric votives have several shortcomings:
1.The experience is not the same as lighting a real candle.
2.The bulbs must be covered by a decorative globe to look
like a candle.
3.The bulbs are expensive to operate and have a limited
life.
4.The "candles" must be turned off by someone.
The Genesis One MicroVotive was my answer
to the problem.
1.A patent pending flame simulation allows direct viewing
of the candles.
2.The LED bulbs are all solid state with expected lifetimes
of over 20,000 hours.
3.A stand with 96 candles uses only 25 watts of electricity,
verses nearly 700 watts for an equivalent flicker bulb unit.
4.A patent pending flame flickering system gives pseudo
random flame flickering that is very realistic.
5.Candles are lit using a lighting wand that is placed
over the candle to light, the candles burst into "flame", and a computer
stores the lighting time in nonvolatile memory. After the time has transpired,
the candle goes out automatically.
Another
Microcontroller project was a smart dolly for keeping the top of a stack of
paper at a fixed height to prevent back problems in the operator. I designed the
circuits and wrote the code.
Contact me: genesis1@snet.net