This view of my main work area shows my primary work bench illuminated.  There are two rows of lights.  The first is under the bench and consists of some bright LED strips.  The benches are typically illuminated by LED reels, but these are mostly for basic navigation.  When one needs to work far more light is required.  So these LED strips take care of that.  The second row of lighting comes from track lights which are focused on the edge of the bench.  This help cover areas not as well lite from the under bench lights.  The track lights are mostly 3 watt LED bulbs, with one 15 watt bulb right above my main work area. 

   This is a view covering a little over 90° of my work area stitched together.  I put it together while watching a bad action movie from the 1980s everyone says is pretty good.  There are about 7 photos in the one finial.  Getting the seams hidden was quite the task.  It is fairly easy to do on large low-detail areas like the floor.  But in the areas with more detail matching becomes tricky.  It gets especially tricky when objects are separated by distance as well because they move at different relative positions as one turns.  However, I've been stitching pictures together for some time so while it takes awhile this stitch was nothing new.

   My colored LED light bulbs arrived today and I retired the compact florescent bulbs that had been in all my fixtures.  The power draw was reduced from 13 watts/bulb to 5 watts/bulb.  In addition the LEDs have no warm up time.  This was most noticeable on my yellow bulbs although they all have a warm up period.  In the winter it is much more noticeable because the basement stays around 65° F (18° C).  The bulbs came direct from China and took a couple weeks to arrive, but the cost is about the same as I pay for the color CPF bulbs I can buy locally.  They do not dim, but that is not required for my main lights. 
 

This is an BeMicro MAX 10, an evaluation board equip with a Altera Max 10 FPGA. I have wanted to experiment with a Field-Programmable Gate Array (FPGA) for some time. These devices are like liquid logic in a chip—you can make them into a huge number of devices including CPUs. About a month ago I came across a project idea that was a perfect application for a Programmable Logic Device (PLD—and a FPGA is a type of PLD). The project is simple enough that I don't need a complicated device, but I figured I could get a good introduction into FPGAs if I were to use one on this project. After consulting with an electrical engineering coworker I started searching for devices. I found the BeMicro MAX 10 evaluation board had an FPGA far more powerful then I required but was a great price. So I could try my simple project on this board and expand when the project was over.

Unlike Arduinos and Raspberry Pi's, Arrow Electronics doesn't seem tailored to hobbyist. They wanted me to have an account on their web site and tell them about my company. Clearly not designed for people who want to tinker. The development tools form Altera were the same way.

   Steve gets a hug.

   An other angle of the free library.

   Can you figure out what it is?

   Amber doesn't seem amused.

   An other night of D&D.

   So this is a graph of the solar energy in the past 30 days.  As the chart shows the average power is 641.44 Wh/m²·day.  I was hoping for at least 770 Wh/m²·day and this lower energy amount means a lot more time running from external power.  The cloudy days during the winter are just too numerous.  About half the days were overcast and produced too little light to run the web server.  The battery would not have been able to survive the almost two weeks of overcast at the beginning of the graph.  When the sun is out there is usually around 1000 Wh/m²·day.
   This does not mean the web server cannot run.  Just that during the winter months it will run from external power more than I had hoped.  A larger battery and additional solar panels would solve this problem.  For now we are just noting the data.  The web server itself has a lot of work to be done.