Birds

Chicken coop and run is just about done. We moved the birds out there on Saturday and they seem to be enjoying it quite a bit. It's twice the size of the box they were living in in our dining room.

Look at this handsome roo:

Broke out the OA torch and "forged" some brackets for the ramp from the coop to the run out of a bit of rebar. In the process of making these I broke a drill bit, but I was able to re-grind it myself and it still cuts great.

School

My advisor told me to take this week off and I am following her advice and trying not to work on much related to research or teaching or whatnot. Instead I'm trying to wrap up a handful of projects that have sat too long at the almost-done stage.

Ambitious Project

Not being content to merely finish stuff that I've already started, I have begun a new undertaking. Some friends of mine run a colo "business"/hobby and want to offer cheap Raspberry Pi colocation. You can buy "Compute Module" Pis that are pretty much the CPU + RAM + a few capacitors on a PCB that will fit in a DDR2 laptop RAM slot.

I have started drawing up schematics for a backplane that has everything else those compute modules need: USB, Ethernet, power, storage, etc. It'll be quite interesting -- doing Gigabit Ethernet trace layout requires a bit of EE black magic -- but hopefully the end result will be really cool. Right now we're guesstimating that we can fit somewhere around 150-200 Pis in 1U if we can manage to get power and heat to cooperate.