I recently decided to jump start an old hobby of mine: sewing. When I was about high school age I used to sew lots of things, generally by hand. I had learned how to use a sewing machine in school, but my mom didn’t like me using hers, so I generally did small projects only. I made some little velcro-closure sacks for my marble collection, lots of pillows and other stuff along those lines. I would frequently repair tears in clothes when I was in high school by hand, because I didn’t like clothes shopping and that was a way to avoid it.

It had been my goal for a few years now to learn how to make my own clothes. I decided this was the year and picked up a sewing machine for myself. It took a little bit of doing, but most things came back to me. But what does this have to do with electronics, or anything?

My solar power station sits underneath my kitchen table, and that’s where I set up my new sewing machine. “Should I try to run my sewing machine off the power station?” I actually ask this question a lot when I have some device in my house. It’s fun to be able to run full-size, useful things off of power you generated yourself.

The first question I have to ask is, “do I have enough power to run this device?” This question is generally pretty easy to answer. The inverter on my station converts the DC power from the battery to 120VAC that’s as good as (likely better than) regular household power. Inverters are rated for how much power they can deliver. Often they have two ratings that describe how much power they can supply continuously, and how much power they can supply in a quick burst. My inverter is rated for only 300 watts, and I have it set up to trip a breaker over about 200 watts. Most sewing machines are primarily electric motors (induction motors) and maybe a small LED light and digital display. This won’t approach 200 watts, so I’m safe.

The next thing I have to ask is, “what is the nature of the load being powered?” By this I’m distinguishing between different kinds of loads. There are two main loads you’ll encounter: resistive loads and inductive loads. Resistive loads are very straightforward and easy to understand and identify. Any device that uses electricity to create heat, either as a primary function or byproduct will be a resistive load. Inductive loads can be a little harder to identify, but generally anything with any kind of electromagnet will be an inductive load.

Clothing iron? Has a heating element, no moving parts, purely resistive load.

Desk fan? Has moving blades run by an electric motor. Some resistive heating in the motor coils, but primarily inductive.

Can you guess what kind of load my sewing machine is? Hopefully you said ‘inductive’. In my particular case, the type of load I’m running on my power station doesn’t matter, but there are plenty of cheaper inverters out there that can cause inductive loads to perform poorly, or even damage them. The reason for this is because cheaper inverters create something called a modified sine wave. Hopefully we remember that AC power alternates in the form of a sine wave. A true sine wave is perfectly smooth. A modified sine wave will look like little staircases going up and down ??approximating?? the shape of a sine wave, but not perfectly.

For a lot of equipment, a modified sine wave will be fine, but some things especially inductive loads, often depend on a clean sine wave. For something precise and expensive like my sewing machine, I’d never want to run it off a modified sine wave. Fortunately, because my inverter is a more premium pure sine wave inverter, I don’t have to worry. Plus the best part is that I get to say I made my first shirt off of 100% solar power!

The big annual craft fair is this weekend here in Key West. Grace and I always go and look but have never bought anything. Maybe this year.

My little Olde English Bulldogge, Jezebel, is growing up fast. I had a dog trainer come over to give us some tips. The guy was HUGE, no wonder the dogs listen to him. He did have some good ideas and step by step Jezebel is getting to be a good dog. Now, if she would just stop waking me up every day at 3:30AM to go outside.

I am having fun with all this home automation stuff and I will be changing out my thermostat and locks for HomeKit gear so I can get some first-hand experience. Some of my hippy friends laugh at me for all the automation but I like using technology and it is very nice to know that you can set up “scenes” so you can tell Siri you are going to bed and the lights get turned off, the door is locked and the thermostat is turned down.

Thank you for reading this issue of Kibbles & Bytes!

Your Kibbles & Bytes Team,

Don, Emily & Hadley

I continue to play around with home automation products. As I’ve mentioned in a previous article, it’s ok to take baby steps into home automation. I’ve been slowly adding devices in my home and started with installing outlets around my home that I can use with home kit. I’m not sure yet if any of these smart outlets will help to reduce my energy usage in a significant way, but it sure makes me feel better to know my kids are really turning off the lights.

Over the past week I’ve installed and have been playing around with the Elgato Eve wireless weather sensors. Both units measure temperature and humidity. The room sensor adds air quality and the outdoor sensor measures air pressure. Setting these sensors up is quick and easy. Simply download the free app from the app store, sync them to your phone by verifying a serial number and you’re ready to go!

The Eve “**wireless weather sensor**”:http://www.smalldog.com/product/88351/elgato-eve-weather-wireless-outdoor-sensor installed quickly outside. The sensor reports the temperature, humidity and air pressure with what I would consider fairly high accuracy. I did initially set up the unit inside and one observation on the negative is it took quit some time to accurately report on the outside temperature. It’s also important to note that it’s only water resistant, so you’ll want to install it in a location outside where it’s out of direct contact with the elements. I set up the Eve “**room**”:http://www.smalldog.com/product/88350/elgato-eve-room-wireless-indoor-sensor in my bedroom. I have some allergies and wondered if I would notice a difference in some of my symptoms based on its air quality readings and humidity. I’ve been making a greater effort to let fresh air circulate through my room, a challenge sometimes in Vermont winters. I have noticed my breathing is better since being able to monitor the air quality closer.

Aside from the ability to simply better monitor weather conditions via HomeKit from anywhere, the eve app itself provides you with accumulative data. I can look for example and see what my average room humidity has been over the last week specifically in my room. To see this more detailed information you do need to use the even app. HomeKit cannot provided the details maps and statistics, but the benefit of HomeKit is I can see everything at a glance.

I cannot begin to tell you how many times I have been helping a customer with a new Mac or a troublesome Mac and the customer cannot remember their password. They start rummaging through sticky notes, old postcards or well-organized notebooks. I was at a customer’s home yesterday and needed to set up her email and iCloud account. I asked for the administrator password for her Mac and she went to a little pile of sticky notes and tried to find the right one and the scene was repeated for each password we needed. I then proceeded to show her Keychain Access and I could see the light bulb hovering above her head as she understood the value of this app from Apple.

Mac OS X supports what are known as keychains: secure storage lockers for certificates, passwords, or any small bits of information to be kept private. The primary purpose of a keychain is to remember passwords for various applications and accounts such as mail and ftp servers, web sites, or encrypted disk images. The basic idea is that a single password, the keychain password, is used to unlock access to all passwords stored in that keychain.

I keep Keychain Access in my dock and use it all the time to find passwords, banking information, or secure notes. To find Keychain Access you follow this path: Finder > Applications > Utilities > Keychain Access. I do recommend that once you find it that you drag it to your dock, because once you start using it, you will wonder how you ever lived without it.

p{text-align: center;}. !http://blog.smalldog.com/images/4969.png!

With the advent of iCloud and OS X 10.9 Mavericks, Apple made Keychain even more valuable as iCloud Keychain lets you share your Keychain in the iCloud so you can access it from all of your devices. I wish there was an app like Keychain Access on your iOS devices but still, it is awful handy to have your device automatically remember your password for websites, etc.

When you launch Keychain Access you will see that the window is divided into three panes. The top-left pane lists keychains accessible to you. Below this is the Category pane. Here you can choose to view specific kinds of things stored in the keychain: passwords, secure notes, certificates associated with your account, encryption keys, and certificates used by your Mac. The largest pane, to the right, displays the contents of selected category items–for example, all of the items that have a password associated with them. Except in the case of certificates, you can double-click on one of these items to open a window where you can view the item’s attributes: name, kind, associated account, location (a website or network address), as well as its access control.

Keychain Access can do a lot of useful things. For example, if you’ve forgotten a password and would like to recover it, Keychain Access is the place to go. To learn the identity of a password, select All Items or Passwords in the Category pane, then find the the item you want the password for and double-click it. In the resulting window, enable the Show Password option. You will be prompted for the password for the login keychain which is either your login password or the administrator password (which will be the same if you are an admin user on your machine). Enter that and click Allow, and the password will be revealed in the Password field.

I have just scratched the surface of this great utility, perhaps we will go into some more technical detail in our sister eNewsletter, Tech Tails or in a future issue of Kibbles & Bytes. But if you are not using Keychain to its full potential, I suggest dragging it to your dock and checking it out!