Painted Lady and Feeding Time

A Painted Lady spent ages feeding on my Lavender bushes.
It never stopped moving so I only managed a few record shots.





The first I have seen since the last big influx in 2009

I have many House Sparrow families around the building.
Here a fledgling was being fed.





As I lifted the lid of my green waste wheelie bin I spotted



a small black beetle which I managed to photograph before it ran away.
Size about 8mm and much shinier than the photo shows.
So far I have failed to identify it.

Juvenile Blue Tit

It was a pleasant surprise to see a juvenile Blue Tit visit the feeders this morning.



Temperature steadily rising out there. About 24C at the moment.
Cooler in here with the air conditioner running.

Spotted a Painted Lady in the front garden. First sighting of one for ten years.

The Singing Aerial

Sat on my 6 meter band halo aerial:



Sorry about the heavy breathing.
Forgot to stay away from the camera when not using a directional microphone.

Home From Home

Sort of ......
Last Friday, after another disastrous blood test which showed things had got worse again,  I was sent to A&E in Grimsby. This time I was pre booked to see the right department but still had a long wait in reception before things got going. The upshot was this was to be my 'home from home' for the past five days.





That was just the first port of call. Three different wards. Each ward with a different consultant. Blood tests by the dozen (at least it felt like that to my pincushion arms). After lots of fluids and yucky medication they got things stable in the end. I am back home and now have a fridge shelf holding meds to be injected three time a week until I receive an appointment with a kidney consultant at another hospital.

Nursing staff were first class and, believe it or not, so was the food.
 
Plenty of choice and everything I chose was perfectly cooked.

Penny had stayed at home and excellent neighbours frequently visited her and took her for walks.
She went bonkers when I arrive back this evening. I nearly got my skin licked off.

Gulls

It is quite rare to see gulls close up in the village.



Herring Gulls, I think, by the size and colouring, though silent so possibly Common Gulls.
I often see them soaring high over the village or following ploughs in nearby fields.
Yesterday two of them spent a few minutes flying around just above roof height and occasionally swooping down to ground level on the footpath just beyond my fence. Must have been something tasty there but I didn't see them fly off with anything.

Wednesday evening saw me having to visit A&E in Grimsby. Very high potassium levels again from the morning blood tests. The A&E department was overflowing with customers so not a fast process, but efficient once they got going. Total time from booking in to leaving was about four and a half hours so I didn't arrive back home until after midnight.  Lots of tests showed the potassium levels were already lower but this time the cause has been found - a side effect of one of the prescribed tablets I have been taking at night. A pity Louth hospital didn't spot that three months ago though to be fair Grimsby has a much larger hospital with specialists in a variety of departments. Maybe now we can get things back to normal with a change of medication.

Latest Arduino Project

It has been quite a long time since I last had a tinker with an Arduino project. The last one was a weather station with digital readout. That never reached its final stage. All was going well until the day I updated the Arduino IDE (the program used to program an Arduino). The update went badly wrong. It kept reporting errors and wouldn't recognise the instruction I had written previously.

Recently I decided to delete all the old IDE files and install the latest version from scratch. Then a new weather station project on the Instructables site caught my interest. It uses a 3.5 inch full colour TFT display to show the readings in graphical form. The display used is designed to fit on and use with an Arduino Mega. It has a resolution of 480 x 320 pixels.

I found one for sale on eBay direct from China for less than £8 which included postage. After 10 days it arrived. I also had to purchase the tiny unit which actually measures temperature, air pressure and works out the relative humidity. I already had an Arduino Mega.

The sensor module, sensor is the tiny metal box top right


As always there were other 'libraries' of instructions to install which enable access to the sensor and TFT display. It took a while to find the TFT library files but I discovered a set on the Rinky-Dink Electronics site. They installed and worked perfectly.

Once the program was installed and tested I made some alterations to the original. As well as the graph the most recent readings are now shown numerically just above the X axis. Also I had to alter the range of values on the Y axis to suit the possible range of local readings. At first I thought the pressure readings seemed to be far too high but checking on the Met Office site showed it to be within 1mbar. More accurate than my commercial weather station!



The display shows up to 36 hours of data (one new reading every 6 minutes) which makes it possible to see weather trends. The above was taken after a 26 hr test run with the unit in the conservatory. When the screen is full the graphs are scrolled from right to left by one pixel with each new reading. Maybe I will change the timing to every 8 minutes so as to display the trend over 48hrs.

Obviously to be of any use the detector needs to be outdoors in a suitable container. Ideally, once I've finished tinkering, I  will have a go at designing and 3D printing a suitable box to hold the Mega and TFT display.

I am so delighted with the possibilities of this colour display I have ordered another one  to experiment with. Screen refresh is slowish so not suitable for displaying video for example.

Having an Early Morning Paddle