This month I expected that my blog will see very low page hits. Actually every summer in the last two years page hits were low. And this summer there were also world soccer championships. Something that I expected to drive down numbers even lower.
Do not worry – Germany won the Championships – so I am not going to complain 🙂
However for some reasons that I do not understand the contrary happened. I got significantly increased hit rates – which of course I like a lot. Seems more people are getting interested in my stuff.
Most notably I got very increased hit rates from Italy. Also the Power Grid Monitor was drawing a lot of attention. More than the all time favourite experiment LED Camera. If anyone could explain the sudden rise of attention from Italy and the increased interest in the Power Grid Monitor I would be very pleased to learn about this.
Also I got a lot of feedback for my DCF project. Ian Castleton from Great Britain found some issue with my 1 kHz generator for the DCF77 library. I was setting up timer 2 with some undefined mode which worked anyway by pure chance. Now I am using only officialy documented timer modes. Of course the github repository is already up to date. What I learned from Ian is that DCF77 is pretty popular in GB but they have to deal with really poor signal quality due to the large distance to DCF77. Just like Brett Oliver he also found that my library deals with this issue very well. He even sent me some logs of the signals he received. He gets a really crappy signal but still not even close to the limits for my library. Ian also solved my long standing question at Stackoverflow. He hinted me to the document Performance Analysis and
Receiver Architectures of DCF77 Radio-Controlled Clocks by Peter Engeler. Without knowing that I was searching for such an article for a long time he provided me with exactly what I wanted. A big thank you to Ian for this.
The highlight for this month was that a colleague got hold of a 3D printer. Of course I immediately designed some enclosures for my Blinkenlighty. I am very pleased with the results.
Blinkenlight 