I think Scott Brown is desperate to find some way to divert attention from his voting record. He continues to be a team player for the Republicans, always voting the way he is told. He consistently votes the way Wall Street wants and he continues to support huge subsidies for oil companies at a time when we are all feeling the pinch at the pump. He continues to believe that, as long as he takes care of his rich buddies, the money they give him will be enough to ensure that he is re-elected. I hope we prove him wrong.

I expect we’ll see more such attacks by Brown and his allies. You’d think, though, that since he’s been in office for a while now, that he’d be able to run on his voting record instead of taking sad little pot shots at Warren. I guess even he’s ashamed of it if he’s trying to stir up controversy.

If you get a chance, go see Elizabeth Warren talk at one of her events. They ask for donations, but I don’t think you’ll be turned away if you tell them you just want to hear what she has to say. Perhaps afterword, you’ll be inclined to support her.

You’d think it would be a no-brainer. Seventy percent of Americans supported this simple bit of legislation that would restore a little bit of fairness to the tax system. Why would politicians vote against such a popular bill? Shouldn’t they be afraid that they’d be voted out of office?

Nope, they aren’t afraid. In fact, they are working hard on taking away the voting rights of the groups they’re sure will vote against them, like the working poor, young men and women voting for the first time, anyone ever convicted of a crime, and anyone working for a living. All across the country, state legislatures, controlled by Republicans, have been making it harder for people to register to vote. They know that their party almost always does better when fewer people go to the polls. So it is in their interest to make it as hard as possible for people to vote. And, of course, they aren’t stupid, so they’ll concentrate on those likely to vote Democratic.

Republicans also know another important fact, that money gets votes. Advertising and marketing sell crappy products to people all the time, and selling bad politicians is a business that’s been booming since our democracy began. So, the last thing they’ll do is vote for a bill that would increase the taxes on the biggest donors to the Republican party, the wealthy.

If you think this is wrong, do something about it. Get involved. Make sure you vote, no matter what.

It is kind of frightening how far to the right the Court has moved. Apparently, many of these justices stopped reading the Constitution after the 2nd Amendment. Over the past 30 years police have been granted powers that could easily be abused. While we haven’t heard of widespread abuse of these powers, history has shown, repeatedly, how quickly that can change. You may now be arrested simply for refusing to identify yourself. After arrest, you can be strip searched, no matter how insignificant the crime. When you talk to the District Attorney, he or she can threaten you with life in prison if you refuse to make a deal. This little trick has put hundreds, if not thousands, of innocent people in jail. Then, once you’ve served your time, you can be denied employment, housing, and the right to vote. Even worse, if you are declared a terrorist by the Executive branch of our government, you can be imprisoned indefinitely. (The law says you can only be imprisoned until the end of hostilities, but how do you figure out when a ‘War on Terror’ is over?)

These kinds of changes to our system are dangerous, not just because of the powers they grant to the police, but because they call into question the social contract that is the basis for our system of justice. As a nation, we have always believed that it is better to let a guilty man go free than it is to imprison a free man unjustly. This was written into our constitution because we fought for our independence from exactly such oppression: searches, arrests, and imprisonment without due process.

Much of what has been done makes no sense. The Justices act as if the country is under siege and we are being attacked at every turn. While there are people who are trying to hurt America, and while every life lost fighting our enemies is a tragedy, in terms of actual numbers, more people die because of drunk driving than because of terrorist attacks. You are more likely to come into contact with the police than a terrorist. You should not be treated like an enemy of the state when you are pulled over for speeding.

What worries me the most is that it no longer seems like the justices on the Supreme Court are acting in the best interest of the country. I used to understand the decisions they made, even when I disagreed with them. That changed when Chief Justice Rehnquist chose to appoint George W. Bush the winner of the 2000 election, despite the fact that the vote showed that Al Gore actually won. I now believe that at least four of the justices are more concerned with having their team win than what effect their decisions have on our country.

It’s my hope that Barak Obama is re-elected and gets the opportunity to appoint more judges. If so, I hope he chooses wisely and selects jurists based on ability and not a political litmus test. If any branch of government needs to be non-partisan, it’s the Supreme Court.

I’ve liked what Elizabeth Warren has been saying for a long time, and I hoped I’d get a chance to look her in the eye and see if I still believed her. I didn’t exactly get a chance to sit down and chat with her, but she did greet me and shake my hand. She struck me as someone very committed to her goals.

If you’ve read much about her, you know that Elizabeth Warren is all about fighting for the Middle Class. She grew up in a middle class family and knows how hard it can be, especially if someone gets sick. She knows what it’s like to hold on to your home by the skin of your teeth.

In her speech, she points out that, as a response to the Great Depression, America made some very courageous and forward thinking decisions. We passed some very good banking laws that stopped the boom and bust cycle. Laws that would have prevented the fiasco that led to our current financial straights. We also decided to make serious commitments to our infrastructure, public education, and to basic research. She also points out that over the last 30 years, we’ve changed direction. We’ve become a nation of people who say “I’ve got mine, you’re on your own.”

The reception was held at the Boston Teachers Union in Dorcester, where Warren was warmly welcomed. Warren told us that she’s a teacher at heart. She taught special needs kids and after getting a law degree and running her own practice for a while, she went back to teaching, this time at college.

I’m still happy with what she’s saying. I hope she wins the Senate seat. I think she’ll be a breath of fresh air in Washington, and I believe her when she says she’ll work just as hard to change things in Washington as she will to get elected.

For the LCD display I’m using, the GDM1602K from Xiamen Ocular, you need provide a Contrast Adjustment voltage on pin 3. In the data sheet, they show a trimmer with a range from 10k to 20k with the wiper going to V0, pin 3. Of course, manufacturers don’t make 10k – 20k trimmers, what you do is use a 10k resister and a 10k trimmer to produce the desired effect. Essentially, the 10k resistor and the trimmer create a voltage divider that limits the V0 voltage to values from zero to 2.5V.

When I designed the board, I erroneously put the resistor on the ground side, which meant that V0 was between 2.5 and 5V, not exactly what I had in mind.

I eventually spotted the problem, but before I was going to make more mods to my board, I wanted to test my ideas to be sure. (I’m still new at this stuff, but it strikes me that you should always test your fixes before implementing them, if possible.)

I stuck the LCD display on a breadboard, then wired it up to the PCB using all the lines except for the contrast adjustment. First, I rigged it up as it was on the board, to confirm the problem. Then I rigged up the proposed fix, moving the resistor to the correct location. That worked!

Next I had to figure out how to modify the board. The resistor that I’d misplaced was in an inconvenient location. A more experienced hacker might have removed it, but I decided my best bet was to just jumper over it. I used some pre-tinned bus wire which is great for this kind of thing. I worked one end under the lead on one side of the resistor, and the other end under the other lead, looped them a couple of times and tightened, then soldered. Next, I cut the trace that led from the positive power supply to the trimmer and made sure the gap was wide enough it wouldn’t easily bridge. Then I scraped the green masking off the powered end of the break to provide a place where I could solder the new 10k resistor. I soldered the new resistor to the makeshift pad and to the leg of the 10k trimmer.

After the solder cooled, it was time for a test. I plugged everything back together and tried it and … it didn’t work. I still couldn’t see text on the display. I was not happy.

Today I took it up again and checked everything I could check, resistances and such, with the device off. Then I checked voltages with the board powered. That gave me some bizarre results. I found that there was still 10k worth of resistance between the bottom leg of the trimmer and ground. Something had to be wrong somewhere.

I went back to my test fixture and verified all the voltages and resistances with the LCD working correctly. No sign of the mysterious 10k.

Most of you with any experience have already deduced that I had a bad solder joint somewhere. They can be very difficult to track down. I wouldn’t have done it nearly as quickly without the help of my friend Marco who coached me over the phone.

It turned out that I never really soldered one end of the jumper that bypassed the 10k resistor that was in the wrong place, between the trimmer and ground. It only took a couple of minutes to fix once I’d found it.

Now I’m about half-way through debugging my board. Next step is the GPS chip.

Well, it has been a learning experience. I actually had most of the project working in about two months, but it was fragile. I had soldered wires directly to the LCD display module, and they kept breaking off. Plus, the switch was a bit too big, it stuck too far into the box, limiting what you could put inside. Not only that, but the first display module I ordered was the wrong voltage, 5V, rather than the 3.3V I was running the system on.

That’s when I decided to create a PCB. I spent the next couple of months learning about how to create a proper design, ordering new parts, and double checking things. I finally got the schematic into the software correctly, used that to generate a PCB that I tweaked based on advice from friends, and sent the board off to PCBBatch.com, a spin-off of Sparkfun.com that prints boards for $10 plus a fee per square inch. (It’s really a good deal.)

Today I got the two boards I ordered. I figured if I had two, if I screwed up on one, I wouldn’t have to reorder boards and wait another six weeks. (That’s the big drawback of PCBBatch, they are not fast.)

Alas, I messed up on the specification of one of the daughter boards that plugs into my main circuit board. The daughter board contains the switching logic that turns on the box and allows the box to shut itself off to conserve battery power. I specified the daughter board as being 0.1 inches wider than it really is, so the holes for the pins on one side, are 0.1 inches too far away.

I think I have a solution. I’m going to put the daughter board on a piece of perf board that a bit wider, add pins to that board, and wire the new pins to the ones on daughter board that extend through the perf board. With any luck, my kludge should allow me to use the flawed boards. I just hope I don’t find any other mistakes.

I’m keeping my fingers crossed. I’ve made a couple of design changes since I first bread boarded this whole thing. I’ve even decided to go back to 5V since a new Arduino clone came out that includes USB. (That allows me to get rid of another daughter board.)

For those who don’t know, a reverse geocaching box the clever invention of Mikal Hart. It contains an Arduino, a GPS chip, a LCD display, a big button, and a servo. The box is pre-programmed with a destination. When you get the box, it’s locked. If you press the button, the display will light up and say “Not authorized!” and then “Distance: xxx.xx km.” Your job, as the box recipient, is to get to the location where the box opens. To make it a bit harder, the programmer can limit the number of tries you get. If you don’t find the spot before you use up all your tries, you won’t be able to open the box.

You can find out more at: http://arduiniana.org/projects/the-reverse-geo-cache-puzzle/

Clean air saves lives, reduces emergency room visits for asthma, and reduces the number of sick days taken by workers. It isn’t hard to weigh the pros and cons and figure out that the minor increase in costs to the power companies is more than made up by the savings in lives and healthcare dollars.

But then Inhofe isn’t exactly the kind of guy who is swayed by data or statistics. He still seems to believe that global warming is a hoax. I guess he hasn’t watched the weather channel lately. The energy being added to the atmosphere is showing up in more severe weather, including more frequent and more severe tornadoes. You’d think he’d be sensitive to that, considering Oklahoma is in part of Tornado Alley.

It’s a shame, because there are plenty of things we should be concerned about in this election. While I support Obama, I disagree with some of the actions his administration has taken and I wish we were talking about those, not the paranoid fantasies the Right keeps concocting.

I disagree with recent statements made by Eric Holder that “due process does not necessarily mean judicial process.” He made these remarks while explaining when the administration feels it’s okay to kill Americans abroad using drones. According to him, it’s okay as long as the target is a terrorist, and it’s the administration that gets to decide if the target is a terrorist.

I’m also upset that Obama still hasn’t figured out that working with the same advisers that helped get Glass-Steele repealed is a bad idea.

This is the time to be talking about those decisions and expressing our displeasure. That’s something we could do if we had a viable Republican candidate that wasn’t so encumbered by irrational commitments to the far Right. I suspect no one in the Republican field of candidates, other than Ron Paul, has any problem with the expansion of executive branch powers represented by Eric Holder’s comments, and even Ron Paul seems to be convinced, in spite of all that has happened, that regulations are some kind of evil plot by the socialists.

Like I’ve said before, we need mature responsible people in government. Right now, we have a pretty good President, but I believe he’s being pushed in the wrong direction by his concerns over re-election. I hope President Obama is wise enough to realize that there is no way he’ll ever be able to win over the ultra-conservative Right and that furthering their agenda of dismantling our civil rights is no way to strengthen support in his own base.

I’m hoping that President Obama wins in November and that the Republican Party finally sees that its extremist views are moving it farther and farther away from mainstream Americans. You can only persuade people to vote against their own interests for so long before they begin to catch on. Perhaps then we’ll see some moderation creep into the Republican party. I also hope a new centrist political party grows up out of the Occupy Movement, maybe even more than one. It’s long past time for this country to have better choices than we’ve been getting with our two party system, and perhaps then we’ll start having the kinds of sober discussions around election time that the most powerful nation on the planets should have.

I suspect this is Rush’s way of “taking one for the team.” It’s not the first time he’s made nasty controversial remarks about innocent people, nor will it be the last. But the timing is very handy, because it takes the heat off Mitt Romney and the Republican party over the way they are pandering to the wealthiest Americans and ignoring the rest of us.

I just recently discovered that a report from the Internal Revenue Service which listed the actual percentage of tax paid by the 400 richest Americans, was made a state secret during the Bush administration. They knew people would wonder why the rich should continue to get more tax breaks when they are already paying less than those of us in the middle class. As it turns out, the wealthiest 400 Americans pay only about 16.6% of their income in taxes, while most Americans pay 20% or more.

While Rush Limbaugh should be repudiated for his remarks about Sandra Fluke, and for the many other insults he has cast at innocent people, we should not let his gross antics distract us from the real problems we face as a nation and the huge inequities that make it nearly impossible to get ahead if you are middle-class or lower, and make it almost certain you’ll prosper if you’re rich.

A pledge to never raise taxes, regardless of circumstances is about the most moronic thing I can think of. Logically, it also means you can’t ever give temporary tax breaks, unless your goals is to bankrupt the government, because you are never allowed to let the temporary tax break expire, that would be raising taxes. Oh dear!

No wonder we have record deficits, Republicans have refused to do what’s necessary to reduce them. All they offer are drastic cuts in programs that would slow or reverse our recovery. All in the name of party unity. It’s more important to them that their “team” win then that America prosper.

The fact is that the top marginal tax rate has historically hovered around 70%, going as high as 94% during WWII. (That was on income over 2.54M in 2011 dollars. There were 24 income brackets at the time.) The top marginal rate is now 35%, but because of tax shelters unavailable to most Americans, the wealthiest Americans pay about 16%, less than many middle class families. So this isn’t about trying to redress some deep injustice being done to the wealthy, it’s about the wealthy clamoring for more special treatment. It’s like going to dinner with your boss, where he orders the most expensive items on the menu, and then leaves you holding the check. (Oh, and the next morning you find out you’ve been laid off.)

Politics is the art of compromise, it requires mature people who are capable of making hard decisions, not children who take an arbitrary stand in order to make marketing their party easier.

So, grow up Republicans! Accept the responsibility for the mess you’ve made and work with the Democrats to fix it. Act like an adult.