On the 13th December 2011, Huntly power station lost its connection to the national grid. Huntly is a major contributer to New Zealand’s electricity supply, so naturally this was a significant event. At the time of writing, the connection still hasn’t been restored. Continue reading →

To help plan hiking trips, I’ve been looking for a list of all DOC facilities in New Zealand, available as a Google Maps or Google Earth overlay. After not finding quite what I was after, I did find Zenbu - an impressive database of almost any place you can think of.

After a bit of processing, I extracted everything related to DOC; from huts and campsites to visitor centres. The resulting KMZ file is here. Enjoy! Continue reading →

This article shows an op-amp based circuit to transform a high-voltage AC waveform into something that a micro-controller can measure directly. Continue reading →