I don't usually start laughing in the middle of the street, but on some occasions, I just have to do it.
On a normal day, my alarm wakes me up at 6:50am, I shower, go on the computer, have breakfast, and then around 8am I go outside to the bus stop. Around 8:25am I get to school and classes start at 9am.
Today my alarm sounded, I woke up, showered, and went on the computer. I checked my email quickly because I had to get breakfast and leave by the hour. The computer clock said something like 6:30am, I thought it must be wrong because of daylight savings or something. I checked my cell phone, and it said, 7:30am, so I proved the computer wrong and kept on going. When I got to the kitchen, nobody was there. I thought that was strange because everyday either my host mother or father are already up. I figured they were tired and slept in, so I made myself lunch for school and started making a simple breakfast. I heard an alarm in one of the rooms, but it was quickly turned off. Later, unfortunately, I dropped something and made a loud noise, my host dad jumped out of bed and came to the kitchen. He had a very confused look on his face, I assumed it was because he realized he had slept in. He helped me with breakfast and went to the bathroom or something like that. I brushed my teeth and left the house. This was about 8:10am according to my cell phone.
The day seemed strange, the sun wasn't as high as it usually was and the bus I got into was unusually crowded. After I switched to the second bus, I saw that it said 7:22 on it's display. I must have missed the 7 because it did not seem strange to me at all. Once I got off near the school, I started walking and looked at my watch; it was around 7:30. I thought, that's strange, I don't remember messing with it, I guess the battery is dying or something. Finally, after a million signs, it hit me. I remembered that I had been playing with the time zones on my cell phone last night and I must have made a mistake. I then started laughing. I realized how many things I missed, the computer clock, the sleeping family, the sun position, the crowded bus, the bus clock, etc... I then started imagining what my host family was going to think, I leave the house before I am supposed to even wake up, I don't say where I'm going, I was in a hurry. I sent an SMS to my host dad trying to explain in Russian what had just happened. Once I did that I realized I had an hour and a half before class started and nothing to do. I decided to walk around, but everything was closed. I ended up taking a nap in a bench in front of the school until it was time for class.
Class was normal, it ended a little early because we went to two convents outside of the city. The first one was very cool, it had it's silver domes and beautiful gardens. The inside was interesting, I had never been inside a working Russian Orthodox church, other than the ones in St. Petersburg, but those were full of tourists. In the same convent is the body of a famous Russian poet, I forgot his name as usual. I bought a chocolate bar from the shop the nuns run, it was very good. They also sell bottled holy water, which I thought was very interesting.
The second convent was not as interesting. The outside was amazing, it had decorated tiles on the outside of the church. They wanted to charge us to take pictures of the outside, and they didn't let us inside, so we left after a few minutes.
After that I took a bus home. When I got here, my host dad was waiting at the door, and as soon as I walked in, he told me to go in the kitchen and pointed at the clock. I just burst out laughing again, and so did the rest of the family. I'm glad they understood (at least I think they did, they were laughing...) and I didn't have to try and explain any further.
Tonight I will make sure my cell phone has the right time before I go to bed, and knowing me, I will keep doing that for a long time.
Opening the HP camera was more complicated than I expected. I had to remove about 15 screws, disconnect several ribbon-cables, and use more force than I am comfortable with with circuit boards. Eventually I got to the shutter button.
The shutter button has two different pressing modes. When you press the button down lightly, the camera focuses, and once you press it all the way down, it takes the picture. I used my multimeter to figure out which pins did what. I figured out that there one pin is connected to ground, the second to the focus trigger and the third to the shutter trigger.
Once I soldered some very thin wires to the button pins I spent some time putting the camera back together. I had to make a small hole in the top so the wires wouldn't be cut by the front cover.
Once I closed it, I soldered the wires to a 2.5mm female stereo connector. This is also used by the Canon DSLRs, so I figured it was a good idea to use it, since I'm planning to upgrade. I also used some heat-shrink tube to protect the tiny wires from breaking too easily.
After the camera was all set, I made a small circuit to trigger the camera. I used an MCT6 optocoupler from Fairchild Semiconductors to isolate the camera from the rest of the circuit. I then connected two button/switches that I found lying around, two resistors, and two LED's to show when each is enabled. The bottom cable assembly with three wires coming out is a 2.5mm male stereo jack that connects to the camera. The left red/white wires come from a homemade 5V power supply.
The full setup can be seen here. The circuit on the right is just a 5V regulator with some filtering capacitors I use for various projects.
