Disaster Comm Ohio

One of the main things that we want to track here are ongoing events affecting Ohio. One might say it's the main reason for this site, if not for EMCOMM itself.

It the beginning it will focus on major events since we don't have that many reporters. As membership grows and contributions come in, we'll be able to track and coordinate more.

This is an example project entry that directs the reader off-site.

Personally I'm a fan of the arduino platform. I do realize that it's a crutch and real-men us PIC or whatever. I've done simple things with PICAXE, but the turn-around time and approachability of the arduino is unmatched. Some may consider it a toy, but it's a fun toy, and with it I can quickly turn out a physical computing project.

Here is a simple technique using I2C to link two arduinos.

This is an example project where I might describe an experiment that I'm currently running at home.

A couple of years ago, I purchased a 12V deep-cycle battery to use in emergencies. I have a little inverter that I could hook up to it and maybe use it to power and appliance or something during the intermittent power outages we have here in the city.

I've added a new branch of tags to the site taxonomy. I want to see if a single Tags field is sufficient to capture both the article type and topics in the site or not. I've create a new article type of "Projects" which will be used to discuss DIY projects or hacks that are of interest to the community. I imagine that it would be used to draw attention to external links on sites like hackaday or instructables, or individuals' home pages that describe interesting projects. It could also be used to host an article that's completely internally-produced.

In the previous incarnation of DCO, I spent a lot of time getting the basic editor installed. In Drupal 7 a very capable editor is already installed, I may upgrade to a WYSIWYG-style of editor with buttons and such to make it easier on others to contribute content, but for now, this works fine.