June 2023 - "We're putting the band back together" Jake Elwood said it well when he talked about Angela Chang and I working together on a Hackster.io design contest.

Okay, so he wasn't talking about us, but almost a decade after we did the Luminous Firefly dress with Harry Umen, she was inspired to create a safety vest that, in addition to the standard reflectors and what-not, has lighted LED strips that are controlled by a microprocessor that watches for headlights, listens for vehicles, and yells "car!" when it sees one.

Okay, not that last part, but it does flash light patterns on the addressable LEDs and vibrate to tell you to be careful.

You can see the prototype on the lovely Eileen (I really need to find a screw for the base that holds her up so she stands up straight).

The freewatt is in the history books now

Dec 31, 2016 - The Climate Energy freewatt^® hasn't been available for new installations in a number of years, but unfortunately Yankee Scientific (half of the Climate Energy joint venture) has decided to begin closing down the support websites. That means the 'find my freewatt' feature of the iPhone app will stop working in a few months. Never fear though, the app will continue to talk to your freewatt if you have the IP of your house. We recommend that you sign up for a dynamic IP service like Dyn DNS and then use that in the app.

Also, Apple has gotten ornery about apps that haven't been updated in a while. We started a rebuild this fall and by the time we finished, Apple had pulled the plug and Yankee had announced the end of the official support.

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Coffee, tea or freewatt? Dec 18, 2010 - The freewatt® iPhone app is out in the app store and reasonably priced at free. We had a technical snag in the approval process which we thought might delay things a bit longer, but apparently not, so the release got out before the documentation was done. We'll have that here for download before the end of the week. In the meantime, all you need to do to get started with the app is to enter the URL of your freewatt in the form "http://173.94.33.104:8082 (where the '173.94.33.104' is the external IP address of your house [this example as actually Google.com] and the 8082 is the port set up in your freewatt. Put your admin password in the password box and hit 'Connect'. There's not much to it. If you don't know your house URL or it changes often, hit "I don't know my URL". Enter the serial number of your freewatt in the first field and your ZIP code in the second. Hit "Start Searching" and if your freewatt is properly registered, we'll look up the IP address of your house and fill in the address field for you. Pop in your password and "Connect". If you try this feature and it fails, send us an email and we'll make sure your registration is completed. Once you've connected, the data reported is pretty much the same as what you're used to from using your freewatt's web pages. Please let us know what we can do to make this app more useful or easier to use.

Eileen says that if you don't have a freewatt® then you're a dummy!* *(It should be noted that Eileen's head is hollow and made of plaster. Don't take what she says too seriously.)

We've been around since 1983 when a number of us at COLECO (yes, the Cabbage Path Kids & ADAM computer COLECO) decided that software for the IBM PC was all overpriced. In 1985, our first offerings were two products for the ADAM - "SPLAT", a full-featured Z-80 debugger and the "JKL Utilities", a full set of file management tools written by Joel Lagerquist. Perhaps you saw our ads in Family Computing. Or perhaps not.

These two applications were moderately well received by the ADAM developer's community and were followed by "ADAMasm", a companion macro assembler/text editor with an admittedly stupid name that that ran natively on the ADAM and gave you something to debug.

You also may have missed GACUT, a MS-DOS image editor for the graphics industry that provided high precision control over a film cutter that made printing masks and of course, the internal graphics library for Hindsight's Letterbug handwriting training system. If you missed these, you're not alone. [some of the graphics library resurfaced into the mid 1990s Penmanship KidPad (Internet Wayback copy)

After a brief hiatus (moving from CT to NH), we resurfaced in 1990 with Tom Thompson's Mac utility "DepthKey" which gave Macintosh users an easy way to switch their color monitors from color for image editing to black and white for word processing. That same year we also released the shareware DOS (INT 33) 'mouse' driver for the Nintendo Power Glove.

Then there was the USB Power Glove hardware interface, a Wintab driver for that, an assortment of custom hardware and software bits for folks who have more money than good sense, and now... The freewatt® iPhone app is out! Thanks to the hard work of Tom Thompson and the cooperation of the folks at Yankee Scientific, ECR International and Climate Energy, the ultimate control application for your freewatt® cogenerating heating system is now available for your iPhone. If you don't have a freewatt®, well, check out the freewatt website (an Internet Wayback copy) and learn more about this heating system which will make made any house green, and any green house even greenier. If you don't have a iPhone, Apple may have a few laying around somewhere. You'll want one if for no reason except to run this app.

When we have a chance we'll make this website a little more exciting.

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