Hello, the Garage

Here is the first project. It also happens to be the impetus for my starting this blog.
I decided to build a garage. We would like a garage. We could get by without a garage and actually have done so successfully for about 8 years so far, however, I came up with enough reasons to justify the large capital investment (not to mention the innumerable labor hours I would invest). I thought about listing a few of the reasons, but good grief, we live in Wisconsin... we want a garage!
Because I have had an interest in renewable energy since I was a little boy reading through old copies of Mother Earth News, and because I can't bear to "leave well-enough alone", the garage is going to be a test bed for passive and active solar climate control. Here at the beginning I'll state the goal. We will build a two car garage with workroom/storage on a  second level and it will be heated only by the heat of the sun. For many years I have admired the simple elegance of using the sun's energy to passively heat a structure. I also admire well built and cleverly designed mechanical things. In this project I will attempt to balance the two approaches. The method will be to build with a very modest budget, using traditional building methods (we'll talk about why in a later post),with a hearty nod toward low maintenance and simple systems.
Another inescapable thought I had early in the planning/thinking stage was Quantification! It seems that much of the solar field is grounded on anecdotal, subjective information. I want to be able to point to numbers and say to a doubter, "The system performed exactly this well in these certain circumstances." I also think it would be a great benefit to be able to point to a certain feature or system component and be able to say exactly how much improvement was gained for what cost.
After hours of searching on the internet and asking multiple people in the solar industry I realized there is a conspicuous lack of systems for quantifying the information I'm looking for. I did find a vibrant but tiny community of hackers/developers in the niches of weather stations and home automation. Weather stations are really good at quantifying the same sort of data that I need to collect and the home automation people have the numbers of sensors that I want to incorporate. I tend to over-research things and since I am interested in having a garage to park the snow blower in and work on my vintage motorcycles during the winter months, I committed to a hardware platform and proceeded.
Maxim Semiconductor's 1-Wire line of products wooed me with their simple data bus, range of sensors available and the relatively low cost of the sensors. I found a curious range of users of the 1-Wire products: from enterprise class fulfillment corporations datalogging the temperature of a pallet of product to home-brew beer guys wanting to know exactly what temp the wort is before they pitch the yeast. For my purposes, the relatively low cost of a few dollars per sensor will let me embed a number of sensors in the concrete, include ambient air temps in and out of the structure and measure insolation ("quantity" of sunlight).
I could go on and on but I think I may have already put a little too much detail into my introduction. In future posts I will go into specific practical processes, unresolved problems, and future experimental goals. I am hoping to include some slick interactive technology in the near future but that for the moment is under the "unresolved problems" category. I look forward to communicating and interacting with you as the project unfolds. Thanks for joining me here.
~swd