It was the 1980's and the sky was the limit. The Internet was going to change the world . . . and it did. We were excited by all the possibilities, like a child on December 20th looking toward …
Ham radio is a hobby. It can be much more than that, but it goes well with a large dish of experimentation and learning. That's the biggest appeal to me.
Let one thing be perfectly clear: I am an old man.
I am past both the social and legal definition of retirement age. I still work full-time, and will continue to do so as long as they want me and I want …
Image: It all started here: a condenser fan motor.
When I was a child I rarely needed a good reason to do a thing. When asked why I had done a thing, quite often my first response was, "Uh, I dunno. Just …
Does this look like a project to you? It does to me.
It's one thing to read about recycling on the Internet, or to see kids shows promote the ideals of good stewardship of resources. It's another thing altogether to actually make something useful out of junk. I maintain the …
This month is the 3-year anniversary of the deployment of WeatherPi
When I built WeatherPi, I was trying for a robust, reliable, repairable Raspberry Pi based weather station. So far, it has lived up to every expectation.
WeatherPi has now lasted three times longer than either of two consecutive Accurite …
Some time ago, one of the GPIO pins on WeatherPi stopped working. It was the one the tipping bucket rain gauge was attached to. I was able to move the wire to another pin, and change my program. Problem solved.
When the rain gauge stopped working again, I assumed I …
If you have more than a hundred lines in your Python script, remembering where in the flow any particular print output comes from can cause you pause. I felt like having the line number from my code would help me more quickly and easily recognize the output.
I've printed a bunch of parts on the Prusa printer. But today (yesterday, actually) I printed the smallest functional part I've ever done. Roughly 7x7x5mm. Tiny thing.
The tiny thing is part of PoohPi.
PoohPi sits at my wife's desk and greets her every morning with statistics that will inform …
Here's another model in my project. It's a 2-row 16 character per row LCD screen with an i2c interface module attached. I'll be using this to display whatever I want on my portable project.
You may be wondering what the value of this is. The value is in fitting this …
When I build things using the Prusa 3D printer, I like to also create a model of the part I'm making brackets or enclosures for. That way I can see how the whole thing is going to fit together without making bad assumptions about how any particular part is going …
I like knowing what the temperature is in my back yard.
And the rainfall amount when it's raining. And the wind speed and direction. That's why I've had a weather station in my backyard for several years now.
We had two Accurite stations in two years. Both crapped out after …