While Esther is now old enough to pilot the cars
I’ve gotten sucked into the world of foam planes. The first 2 attempts did not go well…
RC Adventures
Transparent Plotting
Alas, the Sun is nowhere to be seen these days so I didn’t yet see it projected on the blinds.
Edit: finally got some Sun
Diurnal Porcupine
It’s rare to run into these guys during the day. Robin found it, kept it company, and brought us to it. The porcupine wasn’t too happy about the commotion and hid under a covered tractor implement.
Protected: Spring
Transparency
I’ve been playing with sharpies on transparent paper. I’d like to make some sort of layered color deconstructible portrait with a sheet for each color overlapping each other. I failed today because of an alignment issue, but I stuck the black layer on a window. It’s very discreet and barely visible in the room, and once you notice it’s enough to see who’s on the portrait. I thought the kids might notice and would get a kick out of it.
Later the sun hit our faces so we lowered the window blind, and it hit me what this whole transparency thing was going to be all about. The reverse projection really makes it pop out. With color layers it’ll be amazing. I like the idea of something that’s barely there most of the time and pops out only with a particular alignment of the Sun.
Mindstorms Plotter
Robin built a very cool Lego Mindstorms based plotter. I’ve seen him run into issues similar to what I ran into, and solve them. I’ll sometimes attach a monetary prize to some of his Mindstorms projects. Once he’s scratched the itch and wants to move on, but I know a lot of challenges occur not just making a robot work, but making it work well.
For a while there was $5 on making a drawing machine that drew something beyond a basic shape, it didn’t have to be much, just had to be something that proved the machine’s worth. And he’s earned it with this:
He didn’t write the software that turns text into lines, but there were plenty of mechanical challenges to getting the machine consistent enough to make this. Overall I’m blown away by the quality of today’s Mindstorms. Seeing him build his machine reminded me I had this set growing up:
Might have planted some seeds.
In the meantime I’m testing a 10′ deployment, a drawing machine so big one needs a ladder to get to the top. I haven’t ran it yet, but I know there will be new issues arising from the scale. Even just setting the paper is challenging.
Protected: Practicing her Balance
Tools of Observation
I lost the solar monitoring for a few days. While I do have a backup for everything that gets us electricity, I don’t have a backup of the monitoring system. And I’ve gotten real used to watching these graphs. It’s very much second nature these days, much like keeping an eye on the weather to adjust your day.
On top of this, I have scripts that will turn on and off the inverter based on that monitoring data. It makes my life easier for automation to keep watch and make decisions. And so for a few days, I was flying blind. Well not entirely, I still had the one voltage indicator with busted segments.
And really it’s not too bad, I’m so much better today at knowing where things are and where’s they’re headed with just that information. But I still missed the automated decision making.
Anyway, this Phidget part is busted, and it took a few days to get another one from Canada.
I might have to get an extra for backup, but they’re pretty pricey. The previous one lasted 7 years, and died for no particular reason, having gathered 16,719,281 data points. It’s a bit of a shame, and my readings are a bit off now, I’ll likely have to recalibrate the sensors.