My son is 5, Mindstorms are too complicated to investigate but… By hacking a wire straight to a battery, it’s easy to explain to him how to apply power to a motor. No indirection from the programming or the brick, simply energy applied to motors.
With this you can make a simple car:
It’s been great fun to watch him figure out how various gears work. Now for the project, we simply turned this car into a robot which climbs up a string.
Simply run the paper through a couple of interlocked gears, the result is way more fun than it should be.
This one is powered by induction (a motor with a handle is manually turned to generate electricity for the other motor).
We just got the test results from the well, we can drink it 🙂 This is huge for us. No more bottled water, almost a year in.
The first glass of water we drank and are still alive to talk about
Having a well is amazing and we are becoming quickly dependent on it. We use a lot more water because it’s easier to get. Watering the garden, longer showers, laundry, anything goes now 🙂
Surprisingly efficient way to do laundry, and so much better than wasting time and money at the laundromat
With the nice weather back and easier access to water, we’re enjoying luxurious showers.
When we had just moved in, I noted there were 3 things our household didn’t support:Â potable water, laundry and reliance on gas to power tools. The well allowed us to eliminate 2 of the 3, with the 3rd one still unlikely to go away anytime soon.
We tried to find them for weeks to no avail. Finally Matt was kind enough to show us the spot where he had found them on our land.
I’ll go take a look at the nest tomorrow, they’re most likely all out by now. Mama Robin is getting used to us and doesn’t fly away until we’re very close now.
They arrived a couple of week ago, found our feeder right away.
We bought a 2nd hand sacrificial lawnmower to drag over all the stumps left from the land reclamation. Bush hogging leaves them high enough to be very annoying so it’s time to accelerate the decomposing process. The lawnmower takes a beating in the process, I’m literally pulling it over 1″ to 2″ thick stumps as it jumps around.
They’re not raging but there’s brood and they’re happy.
