Today’s post is going into a somewhat different direction. I was a tech-dad for our summer swim team, the Tracy Tritons, for maybe ten years now. My first extension was a little Ruby on Rails application to publish the meet information quickly to all the parents on a local WiFi network and on the internet.… Read More »
This post is way late:-( First I got stuck trying to find or build a Fritzing part for my TSL235R light sensor. I tried to build the part in FreeCAD but that died a couple of times on me, so I got frustrated:-( I constructed other things with FreeCAD and had no problems, but it… Read More »
The third sensor in my collection is the force sensor. The Vernier Dual-Range Force Sensor costs around $109. My version was < $20 in parts in addition to the Arduino. Yes, it’s not as nicely calibrated but you should be able to get it close. What is a force sensor really? A weight scale held… Read More »
Ok, it took a bit longer than expected. But here is my version of the Vernier CBR2. That sensor is basically a ultrasonic distance sensor. All the other data is calculated based on distance changes over time. I’m using the HC-SR04, which is a very cheap ultrasonic distance sensor. Depending on how long you want… Read More »
It’s this time of the year again and preparations for the regional Science Olympiads are speeding up. This year, I looked a bit at the four sensors/probes to be used in the “Technical Problem Solving” event. I’m just a parent, so I don’t have ready access to the official Vernier probes or software. But with… Read More »
OK, today was a little bit of a PHP day. I was wondering for a long time if I could get my chosen WP theme to work with the Infinite Scroll module of the Jetpack. I looked for a different theme a couple of times but I could not really find anything that I liked… Read More »
I’m trying to attend the monthly meetings of the HomeBrew Robotics Club since around this summer. They are quite fun when you’re interested in hobby robotics and can make it to the San Francisco Bay Area 😉 During one of my first meetings I learned about the tablebot challenge. That sounded like an interesting task… Read More »
Halloween is always a time for me to try different things. So I tried to take some photos and videos of this years displays. Unfortunately, it rained pretty much the whole time, so I had to water-proof the things and did not want to go back in there to fix things:-( But it looked that… Read More »
OK, I got a set of YubiKey‘s some time ago and I use one to supplement my Linux desktop login. But I wanted to lock my screen automatically when I remove my YubiKey-Nano. So I wrote a little Python daemon which is auto-started on login and watches for USB remove events. Once the USB-subsystem reports… Read More »
OK, so we saw and played a bit with the MaKey MaKey at the Bay Area Maker Faire and it’s a fun little piece to play with. I have a fifth-grade teacher in the family, so the plan is to enrich the class room a bit;-) I always want to look a bit behind… Read More »