Rocket Car!

We’re in “Scouts”- As I was reviewing girl scout troops in our area, Amanda explained that she was in girl scouts for a while and lost interest pretty quick, and further relayed that boy scouts got to do cooler projects less focused on home economics & domestic pursuits. Fair enough- turns out the BSA accepts girls these days. Cool. She’s one of two in historic Troop 3. Sadly she was sick for…

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Airplane Barometer

PJ’s on the plane… it was a pre-dawn flight out. Here’s a fun little quickie I came up with while awaiting the big southwest adventure trip. Our first flight to Albequerque had a stopover in Chicago- while at the intial gate I came up with this plan for an improv science project (like we do). It’s cheap (or free), quick, easy, and educational. We used a clear plastic apple juice bottle, a clear…

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Kerbal Halloween Blastoff!

One of very few games we get to enjoy around here is Kerbal. It’s actually my wife’s fault as she bought the game for me before D was born. It’s a great way to lose track of time and build rockets (some just to see them explode, some to actually get to or beyond orbit) and it’s all based on real life physics/rocket science. It’s a really fun game if you’re into rockets but I digress.. Valentina…

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TIG-Cast recycled aluminum hat-stamp

We needed a hot-leather hat stamp, so we made one with a TIG welder & some scrap aluminum.

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DJI Mini2 Dropper mod

I love this mod for a number of reasons, chief among them is that its a bit of a triumph of coding for me personally, although I did cut & paste some of the value averaging this whole program was pretty much documented and written by me and; most incredibly it does just what I intended! yay! It’s actually been over 4 yrs since my intial extra-primative kinetic deployment of our elf on a shelf…

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Gallery

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Gravity Battery!

As an overview, D explains what’s going on with the conservation of energy below: In my grant pitch I cited a boulder or (water?) barrel as ballast, but here we’re using a little tin bucket with a billiard ball in it. I pulled a couple of dead AA batteries out of the trash to use as opposing ballast so that my drive cord will get some friction applied to it. I turned an acrylic pulley which is…

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Pneumatic Minnow

So this project followed an improvisational demo of buoyancy vs. pressure after noticing a “toy” pipette in a chemistry set D had received and weighing it down a bit with a coil of solder. I rememer a cereal toy tony the tiger that worked the same way except that you’d squeeze a plastic liter bottle to watch him drop and float. I always thought there was a missed opportuntiy there to observe the…

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Balloon Glider

Inspired by our previous, fairly epic failure, we decided to embark on a more dramatic failure since it will be a few years before we have the opporutnity to capture a total eclipse from the air again. This time around the thought/question was whether it might be possible to simplify down to a single all-in-1 android device and use it to perform all tasks including navigation to a target that it…

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Drelfie

Yesterday I happened across a link illustrating what is essentially a selfie stick attached to a motor (for the sake of the bearings only) attached to an external camera that is free to rotate around the drone . I thought the end result looked pretty cool so I duplicated it. There are a couple of ways to go about it, and I went with a counterbalanced rod with a central captured bearing. This was…

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DinoPiñata

This one is pretty standard and D does a pretty good job walking us thorough, so I’ll just leave it at that for now. Happy 5th Bday! Areeeba!

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Wyatt's Grand tour

Wyatt’s Grand tour

So, you may have noticed the last three updates are Wyatt projects. We’ve been having too much fun building lately to keep up with documenting too much. I mean we have the media but actually compiling it into a slightly informative and/or entertaining page takes a lot more effort. Anyway, in case it’s not obvious, Wyatt has Osteosarcoma- it damaged his leg bone and it was amputated. He finished…

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BikeCart

Wyatt's awesome new bicycle cart!

Wyatt’s bike cart was a rare unicorn of a project in that I had previously built up a similar but more beat up Schwinn trailer nearly identical to this one. Eventually it fell apart for various reasons but I pack-ratted the aluminum square tube frame into my junkyard wars crawlspace stockpile, and see? Here it is getting all used up again! Yay! Due to this amazing preparedness I managed to knock…

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BLE Beacon Dog Door

BLE Beacon Dog Door

This project has been through the wringer a few times and I ended up making it way harder than necessary, but the end result is decent. Starting with technology and basic goals: I wanted to have an upstairs dog door that was big enough for our Dogs, Wyatt- a 105lb golden retriever with 3 legs due to cancer, and a 14yr old lady dog Trouble with stiff joints and frequent trips out back. Problems…

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Wyatt's pull cart

Wyatt’s pull cart

Obviously this was a quickie but also probably more accessible for anyone else in a similar predicament. You don’t really need much other than a few small hand tool, some spacer material and a rigid platform of whatever length you or your pet prefer. To start with, just get one of those folding utility carts. Their pretty readily available and affordable, they’re just not long enough for a dog…

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Mad Eye Moody & Snitch

Mad Eye Moody & Snitch

Another consequence of housecleaning this week was rediscovery of the “Mad Eye” I made just prior to Delilah’s birth at Halloween 2016. Team Amanda & Delilah made a great “Golden Snitch” costume that fit right into the pregnancy. This particular halloween was woefully documented, so I’m putting a little extra effort into…

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It came from the 80's- Nitro conversion

It came from the 80’s- Nitro conversion

So I started this project by attempting to clean out the garage (an attempt still in progress). In one particularly exciting corner, I rediscovered a boxxed nitro car & parts that my friend and former coworker at Enventys had gifted me. I didn’t really get a full story at the time, I guess he was just getting out of the hobby, but he walked into my office with a box of transmitters, parts, and…

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