Summer PD In Electronics

This summer I did some self-guided PD in basic electronics guided by my son's interest in learning about it. It has been a wonderful thing to do together, plus I've learned a ton. I probably would have covered what we did this summer in one week in Electronics 101 in college but the time has given us the opportunity to really let things sink in and follow up on our own questions. Here is the website that guided our experiments. This All About Circuits textbook written by Tony R. Kuphaldt explains things well but most importantly asks the learner to find their own resources for the experiments, which has been one of the most enlightening parts of the experience. Below I outline our activities and learnings, and some reflections.

Raspberry Pi Classroom Table Timelapse Documentation

After trying to document spring plant and tree growth with a Raspberry Pi timelapse setup I found the variation in lighting over long periods of time produced a lot of bad footage. But I figured using this in the classroom to do timelapse recordings of students working at the table could be useful and not face the same problem of changing lighting conditions. So I created a mashup of my old Replicator 2 3D printing monitor with the timelapse program that conveniently attaches to our hanging outlets and managed to bang out a pretty quick set up for this. I start the program by logging in to a headless Raspberry Pi Zero wifi and the pi waits for a button press to start snapping pictures at 5 second intervals for 15 minutes.