Wild Bees

I've enjoyed the wild bees this summer. One of the highlights of the summer was coming upon a nectar and pollen feast these black bees were having in a gentle winding ravine behind the Las Madres Pueblo on my dad's property. 

VFD Filament Driver Circuit

Don't give up! I spent the last 3 years troubleshooting this circuit with an LM4871 chip with the goal of supplying a low voltage alternating square wave current across the filament of vacuum fluorescent displays. Spoiler alert: it was the addition of a single 10Ω resistor to lower the voltage from ~5V down to ~3.3V.

Intro to Basic Python App with ChatGPT

I spent a couple days figuring out how to make a good basic app with Python to have a conversation with ChatGPT so that I can teach it to my high school students. There are some good resources for novice coders to engage with machine learning and ChatGPT with blocks coding (Micro:bit , Scratch, App Inventor) but I could find no clear resources on getting started with text coding that don't require some deeper understanding of programming concepts to get reasonable results.

Alligator Clips in the Classroom Tip

How do you keep alligator clips from getting tangled up? I thought of this a few years ago and will never go back to my bin of tangled wires. It's so simple!

Learning to Solder Technique

I've been teaching middle schoolers to solder for years but I only came up with this approach to the workflow this year and it has been a game changer.

Milling PCBs in the Classroom, Updated Workflow

I'm continuing to teach high schoolers to design their own circuit layouts and mill the boards so they can solder them together and have their own custom hardware to keep. The microcontroller I use for these is usually an ATTiny 85, 84, Adafruit Metro Mini, or Raspberry Pi Pico, all relatively inexpensive. What follows is an easier workflow than I've outlined in previous posts.

Make Gears With Turtle Art

 

You can code gears with Turtle Art! If you have a fabrication machine such as a 3D printer, laser cutter, or CNC machine you can download the SVG file from a Turtle Art design to fabricate in your material of choice. Here is how I made these gears—5 and 10 inch in diameter—with a Fox Alien CNC machine.

Mycelium Bluetooth Speaker

 

Someone gave me the electronics to a bluetooth speaker so I figured I had to make a mycelium case for it.

Backyard Inspiration

We have a small—18' x 19'—backyard that was shaded by a large maple until a year and a half ago when it had to come down due to a fungal condition. The yard was hard to do much with because of the shade but now with the increased sunlight we've been able to experiment more with gardening and other decorative planting. Last summer I discovered that grass takes way too much watering to maintain so I've been waiting for inspiration to strike to find an alternative. 

Making a Plastic Press

In another post I showed how to use a tortilla press to compress melted HDPE plastic in flat disks to use for making things. I made a bit more elaborate press to get bigger pieces while keeping them flat and as thin as possible, between 1/8 - 1/4 inch. The key ingredient is a bottle jack.