Reinventing the Mallet

I've been making scrap wood mallets for a couple weeks now and I can't stop. For one thing I do like them as a tool; multi-purpose, perfect for knocking things that a hammer would damage or require careful aim for. But also they are simple to make, yet require enough forethought to meet some basic requirements; that the head not fly off, that it satisfy size and proportion constraints, that it not split apart. There are many videos on how to make an awesome mallet and I did watch them. But obtaining just the right heft by filling inner pockets with BBs or creating interlocking parts with dowels is not what I'm after.

Raspberry Pi As Media Server

I'm mounting my media hard drive containing music, photos, and file backups to my Raspberry Pi 3 B+. I'm putting some resources here to remember how I set it up and some leads to fix a bug I'm experiencing, namely that the Raspi won't encode accented characters and replaces them with question marks, so iTunes can't find the files for those songs or the artist folder in the library.

Makerspace Project: LED Side-lit Acrylic Signs

One of my favorite projects over the last couple years to do in our maker-space classroom is side-lit acrylic signs. The project has evolved a bit as I have improved the design of the signs and workflow for students and it is now in a place I really like. 

Use Scratch to Make Interactive History Timelines

An 8th grade history teacher I work with wanted his students to make their own timelines of world historical events as a way of tying events together over great spans of time and constructing their own trends. It took a while to find the right software platform because I didn't think Scratch would be capable of representing such a dense amount of visual and text information. He also wanted them to use a slider as a tool to navigate through the information and I thought that would be hard in Scratch. But after playing with it I found it was absolutely possible.

Learning With Mycelium, Packaging of the Future

Corinne Takara and Chris Sweeney are exploring opportunities for learning with so many different materials and creative approaches, one of the most exciting of which for me is bio-fabrication with mycelium. I ordered a couple bags of hemp substrate from Grow Bio and followed the schedule and steps they recommend.

Timelapse Camera With Raspberry Pi

I thought I could make quick work of getting some timelapse footage around the house by connecting up a new Raspberry Pi 3 B+ with a v1.3 camera module I had. Being lazy and impatient I wanted to avoid writing a whole program for it in Python and just start captures by running raspistill commands in terminal with a headless setup.

Chinese Dice Program for the Sinobit

Here is a die rolling program for the Sino:bit.

Chinese Character Hex Bitmapper For Sino:bit

In an effort to help realize the goal of making the Sino:bit accessible to novice coders in non-Latin based languages here is an app that allows you to paste a Chinese character and get a char array representing a bitmap version of the character. The array can be uploaded and displayed on the Sino:bit with the Arduino IDE.

Hexadecimal Bitmap Codes for Sino:bit

The Sino:bit is a big LED matrix based on the Calliope mini and developed by Naomi Wu. It's also a lot more, with a bunch of sensors and accessible pins on the board, like the Calliope and the BBC Microbit. The matrix has 12 X 12 LEDs and is fun to make bitmap images for. I made a P5 app on Glitch for designing bitmaps and downloading the Arduino code to display it on the Sino:bit.

Milling PCBs: Tinkercad Circuits, Eagle, Carbide Copper, and Carvey

This workflow for designing and milling a single-sided PCB on the Carvey CNC is an updated workflow from that which I worked out last year when I first started doing this in my high school classroom/maker space. This workflow is much simpler, and allows my students to make their own simple PCBs in less time and with less frustration, while still giving them an experience of circuit design, PCB layout, and hardware integration to container design.