One of my goals for the IoT light sensor was to explore graphing live data. Phant, the Sparkfun service I’m using to post my data online, has an example of graphing live data with Google Charts. Since I know nothing about coding for the web save some outdated html and css knowledge, I used their example code as a template for what I wanted to … Continue reading IoT Light Sensor: There is Data!
I finished my second crocheted stuffed animal over Christmas for my newborn nephew. While I’m not convinced I made it more quickly than my last one, I definitely better estimated how long it would take. I ran out of grey yarn close to the end, hence the green ear and tail, but I’ve decided it’s all for the better. The head, again, is droopy. I … Continue reading A Crocheted Interlude
As I’ve mentioned, I’m working towards an electronic mural using Chibitronic circuit stickers and a Circuit Scribe pen. Today I prototyped the entire circuit on paper. The fun part was using the microcontroller circuit sticker–wicked easy. I used an Arduino UNO as a programmer (tutorial for setting up the board) and Arduino software to write my code. It took maybe 10 minutes to get up … Continue reading Electronic Mural: Charlieplexing with Paper Circuits
I was inspired by this blog post at Earl Grey, Hot to make a similar bracelet for my sister. I didn’t have much time to put it together, so it was an interesting test of how quickly I could get this short project done. (If you didn’t click the link, it’s a wooden bracelet, essentially.) I followed her lead and used a .dxf file from … Continue reading Wooden Flex Bracelet
I had an old Makerbot stepper motor with a worm shaft on it that I wanted to use to make a linear actuator. It looks like this: Worm shafts are typically meant to be coupled with gears and can give you good speed-reduction in little space. However, I really wanted to put a nut on it that could travel along the length of the shaft. … Continue reading Making Nuts for Worm Shafts
For my Power Electronics Lab, this week, we built the three-phase drive for an induction motor. Induction motors are pretty damn cool, and while I think they are the hardest motor to understand, they certainly have the most interesting torque speed curve. And induction motor is basically a series of coils that you run current through one by one. The coils are the stator, they … Continue reading Induction Motor
I’ve been wanting to make a walking robot for a while and found this awesome 3-servo design in Make magazine: http://blog.makezine.com/2011/10/20/how-to-three-servos-walking-robot-video/ It’s very simple and appears to walk with a shuffling motion, kind of like a duck. It’s a pretty clever design: basically a flexible parallelogram that is rotated by a servo. The parallelogram acts to move the legs up and down. Each leg has … Continue reading Small Walking Robot
As part of an undergraduate reading group led by Nancy Ouyang, http://nouyang.blogspot.com/, an awesome fellow course 2-er, we made some small, origami-like hexapods! We following instructions based on research done at Berkeley: http://robotics.eecs.berkeley.edu/~ronf/Prototype/index.html The flat-pack piece. It’s two pieces of regular cardboard with a sheet of thin plastic glued in between. The slits that you see are precut with a laser-cutter in the cardboard before … Continue reading Hexapods!
Like Math, But Louder 