Being a combination of crafty and cheap, DIY projects are just our thing. Projects range from hardware hacking to furniture making.
Adam sent me a stumble of a DIY vinyl wall art project on Instructables by Britsteiner. Immediately I was inspired by her project and went to work. Her Instructables project used contact paper and after a quick trip to Lowe’s and the local dollar store I decided contact paper would not work for my project. I wanted specific colors – brown and green – that I could not find as contact paper. I wanted to make a tree.
I recently had an MRI and wanted to make an animated GIF out of the images. I found a couple of great little programs that made this task a breeze.
The Rocketry of Central Carolina (ROCC) hosts rocket launches using their rocket pad for rockets from 1/4 A motor size all the way up to gigantic K size motors. Adam and I have gone several times just to watch the launches, and a few times Adam has launched his own rockets. I much prefer this to the times he used the car battery to launch a few homemade rockets at our home. Watching rocket launches is free and a small donation is recommended if you use the ROCC launchpad. See some of our ROCC adventures after the jump.
Now that some time has passed, I am able to reflect thoughtfully and professionally over the Maker Faire that was held in Durham on Sunday, April 25th.
From a teacher’s perspective, four makers in particular presented things I just “need” to have in my classroom. This is my wish list:
Find reasons and more information about each of my choices after the jump.
I’ve had a FTDI cable for a while for testing serial communications between my microprocessors and my computer and for that job, it works great. However, I recently grabbed a couple Ardweenies from Solarbotics and decided to use my FTDI cable to program them. The FTDI cable doesn’t have an automatic reset, so you have to push the reset button on the board at exactly the right time when trying to program it from your computer. This causes tons of frustration.
Oddly, a few days of experimenting with the arduinos, my cable got a short in it. While fixing the short, I was surprised to find out that the FTDI cable uses the same chip as the Sparkfun Programmer (which has automatic reset) so I went about modifying my cable to include this feature.
Modifying the cable is much easier said than done, but since I got it working, I figured I’d do a write-up on it in case anyone else wants to give it a shot.