July 2, 2016:
Recently, I accidentally hit a threshold when going through all the emails Instructables had sent me and saving my favorites among the projects in those emails to my Instructables profile. I contacted the site admin, and that very weekend, someone contacted me back and upgraded my account to premium for free for three months! Instructables is definitely one of my favorite sites because it highlights people's ingenuity and skill in creating mostly useful projects.
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http://www.instructables.com/id/Build-This-Solar-Powered-Hydroponic-Water-Garden-o/
The thing I love about hydroponics is that you can combine plant growth directly with indoors (potentially very large buildings with many floors) and with fish farming. Along with that, I would get to use my electrical certification skillset to setup circuits to power the pumps and grow lights. One of the few remaining things that is bothering me is how to make the system completely enclosed as far as how to feed the fish without external inputs (potentially from wheat or something like that).
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=mCCN4nq7BlQ&feature=youtu.be
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I have a feeling I am going to need this circuit type. This is a DC motor driver.
http://www.instructables.com/id/1-Motor-Driver-Circuit-for-Arduino/
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30 Dec, 2015:
https://blog.adafruit.com/2015/12/29/farmbots-makes-growing-food-easier-arduino/
This is a CNC machine scaled up over a grow area.
Comment on the project by Ed K:
"I greatly admire your engineering and design but the concept itself baffles me. One of the most attractive features of growing your own food is the low cost. It takes only a few simple garden tools and admittedly, some hard labor. It seems like an amusement for people who have more money than time. But, does it really save time?
If FarmBot could do the initial soil preparation that would be a huge plus. This (as you probably know) is a lot of work. Planting the seeds is a one-time-per-season thing (or maybe two at best). Watering is an important feature but a soaker hose and a timer valve are pretty effective for that. The part of having your own garden that is sheer drudgery is pulling weeds. This may not be a big issue in urban environments but it certainly is outside of cities. Identifying and eliminating weeds would be a great feature.
All this being said, there is a great deal of satisfaction to be had by actually planting seeds and touching soil with your hands. Yes, it’s hard work but it provides something that sitting at a desk and tinkering with a computer does not. You should try it!"
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20 Dec, 2015:
Going to try to make that EEG circuit again over the Christmas break. I found the DIY oscilloscope part of it on Makezine - you can use a very simple circuit combined with your computer's sound card & some sort of graphing program. That lets you see a lot more than you can with a multi-meter (a multimeter will give you one piece of information, which is reliable if the signal isn't varying - an oscilloscope will show you a graph over time).
http://makezine.com/projects/sound-card-oscilloscope/
http://www.swharden.com/blog/2009-08-14-diy-ecg-machine-on-the-cheap/
http://homediyelectronics.com/projects/howtomakeafreesoundcardpcoscilloscope/
https://www.zeitnitz.eu/scope_en
I had made a Python program using Pygame that graphed output - it was very basic and didn't connect the measured points with a line - it only showed dots where it got measurements. I've since lost the code :( Have to write something like it again.
I found the site with the original circuit I used in Hawaii to make my "EEG" - really it's an ECG circuit, but I was getting signal from the surface of my forehead - no idea what kind of signal it was - could have been simply electrical reflection from lights in the room, or muscle firings.
Waiting for the LM324N op-amps to arrive, then should have all the parts I need.
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21 Jun, 2015:
Linux terminal radar feed display program written in Python, uses ASCII to display out:
https://www.reddit.com/r/linux/comments/32l5kv/i_created_an_ascii_weather_radar_script_for/
http://media.giphy.com/media/xTiTnERTs8n5G6ggus/giphy.gif
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25 Apr, 2015:
https://www.raspberrypi.org/tag/mobile-phone/
I saw another post about using the pi to control a mini radio station, so figured someone must have figured out the cell protocol control. I'll have to read more about this later.
http://www.instructables.com/id/Raspberry-Pirate-Radio/
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Apr, 2015:
Jeri Ellsworth was my pick for the Women's History month - she has a cool story about her bio on Wikipedia.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=YFVgq3ZB0Mo&list=PLG55K_hPSNN4fK-uXzQmbV5DywTgRIhmq
-- Really cool thing about software defined radio is you have these people making their own boards and using their computers to process all the input from them, able to record a broad frequency spectrum and all signal sources coming from it. Imagine - you could have a private group of individuals, each with a computer, and you'd be able to make a 3D map of all the sources transmitting, and have a complete record of the whole area.
-- From there, it would be a simple matter of quickly figuring out number station sources. I mean, who in their right minds uses voices to transmit numbers when it's done computationally / digitally?
-- If you combine something like that with a Parallela board, or another type of FPGA, you could probably get a much broader spectrum, or higher resolution within the same spectrum range.
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29 Mar, 2015:
This is something I'd have to work with slowly and figure out / design an acceptable product out of in stages.
Really neat. Summary: a line drawn by a pencil on paper can conduct electricity, but its resistance will change based on how it's bent. You can tell which way it's bent by how the resistance changes - it's on par with commercial sensors.
https://www.newscientist.com/article/dn27189-pencil-sketches-turn-paper-into-a-sensor/
-- The Chinese researchers found that wearing the paper with the graphite lines meant that they could measure movement of limbs. So you could make your own very cheap gloves and use your circuit & a short language of movements to be able to type in the air for instance (or some other form of interactive language).
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Feb, 2015:
This is one of the recent pico solar companies, which were buying scratched solar cells in China at very cheap prices.
http://www.instructables.com/id/SPF-DIY-the-Fanned-Light-A-Solar-Light-from-Scr/
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Feb, 2015:
http://www.instructables.com/id/DIY-AA-Batteries/
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