I feel like the dumbest person in the room. This is what I wanted grad school to be like, and I have finally found it.  I love it. I have been unbelievably  blown away by the quality of the people here at SU.  It is incredible to hear what people have created so far, and…

I had designed and then ordered a PCB for my interpretation of a protoboardunio, as a first PCB design experiment.  I had used the good service at OSH Park to make the order, and they arrived today! OSHPark effectively uses a specific colour purple as their brand, and so the envelope of course came in…

I am now more through the Udemy Arduino Step by Step course, and have a few more takeways: Cool sensors:  the membrane potentiometer and the flex sensor are cool. For pots, they have three pins, so you don’t need a second resistor to create the voltage divider.  But the flex sensor only has two pins,…

I have done some soldering over the course of my relearning how to make, but I didn’t do so deliberately or with really decent instruction. I found a really fantastic video series on soldering, which looks like it was from the 60s or so: Covers all the basics, and I learned a fair amount from it.…

I signed up for the Arduino Step by Step course from Udemy, and have now got partway through it (25%!).  It is pretty good, and I wanted to summarize my key  lessons learned: Sensors:  the course walked through a bunch of them, but most of them are pretty straight forward or I had used before.…

While I feel like I have managed to become reasonably knowledgeable about programming Arduinos, and experiences such as at Startup Weekend and with Code for DC have validated my knowledge base and skill, I know there is a tremendous amount that I still have yet to learn.  Moreover, I feel like I have learned sporadically,…

So I purchased a few $5 (or less) Wifi chips off of ebay, the ESP8266.  It has taken the maker world a little by storm, as it makes is super cheap to get wifi into a project. You can use it as a standalone microprocessor, but to start I wanted just to use it as…

Stumbled across a great intro to prototyping thanks to an article at Makezine, about billionaire Dan Gelbart.  He has a cool set of tools in his basement, and has great instructions for how to build stuff. Check out the YouTube intro and the YouTube Channel. Lessons I liked a lot were on forming plastic molds, and on building…

After I completed the prototype of the bag movement alarm I spent some time turning it into something that is more of a usable product.  I designed a layout to fit onto a protoboard PCB that I got with a small project case I purchased, and then soldered it up and stuck it in the project…

After figuring out the modified power circuit and the battery power monitor circuit, I could finally finish the prototype of the bag movement alarm.  I also added the same power switch circuit for the speaker, which allowed me to use a much better speaker (when I had tried it before with the old power circuit, it beeped…