UptownMaker

Quick and dirty math post- The media reports the balloon was about 20' x 5'. Modeled in SketchUp as a 20' diameter sphere, shmooshed to a disc with a 5' vertical, that yields ~1000 cu. ft. of helium, or ~28,300L. As we all know, helium can lift 1.113g/L, for a total of about 31.5 kg of lift for that volume of gas. A quick Google search tells me the average 6-year-old boy weighs 46.2 pounds, or 21kg. That leaves 10.5 kg for the mass of the craft itself- about 23 pounds, or slightly less than the weight of three gallons of milk. I guess it's plausible, but I'm skeptical. I think it will come out that he was never on board in the first place.

Some general notes on the whole "Essential Skills" post. A couple of commenters mentioned that it is a bit heavy on electronics. True; partly that's because I'm an electrical engineer, but it's also because, in my experience, it's also where many makers (aside: I will continue to use that term; I came to my personal peace with it during the discussion about what to name the Twin Cities Maker group) "fall down" and lose confidence or run aground. Electronics is a massive sphere, and my hope, by including those things on the list, was to encourage people to develop familiarity with the most basic, most useful aspects of it (at least, as far as general making is concerned), rather than feeling overwhelmed by the whole thing and steering clear of electronics projects altogether. Some of the coolest projects I've seen were banged together by people with little or no electronics experience, just the confidence to go forward and the willingness to m...

@AntonOlsen recently posted an article on GeekDad enumerating 100 Essential Skills for Geeks. As he was inspired to do so by a list of "Essential Skills for Men", so I am inspired to make this list of essential skills for Makers. His list was a little long (100 items), terse (essentially one line per item, but with links), and slightly biased (heavier on computers than I might have liked, but to be fair, that is the most common geek fetish). I'm going to go for a shorter list, with slightly more verbose entries, and try to cast a wider net. If I get interest from this list, I'll follow up with an article on each point going into more detail. 1. Calculate power consumption and estimate battery life - Most electrical projects will involve batteries of some sort. Having an idea of how long your project will run on a battery can save you a lot of trouble later- that wireless garden soil moisture monitor is probably not going to run very long on a 9V battery. Mayb...

So, in keeping with our ethic of keeping our food as close to home as possible, Beth and I elected to put together a bit of a garden this year. Rather than do it on the ground, as is more usual, I built some boxes up on stilts. Being the ever-resourceful scrap hound that I am, I found some really good sources for the material to make these boxes: My work was clearing out a part of the factory and disposed of a demo dumpster FULL of various types of wood scrap. The bottoms of all the boxes came from some old shipping crates we no longer had a need for- they are rough-grade 1/2" plywood with a 2"x4" frame around the edge and one 2"x4" across the middle for extra support. 3'x4', pre-cut. Saved me a lot of effort and basically made the whole thing feasible. The legs are largely made from scrap I found on the side of the road. Someone had done some concrete work and left the wood on the roadside for anyone to pick up. Warning: wood used for a concrete ...

I know some of the people who read this blog (or who will see links to this post on Twitter) are into laser diode projects, so I thought I'd throw out some of the lore I've acquired on the topic. Laser diodes... 1. ...are current driven devices: Always drive them as such, being careful to limit the current through them to some relatively safe value. 30mA is not an unreasonable guess; as they age the current required for the same output power will increase. 2. ...aren't very laser-like: Don't expect a laser diode to put out a tidy little dot of light. That requires some optics. As the current pushed through a laser diode goes up, the efficiency of the device increases, and the divergence angle of the beam decreases. The beam tends to project an ellipsoidal shape on a perpendicular surface; the larger of the two dimensions will change more as the current goes up, while the smaller dimension won't change much at all. This is why laser pointers do not project a...

I got started late on the AMC, so I'm a few behind. I have, however, managed to average one a day since the 10th. I'm offline at home until May 6 (moved- why do I NEVER remember to arrange things like that ahead of time?), so I'll post my last one now. I have a ton of others, so I'll trickle them out, because I enjoy this, but this'll be it for the daily do. I'd like to include an RFID reader in a mouse. I think it's doable- some computer mice are pretty large, and by hacking ruthlessly at a hub and RFID reader, you should be able to do it easily enough. Why, you might ask? Quite simply, it would be a good way to keep your PC secure. Workplace hijinks can occasionally cause heartburn, so I know several coworkers who lock their PC when away from their desks. I'd prefer to have it lock itself after 2 minutes of no action, then have it automagically unlock when I get back to my desk. Thus, an RFID reader that detects a tag I have in a ring I wear an...

The MiniPOV is an Adafruit toy that provides a discreet package for POV (persistence of vision) display. Normally, POV displays involve lights that are mounted to a moving arm or wheel. As the lights are swept across a person's field of vision, the slow response time of our vision receptors causes us to detect the changing light patterns as an image. The MiniPOV depends on a person to provide the motion. Instead of being mounted to a moving object, the user holds it in his or her hand and sweeps it through an arc, providing the motion. That's pretty cool, but it's also kinda small- it fits into an Altoid tin. I'd like to make a larger one- say, 12" long, with one LED every half- or quarter-inch. My deeply subversive application is to press this up against the window of my bus as it drives past all the suckers stuck in traffic on the highway, flashing a message to hopefully get them to consider some alternative to single-commuter driving.