Inspired by the Public Laboratory and having just finished a round of college applications, I decided to experiment with thermal imaging on the cheap. Thermal cameras are expensive. Even at low resolutions, it is not uncommon for a decent thermal camera to cost over $10,000. However, for only $20, you can buy an infrared thermometer that reads [...]
I recently had the pleasure of working in the shop of a good friend of my grandparents named Mark. Mark’s shop is just awesome – milling machines, giant metal lathes, a TIG welder – he’s spent years collecting some of the coolest equipment I’ve ever seen. Mark was kind enough to let me use his shop [...]
My school is kind of strange. We don’t have a cafeteria, but we do have a four week course on “The Simpsons.” We don’t have a jungle-gym on the elementary playground, but we do have a half-buried firetruck. We don’t have a football team, but we do have a bee-keeping club. It’s pretty awesome. This [...]
For a class I’m taking in technology entrepreneurship, I’m building a product that requires a large database of restaurants. Factual.com has one of the best restaurant databases I’ve found. The best part? 10,000 API calls per day for free. That’s pretty cool. You can also request downloads of their data for a reasonable fee. Unfortunately, there’s [...]
Released in 1989, the DMG (Dot Matrix Gameboy) was the first Gameboy Nintendo ever released. It’s a lot of fun to mess with, so here’s a quick guide of my experiences taking apart, restoring, and modifying the DMG with an awesome new backlight. The Gameboy I had was in fairly good condition, with the exception [...]
After releasing my last Vex Robotics scoring app the day before last year’s world tournament, this year I decided it might be a good idea to start just a tad earlier. This year’s competition, called Sack Attack (I know, I know…) operates on the premise that each alliance’s robots score as many ‘sacks’ as possible [...]
I’ve been really fascinated lately by magnetic and electric fields and how they interact (mostly influenced by my interest in magnetohydrodynamics). One relatively simple but fun project is an air ionizer. The one I’ve built converts mains voltages (~120VAC @ 60Hz in the US) to something on the order of a few kilovolts at a [...]
Magnetohydrodynamics: possibly the most intimidating name for a relatively simple concept ever! If you’ve ever seen The Hunt for Red October and the quest for the “silent submarine”, you may have heard of MHD. Basically, MHD involves taking the cross product of a magnetic field with an electric field to produce the resultant vector, the [...]
For this year’s science olympiad competition I built a really cool robotic arm with my friend Ben Katz. I’ve already posted about the controller for this arm, but the whole thing is pretty awesome. The arm has 6 points of dexterity- base rotation, the lower arm, the mid arm, the upper arm, wrist rotation, and the [...]
Lots of crazy-cool updates below! I’ve been working with a friend of mine, Nat Emerson, on a midi organ project. Nat wanted to keep some of the retro-style of organs from the 60s and 70s, but instead of controlling actual analog components, it would output a midi signal to control software running on a laptop. [...]