One of Kendra’s professors this semester does a lot of powerpoint and goes really fast, so a laptop is a huge asset for that class. After the first or second class she realized that she needed one (the other classes were just inconvenient without one, this one sounds impossible if you’re not a stenographer).
Here it is!
I helped her shop for it and I don’t mean to brag, but I think we found a good one 
It’s 2.3 pounds, and really REALLY tiny. We’re talking kendra-sized. It’s really neat, too- it has a touch screen so you can use it like a tablet.
Somebody’s done it- some of you might remember how I was talking about how cool it would be to paint a cube room to look like it’s a sphere (obviously it would only work from a certain angle with the right lighting)- and now somebody has done something very similar.
http://www.impactlab.com/modules.php?name=News&file=article&sid=7189
I just saw this material, it looks really good for vibration isolation:
http://www.sorbothane.com/
The really cool part is that there is a material calculator to simulate the effect of using their material.
I’ve been working on some cardboard speakers lately, just for fun. I received some nice tools for christmas, but everybody makes speakers out of wood. I want to see if I can make something that actually sounds good out of cardboard.
I tried before with styrofoam, and I think I learned a lot from that.
Even though the box was fairly stiff, it didn’t weigh very much. The force of the cone moving shakes the whole thing, and I think that produces a coloration in the sound.
My present construction technique is going to use several plies of corrougated cardboard in alterinating orientations, and will be lines with about a pound an a half of cheap non-hardening modeling clay.
If you remember from the first time I posted about these drivers, there’s already a design out there that I stole the geometry from. I may end up doing something very similar to that in wood eventually, if I get tired of playing with “cheap” materials. These are basically bedroom speakers.
Ha! This kind of thing really needs to get on MTV:
http://www.jeffiscool.com/numanuma.html
This is so awesome, Kendra was on TV tonight!
http://www.nbc11.com/health/6279737/detail.html
That’s the story, I’ll post a link to the video if I ever find one. Of course we taped it, but I don’t have a way to get a VHS tape onto the computer.
I remember the book, “The Way Things Work” from when I was growing up, and it was really fascinating. I think it taught me a few things before highschool, but the first time I read it and was sure I knew what was going on was after I’d had some college science classes.
I just saw that there’s a new edition out, including some Internet concepts. If you know anybody who’d like to know a little more about how the heck technology works, this is a good book.
http://www.houghtonmifflinbooks.com/features/davidmacaulay/
I’m glad to say, Kendra finally got her new wheelchair! It’s a relief, since her old one (Eddie) was on his last legs (wheels). Her new wheelchair is named Winnie, and it seems to be working very well for her.
The shocking thing is that she said I can user her old wheelchair to make a robot! I figured that she would donate it to the MDA or something, but she tells me that they wouldn’t take it because it’s too old and broken down. To be honest, she’s right. The motors are past their expected life, the transmission is loud and funky, the wheels are split down the middle (last week they started to bulge outwards and rub the frame), and those are just the dangerous problems. It would cost a charitable organization at least $5,000 to get all those things fixed.
So, what can I do with a wheelchair??
-Giant remote controlled car
-Platform for a mobile robot
-Take off the wheels and use the motors and frame for a CNC machine tool
-Homemade a Segway
- Powered wheelbarrow (good for moving)
Seriously, the possibilities are endless. Anything I make with it has a possibility of randomly breaking- a much lower probability than most hobby/amateur stuff, but its time as something good to use as a medical device is reaching its end.
I want to learn more about these things:
Polyswitches (wikipedia)
It’s a self-resetting fuse; actually a non-linear thermistor that sharply increases its resistance at a certain temperature caused by self-heating of the device due to current flowing through it.
The way it works is described in the wikipedia article- what I need to read more about is how these things fail, their behavior and the causes. What’s it take to break them? Can they be adjusted on the fly? Where did they come from and when were they invented?
I’m only so interested because I don’t remember ever hearing about these before about a year ago, and now they seem to be important because they’re able to reliably(?) protect all sorts of electronic devices from damage.
Woo! After almost three months of searching (the last few weeks have been really tough), Kendra and I finally found a new place to life.
I don’t know our exact address yet, but we’re moving into Del Norte Place in El Cerrito, California. Our new apartment number will be 303- Kendra pointed out that we’re moving to 303 from 202. I said that if we ever move into 404, I’ll put a little sign “Webpage not found!” under our apartment number .
We didn’t find out until this evening, but we had applied and written checks before so we weren’t doing a lot of anything today. I spent some time working on getting my blog into Wordpad 2.0, and that’s what you see here. I seriously need to integrate it with the rest of my site better, but that will take some time and learning. All of this PHP, SQL, and CSS has me a little intimidated.