NothingNormalNet

Pinewood '25

This year’s Pinewood derby entry used a little flexible pcb (fpcb) that we yanked from yet another “flame” light bulb. I used the same bulb once prior for the Starship ornament upon discovering that the manufacturer simply rolls up the board into a cone and uses a second tiny step down circuit to convert 120vac to just a 3.9v circuit- perfect for those tiny batteries we just received for the…

This project was a bit of a mad dash once the concept popped into my head, and so I really have very little media to document other than the end result (at least that I can find- if I discover more I will update this page), so you will have ot use your imagination a bit, but I’ll help you out with some backstory: I actually cut & treated a big oak log years ago whlie we were preparing D’s…

This simple project ended up being a great way to learn about superhydrophobic materials (and hydrophillic). Basically, we just seized the opportunity to practice some simple CAD and build a small simple maze from lines and curves. Then we printed and refined a few versions finally using a superhydrophobic spray made by Rustoleum called “Neverwet” (which has been discontinued, sadly) to add a…

We’re in “Scouts”- As I was reviewing girl scout troops in our area, Amanda explained that she was in girl scouts for a while and lost interest pretty quick, and further relayed that boy scouts got to do cooler projects less focused on home economics & domestic pursuits. Fair enough- turns out the BSA accepts girls these days. Cool. She’s one of two in historic Troop 3. Sadly she was sick for…

PJ’s on the plane… it was a pre-dawn flight out. Here’s a fun little quickie I came up with while awaiting the big southwest adventure trip. Our first flight to Albequerque had a stopover in Chicago- while at the intial gate I came up with this plan for an improv science project (like we do). It’s cheap (or free), quick, easy, and educational. We used a clear plastic apple juice bottle, a clear…

One of very few games we get to enjoy around here is Kerbal. It’s actually my wife’s fault as she bought the game for me before D was born. It’s a great way to lose track of time and build rockets (some just to see them explode, some to actually get to or beyond orbit) and it’s all based on real life physics/rocket science. It’s a really fun game if you’re into rockets but I digress.. Valentina…

We needed a hot-leather hat stamp, so we made one with a TIG welder & some scrap aluminum.

I love this mod for a number of reasons, chief among them is that its a bit of a triumph of coding for me personally, although I did cut & paste some of the value averaging this whole program was pretty much documented and written by me and; most incredibly it does just what I intended! yay! It’s actually been over 4 yrs since my intial extra-primative kinetic deployment of our elf on a shelf…

As an overview, D explains what’s going on with the conservation of energy below: In my grant pitch I cited a boulder or (water?) barrel as ballast, but here we’re using a little tin bucket with a billiard ball in it. I pulled a couple of dead AA batteries out of the trash to use as opposing ballast so that my drive cord will get some friction applied to it. I turned an acrylic pulley which is…

So this project followed an improvisational demo of buoyancy vs. pressure after noticing a “toy” pipette in a chemistry set D had received and weighing it down a bit with a coil of solder. I rememer a cereal toy tony the tiger that worked the same way except that you’d squeeze a plastic liter bottle to watch him drop and float. I always thought there was a missed opportuntiy there to observe the…

Inspired by our previous, fairly epic failure, we decided to embark on a more dramatic failure since it will be a few years before we have the opporutnity to capture a total eclipse from the air again. This time around the thought/question was whether it might be possible to simplify down to a single all-in-1 android device and use it to perform all tasks including navigation to a target that it…

Yesterday I happened across a link illustrating what is essentially a selfie stick attached to a motor (for the sake of the bearings only) attached to an external camera that is free to rotate around the drone . I thought the end result looked pretty cool so I duplicated it. There are a couple of ways to go about it, and I went with a counterbalanced rod with a central captured bearing. This was…

This one is pretty standard and D does a pretty good job walking us thorough, so I’ll just leave it at that for now. Happy 5th Bday! Areeeba!

Wyatt’s Grand tour

So, you may have noticed the last three updates are Wyatt projects. We’ve been having too much fun building lately to keep up with documenting too much. I mean we have the media but actually compiling it into a slightly informative and/or entertaining page takes a lot more effort. Anyway, in case it’s not obvious, Wyatt has Osteosarcoma- it damaged his leg bone and it was amputated. He finished…

Wyatt's awesome new bicycle cart!

Wyatt’s bike cart was a rare unicorn of a project in that I had previously built up a similar but more beat up Schwinn trailer nearly identical to this one. Eventually it fell apart for various reasons but I pack-ratted the aluminum square tube frame into my junkyard wars crawlspace stockpile, and see? Here it is getting all used up again! Yay! Due to this amazing preparedness I managed to knock…

BLE Beacon Dog Door

This project has been through the wringer a few times and I ended up making it way harder than necessary, but the end result is decent. Starting with technology and basic goals: I wanted to have an upstairs dog door that was big enough for our Dogs, Wyatt- a 105lb golden retriever with 3 legs due to cancer, and a 14yr old lady dog Trouble with stiff joints and frequent trips out back. Problems…