How many drills do I really need? Well, one more would not hurt, I guess. I have got dead 9.6 volt Black and Decker with dead battery from my neighbor on a garage sale last year. My idea was to hook it up to 12 volts from PC power supply.

I knew that small wall outlet – style power supplies would not work – see my learning curve.

I have two old PC power supplies to play with. They both shut down as soon as I hooked up the motor. Oh well. I was about to give up, but then I decided to try 5 volts. Surprisingly, even though motor does not spin very fast at this speed (fast enough to drill, but not fast-like-crazy), it has a lot of torque. I cannot stop the spindle with my hand. What is good – it is high quality high precision drill. I was able to drill a hole across the yard wooden ruler (I have a broken one to play with), and the ruler is thinner than USB connector, and one inch wide, and the drill bit came out right in the middle.

Anyways, here is the drill:

P.S. Do you think connecting the drill to wires +5 and +12 to get 7 volts is a good idea? Well, may be in theory. It does not work, power supply just turns off (I have a lot of respect to whoever designed protection circuit for PC power supplies – it works great)!

Here is a story about a wall plug like you’ve never seen before (well, at least I did not).

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Lyosha Kojenov was excited about high-speed photography. He has all the photo-setup, but has no equipment to trigger a flash at the right moment. I do not have all the photo set-up, but I have Arduino. We decided to combine efforts.

The idea is simple – something happen that makes noise – microphone catches it, amplifier amplifies it, rectifier rectifies it, Arduino measures it with ADC, add some delay and trigger a flash.

Studio shall be dark, camera shutter shall be open. That’s pretty much it.

First, I made audio amplifier on a breadboard.

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I had a nice electric screwdriver with a dead battery. I finally hooked it up and it works great.

Here it is:

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Our friends gave us something that looks like a useless bookcase. It had 3 shelves, but space there was too low and too deep. Back wall was partially missing. I needed a bookcase for my office.
I removed one shelf, moved the other to the middle (I had to drill a few holes to do it, therefore I consider it a project and put on my project web site), and completely removed the back wall. I’ve got a nice bookcase accessible from front and back sides with plenty of room for my books. I wonder how did live without it?

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Lesson learned: Do not let goat to the garden, do not let cat to the crawlspace.
Well, at least if crawlspace is insulated. We had one cat, now we have the other one. One of them, or maybe both, did quite a bad damage to our insulation. I’m not sure which cat to to blame. I guess, both.

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Olya and Xenia had a ceramics class. Here are some creatures they have made.
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Boys got a cool but old bike (I mean, trike) from our neighbor. Rear wheels were in a pretty bad shape, and brake did not work.

Here are the old rear wheels feel up my trash can. Well, they still worked, but were quite noisy, and I was concerned, that boys can cut their skin with those nasty cracks in plastic if they fell on one.

I purchased new 10″ wheels in Harbor Freight for $6 a piece and installed them on a bike. I also finally fixed the brakes. Boys like to ride this bike from the hill down on our cul-de-sak, and they do it bare fit, so fixed brakes should save them some bleeding.

Me and boys love hotwheels because we can combine multiple sets together. This time we build a very long road. It supposed to be perfectly straight, but even if it is, car’s weight bends it in vertical axis. We put a lot of stuff underneath the track to mitigate that. It is a challenge if track is long.

Boys usually build more sophisticated things out of it:

Let me show you some panorama photos I made. I usually publish my photo here:

cotty.16×16.com

However, these panoramas are not just photos, they are a project. First, I purchased a camera that make them. Second, I figured out how to display them. Unfortunately, IE does not show them quite properly (yet, you can see them even with IE). However, Google Chrome, Opera and FireFox work just fine.

Please move your mouse over the photo to scroll it

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