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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It is more than a month till the Halloween, but my pants are already haunted.

Now what? I guess, I need some kind of yellow eyes to put on top of it.
Anyways, nice jeans refurbishing idea. All my jeans have holes on a knee. I guess, due to Lego castle building with boys and such…

For those who did not get it: that supposed to be a vampire face with a pair of white teeth.

We build a castle with boys. May be not that much of high-tech, but still fun.