If you follow @HackAWeek (Dean Segovis) on Twitter, you may have seen this tweet announcing a new series of videos, shockingly including my name and twitter handle.

This Saturday I’ll be posting the first in a series of videos on #HackAWeekTV for Nerd Thunder! #nerdthunder #hackaweek Watch for videos from @jeriellsworth @bekathwia @dmlandrum @joegrand @BenKrasnow @brainwagon @JohnS_AZ throughout December! #nerdthunder

— Dean Segovis (@HackAWeek) November 30, 2018

My name is being mentioned in some pretty elevated company there. I know Dean, John, Daryl and Joe on the Tymkrs IRC channel. I know Ben mostly because of his awesome work on Youtube as part of the Citizen Science channel, but I’ve been lucky enough to meet him in person at a variety of Maker events. And I first made Jeri’s acquaintance at a hacker event that we both periodically attend. The only person I haven’t really met is Becky (hey Becky!).

All are awesome, and I’m flattered (and more than a little intimidated) to be asked to be listed among their lofty company. My own Youtube and blog presence (as anyone who monitors this channel can attest) have fallen off considerably over the last year, and I’m kind of out of the habit of producing even the meager output that I did before.

But that’s not to say that all interesting stuff has stopped in the brainwagon lair. My projects tend to be a little smaller in scope than many others, but I recognize that can also be a bonus. Perhaps some of my bits of tinkering will be less intimidating and thus will inspire more people to try and talk about small projects of their own. We shall see.

So, what can you expect from me in the month of December?

I have three projects that I currently want to work on.

Back in September, I wrote a short post about something that I have come to think of as a “solar satellite project”. Really, it was just an excuse to understand how solar battery charging works by simply building and using a small 10W solar system. My Solar Energy Project It isn’t really interesting in itself, but building it has exercised a couple of tinkering skills that are generally useful. A recent spate of bad weather revealed a problem as the battery drained out the bottom of its useful range, so currently it’s sitting on my garage workbench. As I get it back working, I’d like to talk about it a bit, and maybe see if anyone else is interesting in similar projects. My ultimate goal is to build a Raspberry Pi Zero powered system in my backyard that is entirely solar powered, and that can be used to take pictures of hummingbirds. A test run earlier this year resulted in this twenty minutes of video being recorded over the span of a day:

Next, I’d like to revisit a project of old: my LED Christmas hat. This project could use a revisit, and I am thinking of doing a remake using ESP8266 modules and MQTT to enable the hat to be controlled via the Internet, perhaps using Micro Python. I also should note that I might go ahead and crochet a custom hat to go with this project (my head is big, and many off the rack Santa Hats just don’t fit properly).

And lastly, my Creality CR-10 has been down for a while because I needed a new hot-end. I need to install that and get it back running.

So, I’ll cut to the chase. I’m going to try something new: I’m going to live stream my workshop time on the brainwagon Youtube channel. I will try to announce events a bit ahead of a time via my twitter channel so if you are interested and don’t follow me, go ahead and do so. I may or may not produce re-edited versions of these live sessions and upload them for more permanent storage. I’ll also likely include some links to other of the #nerdthunder members as well as my commentary as to why they are all awesome. Feel free to comment while I’m operating live (in fact, I think it would be awesome) and bear with me. Format, timing and exactly what I’m chatting about will likely change. I also am somewhat lacking in microphones and good video equipment, so the technical quality may not meet your expectations.

Stay tuned!