brainwagon

Over the holiday I was watching my usual raft of videos on Youtube, and got interested in the circuitry that is inside the common garden light. I have a number of super cheap $1, and if you watch any teardown videos of them, you’ll find that there is almost nothing inside them: typically a solar […]

Readers might recall that I’ve been interested in small solar energy projects. In the past, I’ve played with a 25w solar panel, a Chinese PWM solar charge controller and a 7Ah battery, and I used it as the power source for a WSPR radio beacon that I ran for a few months in my back […]

In my garage, I’m trying to do some simple skill building exercises to increase my precision and knowledge about how to construct useful objects. The recent kerfmaker and half lap projects that I’ve tweeted about were part of this attempt. Last night, after a full day of chasing pixel problems, I thought it would be […]

On one of the Facebook model train groups I was in, I read an article about someone who was building a transistorized throttle based upon a design called the “Pacematic”. I did a bit of googling, and found this description. It seems like a relatively simple circuit based upon the 555 timer. I started digging […]

I am still an absolute rookie woodworker, which means that time spent in the shop doing the most basic skill building exercises can be fun. My previously mentioned “skill building” exercise of making a pair of simple boxes had met with the approval of our supurrvisor. I cut all the rabbets for these on the […]

A friend of mine pointed out an interesting website today: applesearch.org. This is well and truly off my normal set of blog topics (as ill defined as those might seem) but I must admit that I find it fascinating. See, apples are fascinating. Most people can name five or six varieties of apples, and if […]

I’ve had a couple of DC motor control modules lying around unused for quite a while. I think that I bought them for a simple robot project back in 2013 that apparently wasn’t quite simple enough: I got distracted and never went anywhere with it. But I was watching some videos as part of my […]

Carmen thought I should spend a little more time in the shop today. I didn’t have anything in mind, but while poking around we found a chunk of cedar fencing that I had used as a test for my jointer. We had jointed it down to around 0.47″ thick, although it wasn’t particularly uniform: I […]

Yesterday I did some work in the shop, finishing up a couple of small projects and prototyping a small display shelf for Carmen. The result was a fair amount of sawdust everywhere, so today I spent some time today vacuuming and tidying, putting away tools and generally just enjoying being in the shop. It just […]

I’ve got a week off before crunch time really begins at work, so I’m home enjoying the company of the missus and just relaxing. And, for some reason, I’m thinking about model trains. Mind you, I’ve always been pretty interested in model trains (and model making in general) although it never really rose to be […]

Brace yourself for old guy reminiscing about the past. Back in 1980, I was a sixteen year old kid with a goal: to buy my own computer. I spent a year mowing lawns and doing chores, mostly for my grandmother, and slowly began to tease together money. By the end of the year, I had […]

Everyone I know in the twitterverse/blogosphere seems to be getting a cute little $50 piece of kit called the NanoVNA, which is a small vector network analyzer. In ham radio lingo, this means that it’s an antenna analyzer. IMSAI guy was the guy who first got me interested in getting one, and he did an […]

I’ve been working on a bizarre little project which involves the very first computer that I ever owned: my trusty old Atari 400. I bought it when I was just 16 years old, and it is probably the artifact of my deep past which is responsible for my career and a heck of a lot […]

I’ve been watching too many YouTube views lately about tool restoration, and as part of my ongoing efforts to equip my home workshop with more tools it means I’ve been hitting more garage sales and picking up a lot more tools which are coated in ferric oxide, and then doing various things to them to […]

I’ve been on a bit of a woodworking binge lately, no doubt fueled by all the creative and talented woodworkers who have made a place on my YouTube subscription list. I’ve also been slowly acquiring used tools of various sorts, working on a variety of shop projects, and even taking a class. The “class” is […]