brainwagon

It seems like I might have access to a 3D printer, so I thought it might be fun to see what I could design. I thought using OpenSCAD, a scripting based 3D modelling software that can generate models in STL, a fairly simple but flexible format that can be printed by lots of printers. I […]

I lost 1.8 pounds this week. I went on 2 mile walk with Carmen. I soldered some clip leads onto pennies to make a touch sensor for the Arduino. I figured out how to run the card deck on the Computer History Museum’s 1401 restoration page that computes pi on the 1401 simulator. 000000003. * […]

Okay, I was trying to find more information about the IBM 1401, and the bitsavers website again came to the rescue. If you surf over to to their directory of IBM 1401 information, you can find some nifty references. One of the most useful references is 1962 manual Programming the IBM 1401. A somewhat less […]

A few days ago, I was playing around with my Raspberry Pi, trying to get a new, freshly compiled version of the TOPS-10 7.03 monitor running. I was having some difficulty with it, as it appears that a bug had crept into the code that simulates the DZ11 serial ports as telnet connections, and I […]

Yesterday, I mentioned Rory’s excellent introduction and exploration into DTL logic. He covers some of the basics here, including circuits for all the basic gates: AND, OR, NOT and NAND. The AND and OR gates are interesting, because they consist entirely of diodes and resistors. They do have the drawback that they are “lossy” (the […]

Previously, I had linked to Rory Mangles’ experiments with relay based computers. He had an incredible build of a relay logic computer called Tiny-8 which used paper as program mamory, inked with a pattern which could be read by photo sensors to sequence the control logic in his computer. I thought it was amazing. But […]

Sorry it’s been a while since I wrote anything here. The simple fact is that I haven’t done a lot that’s very interesting lately. But Carmen did buy me a Raspberry Pi for Christmas, and I’ve been playing with it a bit. As it happens, we had a power outage over on the 26th, and […]

I wanted to know. I read up on the Mayan calendar. It was easy to code up in Python: [sourcecode lang=”python”] #!/usr/bin/env python # This code is completely untested, it doesn’t do anything relative # to timezones or the like. It does appear to broadly function. # # 1 k’in == 1 day # 1 […]

The guys over at flitetest have a great series on building airplanes around a swappable fuselage. The basic idea is to house the receiver, esc, and battery in a fuselage that can be easily attached and detached to different wing setups, essentially giving you different planes without having to duplicate all the same receiver/ESC in […]

Last year, I spent a little bit of time to create a set of blinking Christmas lights that I could mount in a hat. It was powered by an ATtiny13 and mounted in an Altoids tin. While setting up my Christmas tree last weekend, I found them, and they still work. In case you missed […]

I don’t think he was at the local Sonic drive-through window. Okay, this doesn’t have much to do with my normal blog topics: it’s just a picture of my son working his day job. Your country thanks you for your service, and your mom and I are very proud of you. And the glasses are […]

Today I spent a lot of time making bread and pumpkin cheesecake for tomorrow’s Thanksgiving day feast, but in between I decided to build some more parts for a “So” twin boom foam flyer, using the KFm3 wing that I photographed yesterday. My goal wasn’t so much to build a flying plane today, but to […]

Okay, I haven’t had much time to work on RC airplanes. I’ve been meaning to try to find something a little tamer than my Nutball to fly (it seems to be a bit twitchy) but I haven’t really done too much other than watch videos on YouTube and scout around on the rcgroups forums for […]

I’m constantly on the lookout for interesting and simple airplane designs. This design from foamflyer is interesting in a couple of different ways. First of all, it’s made from cheap dollar tree foamboard, which is nice. It has an overall pleasing shape with a nice KFm3 style airfoil, constructed a bit differently than the one […]

I snapped awake at 5:30AM this morning, and couldn’t get back to sleep, so I started a loaf of bread to bake later tonight, and then settled in to thinking about airfoils some more. I had seen references to the “Clark Y” airfoil, but didn’t know how it was defined, so I set out to […]