brainwagon

I’ve slowly been trying to do some woodworking projects. I have very little skill and experience. In the past, I had (barely) enough skill to put together some simple Dobsonian telescopes out of plywood, using mostly a handheld router and a jigsaw, but they weren’t actually very accurately made (especially compared to the tolerances the […]

So, my idea is to use a cheap but reasonably accurate RTC chip module based upon the DS3231 chip to periodically wake a sleeping Arduino. I tried getting it working yesterday, but had little luck. I don’t know whether it was Bailey’s insistence on being petted or simple sleep deprivation, but it eluded me yesterday. […]

Last night, I did a small amount of work on two projects. I applied some Wood Bondo to a couple of bad defects in my garden bench project. I hadn’t used it in a while, and forgot what a pleasure it was. Sanding should be finished up shortly and I’ll definitely have it painted and […]

I must admit to a certain amount of jealousy about people who demonstrate an ability to start and finish large projects. Granted: I have a full time job and that job is not tinkering with my little home projects. But when I see someone construct a complex prototype of electronics, a large piece of woodworking, […]

Last night, the weather was pretty rainy. I woke up a couple of times during the night (once, when my little cat friend Bailey decided to check my breathing and started head butting me around 4 AM) and heard a lot of rain falling on the roof. When I woke up, it was fairly wet […]

So, last night about 9:30PM I decided to spend a little time in my garage workshop. I cleared some items off the top of my rolling workbench and decided to do a short bit of work on two projects. A couple of days ago I had started making a cross cut sled for my tablesaw. […]

Okay, a few weeks ago I bought a little Dewalt DW745 table saw for use in my garage. I’ve never actually owned a table saw, but lately I’ve been wanting to do more construction, and I thought investing a fairly small amount of money in a table saw would be a good way to go. […]

I heard some friends of mine that I haven’t seen in some time were having an estate sale, so I drove over to say hi and, well, to also see if they had anything interesting. Lately I’ve become interested in doing more work in my shop, and I’ve always had a bit of a fondness […]

A couple of days ago, I found out about thecavepearlproject.org through a link on hackaday, and an article which gave an interesting idea about how to do temperature sensing using an Arduino and no additional parts. I didn’t really recap the actual underlying technique. The idea was a fairly interesting one. The watch dog timer […]

I’m still heading toward changing my Creality CR-10 over to use a BLTouch bed leveling sensor, but I still need a few parts that I’m waiting on. I thought it might be a good time to try some prints with a filament that I never used before: namely a roll of Sainsmart TPU filament that […]

Over the last couple days, I’ve been pondering my journey through 3D printing. After having taken a three month break from it (more on that below) I’ve managed to get my Creality CR-10 back up and running in a reasonable way, and have donated my Anet A8 (my gateway drug to the world of 3D […]

Okay, as per the previous installment, I carted my new current transformer tap upstairs, and plugged in the Litter Robot. It entered its startup sequence, which ran the motors back and forth, and I was able to grab some data. It looked like the following: Using the built in ADC of an Arduino would give […]

Okay, here’s a strange little project that is pushing the limits of what I understand in a couple of ways, and I thought I might write it up and also ask a question from those more knowledgeable than me. Here’s the idea: in our upstairs bathroom, we have a Litter Robot. This is a commercial […]

Back around 2016 I had a tough time. A vertebrae in my neck began to pinch on the nerves that run down my left arm and began to cause pain and weakness. In the end, I had to have an injection into my spine to calm the pain, and spent months in physical therapy. I […]

I didn’t accomplish much in the garage on Sunday, but I did manage to take down some old, flickery and generally unreliable flourescent lights and replace them with some very inexpensive LED lights. I had previously tried to continue to use two of the old fixtures, including their old fluorescent ballasts, but in general that […]