Posted April 17, 2015 by Chris

"A small handheld antenna and a simple radio are all you need to get started….Unfortunately the amateur satellite market is very limited so there is no incentive for anyone to produce a low cost commercial az-el rotor system. The Yaesu G-5500 is currently the only viable option. It is a great piece of gear but is quite expensive and the rotor motors run on AC which makes portable option a bit more difficult."

Posted April 16, 2015 by Chris

"At the invitation of Prof. Susan Gerofsky, I visited The University of British Columbia (UBC) as artist-in-residence for a week during January 2007. The agreed-upon project was for me to develop a mathematical sculpture that can be replicated in classrooms. I worked with Susan, student teachers in UBC’s education program, and visiting students from Vancouver-area schools to test the ideas and write up a lesson plan."

Posted April 14, 2015 by Chris

Thanks to continued support and feedback from all of YOU, we are excited to announce that the 6th course of PyroEDU: An Introduction To Sensors will begin in two weeks! Here’s a preview of the course overview:

“This course is meant to create a pathway into learning about sensors, for people who are scared of the math and general trickery that usually comes with them. A hands-on approach is taken in this course through a combination of lecture and experimentation to teach you about the different basic components used as sensors. Additionally, visuals are used throughout lectures to explain the theory behind how each sensor works and their role in the everyday electronics that we use, while keeping the math to a minimum.”

This course comes right on the heels of our two courses: An Introduction To CPLD and FPGA and An Introduction To Microcontrollers and as such, it will use knowledge from both previous courses to further expand your knowledge of how to build sensor interfaces. Also, thanks again to all of our kickstarter backers who originally got us started! Read more at the course page at PyroEDU

Posted April 13, 2015 by Chris

"Ben came over for the weekend a couple of months ago, and we were looking for a project to do in my fledgling machine shop. He’d never really used machine tools, and I hadn’t done any ‘real’ machining in my home shop yet, so we were looking for an excuse to pick up some experience. Ben’s in to paintball, so we decided to try to make a paintball gun."

Posted April 12, 2015 by Chris

"Since I posted the write-up for the first table, I have had many requests to create a new version which would be able to withstand shipping, or at the very least, offer a kit so that other users could build their own table. This write-up is for the new version of the beer pong table and contains all of the steps to assemble your own."

Posted April 9, 2015 by Chris

"I developed this WSN for a coursework on my MSc and I’m hoping others will find this useful or at least interesting 🙂 I’ve just installed the first parts of this WSN back home to collect sensor data from various outbuildings and it will be part of my new Arduino controlled greenhouse project. I’ll try to port the storage and reporting backend to a Raspberry Pi later this week, initial trials seem to suggest that it should cope well with this task for my size of network."

Posted April 8, 2015 by Chris

"Back in late February I saw this post on the Raspberry Pi site: http://www.raspberrypi.org/school-weather-station-project/ . They had created Raspberry Pi Weather Stations for Schools. I totally wanted one! But at that time they are not publicly available. Well, I wanted on and I didn’t feel like shelling out hundreds of dollars for an existing 3rd party system."

Posted April 7, 2015 by Chris

"…I have received a few emails asking about controlling a toaster oven using the laminator temperature control board. This is something I have been thinking about myself, so I decided to buy an oven and convert it into a SMD reflow oven. If you decide to do this, do it at your own risk and make sure you, your family, and your friends know to never use it for food!!!"

Posted April 6, 2015 by Chris

"Being a little a little bored (although that`s the wrong word) this afternoon, I considered the 3 servos I had in a box after replacing the ones in my robot arm, and came up with the idea of making an ‘insectoid’ robot with them. "

Posted April 5, 2015 by Chris

"The presented home monitoring system consists of a star like structure of wireless nodes. This means that one node, the main node, collects information from the other nodes and forwards them to Raspberry Pi. The other nodes act just like wireless sensors – periodically measure physical values around the flat and send the measurements to the main node. "