It turned out to be an awesome build and I had lots of fun putting it together. I also chose it because it allows you to program your own clock “faces” for it. I’ve programmed a Space themed face for it that simulates the space station ground track. I’ve also programmed an autodim feature for the backlight because my preferred daylight brightness was too bright at night. The fact that I can customize it to fit my needs is an awesome thing. I wish there were more products like it.
I did encounter one problem when building the kit; the processor chip wasn’t working. However, Adafruit provides a forum on their website for support and they very promptly helped me isolate the problem and replaced the chip. The customer service is excellent.
My sister decided to make Gingerbread cookies for Christmas. This would have been great except that after she made the dough, we discovered a complete lack of any cookie cutters in the house and all the stores were closed as it was Christmas day. So rather than give up, I made her a cookie cutter from some sheet brass I had laying around. It wasn’t perfect, but it sure made the cookies interesting. I got the idea from this Instructable. Check them out below:
Air pressure. We experience it every day. For those of us living around sea level, we must endure 14.9 pounds pushing down on every square inch of our bodies. Of course, since the air is also pushing in every other direction, we don’t feel it at all.
Due to the fact that we experience air pressure on a daily basis, we at Thematic Attic decided it would be an excellent topic to cover in one of our Science Saturday workshops, specifically using hover craft.
One of the demonstrations that I came up with for the workshop was a paper plate hovercraft. I built it out of a large 12 volt computer fan that was placed over a hole in a paper plate. I happened to have a generic transformer that could deliver 12 volts and so, with a little soldering, I had a way to power the fan indefinately. Voila! A Hover Craft
In retrospect, I would consider going with a smaller fan since this one seemed to lose a lot of air straight up through the fan. However, it was able to force and keep enough air under the plate to lift the edges and allow it to float across the table.
In researching this project I saw several articles on how to make a ride-able hover craft out of some plywood and a leaf blower. Coincidentally enough, this showed up in my living room a couple days later…
So a couple months ago, my girlfriend accidentally dropped her laptop and corrupted the software to the point where it could no longer boot. The computer has a bios password that she didn’t know and so I couldn’t even get it to boot off a CD. So in order to recover her data so that it could be put on her new computer, I pulled the hard drive and attached it to my Linux computer. The response: The Click of Death. That sound a hard drive makes when something is totally out of place and it doesn’t want to work anymore.
I fiddled with it for quite a bit, and was about to throw my hands up in disgust when I remembered a last resort trick I had read on Lifehacker a while back; toss the hard drive in the freezer for a couple of hours and then try running it. The idea is that the cold might put things back in place. However, its a dangerous thing to do as it could very easily kill the drive; but if the drive isn’t working anyways, its can’t hurt to try. So I put the drive on top of the bucket of ice cream in my freezer and took a shower. When I came back I pulled it out and tried again. The platters wouldn’t spin up at first but once they thawed, they started spinning and ran without any major bouts of the Click of Death for the entire seven hours it took me to back up the data. It may still spin up again if I were to try it but I couldn’t say for sure since I managed to get all the data in one go.
So as a last resort, this trick does seem to work in some cases.
Some of my christmas money went towards purchasing a Monochron Clock kit from Adafruit.com.
So a couple months ago, my girlfriend accidentally dropped her laptop and corrupted the software to the point where it could no longer boot. The computer has a bios password that she didn’t know and so I couldn’t even get it to boot off a CD. So in order to recover her data so that it could be put on her new computer, I pulled the hard drive and attached it to my Linux computer. The response: The Click of Death. That sound a hard drive makes when something is totally out of place and it doesn’t want to work anymore.