To put this into context, I took my first Loopy’s tubing trip long before waterproof Bluetooth speakers were something you could just go pick up at your local Circuit City. For the average rivergoer, a tranquil float down the serene Chippewa River on a beautiful sunny day is already pretty hard to beat. But what kind of engineer would I be if I didn’t seize the opportunity to enhance such a natural experience with a piece of cobbled together tech designed for the sole purpose of blasting out the fattest bangers of 2005? What started out as a dumpster dived Continue Reading
electronics
A wireless water level sensor for the Internet of Tannenbaums
I rigged up a crude little water level sensor to monitor my Christmas tree and send me alerts when it gets thirsty. With the help of two strips of aluminum stuffed in a FoodSaver bag, an Adafruit HUZZAH32 – ESP32 Feather Board, and a little Arduino code, our humble tree has become part of the IoT revolution! Physics lab flashback The sensing probe that goes in the water is basically just a parallel plate capacitor straight out of undergrad physics. The water flows between the plates and works as a dielectric. The relative permittivity (aka dielectric constant) of water is Continue Reading
Oldsmobile Modsmobile
If there’s one good thing about driving a $500 POS with no A/C and a driver’s door that doesn’t open, I guess it’d be that you can’t really make it much worse. Before the brakes blew out for the second time, I made a couple mods to my 1995 (??) Cutlass Supreme, aka The Stallion. Since the Cutlass was already an extremely high-performance machine, and that fact that I know next to nothing about auto mechanics, the upgrades were purely electronics related. CarPlay The first order of business was to hack in an aux input into the radio, which only Continue Reading