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
water
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
Watts ur microwave power, bruh?
Over the past year or so, I’ve been dabbling in bread baking. One of the first steps to every batch is to get about 750 mL of water to a specific temperature, ranging from 85 °F to 105 °F. The standard drill was to just mix hot and cold water from the tap until I got within a degree or so of the target temperature. Then I’d take that and repeatedly pour out a little bit, weighing it each time, until I got to the exact amount I needed. This method worked fine enough, but the tediousness of the whole Continue Reading