What Are Your Projects This Weekend?
4 Comments Published by Joel November 11th, 2006 in DIY, Gadgets. Share This
My first experiment this weekend, seeing if ephedra helps me concentrate or just tweaks me out (verdict: uncu-cu-cu-clear), led to my second one: finally completing this Hex Pummer Kit from Solarbotics. I started putting this together almost two years ago, finally giving up in a fit of pique after I installed the LEDs on the wrong side of the board. (Turns out they’re in upside down but still function.)
I write about electronics and technology for a living but I’m a wreck with a soldering iron, so I had thought I’d start teaching myself the basics by building some of these little Solarbotics projects. With my new Cold Heat Pro soldering iron I was able to knock out the last few bits of assembly—a couple of capacitors, the solar panel, and the battery pack—in short order.
(The Amazon reviews of the Cold Heat are strangely off-base in claiming it doesn’t work at all. It may not completely obviate a traditional iron, but for basic to-the-pad solders it works better than a regular iron does for a shaky-handed rube like me.)
Oh, what does the Hex Pummer do, you ask? It soaks up sunlight during the day, then turns on the LEDs with a bright flash which quickly fades to darkness—hence, the “pumm.”
What projects are you working on this weekend?
My project is to prepare for other projects. It’s a beautiful, if very cold, day here in Kansas City and the shop is begging to be organized and cleaned, top to bottom.
So the doors are open, the radio is blaring and I’m sorting through crate after crate of car parts (Datsun 280z), motorcycle parts (Yamaha CS1) and unidentified parts (!) and generally straightening up to prepare for the deep freeze that is around the corner. Hopefully, this weekend’s fit of activity will allow a winter’s worth of work to go down without too much tripping over piles of stuff.
Jon
My projects are:
- two dives for reefcare: monitoring coral abundancy & health
- gardening
- getting my data from laptop to powerbook
I’m in ‘Ichita, south of Kansas City, and my project is:
LEAVES…millions of them to collect and turn into mulch.
Um…how do I do that?
Also winterizing…and…how do I do THAT?
I just moved in April and I think my house is prepped, but I’m not sure.
It’s sealed against vermin, check.
I had to clean the central air/heat pump outside…check…
Check leaks in house…check.
Check roof..check.
Actually…I got an average billing plan.
You can’t do EVERYthing…but ya gotta know how to do the important stuff.
Well…qualify and QUANTIFY the important stuff, Dethroner.
I sold MY HUSBAND on you…
So I just used my Cold Heat to build a Digg button kit from Adafruit.com. The heat (or I suspect the electric charge the cold heat uses to generate heat) blew out part of the LED display. Sucky! Time to start firing up the old stick soldering iron, I guess.