For the past few years we’ve been dealing with buttons. Moving, storing, sorting, picking through, and generally managing a large collection of castaway buttons from a previous company. Some were usable, but many lacked the micro-switch that gives the button any functionality at all. Why do I mention this? Because having these buttons made us [...]
I pulled out an old transformer that I had been saving for probably 10 years. I don’t even remember where I got it from. According to the tag on it, it has a 110V input but the output is 6200V rated at 82mA. I ran the input through a contactor (basically a beefy relay) so [...]
I’m slowly adding my project portfolio to the Cargo Collective portfolio site. I’m hoping to document most of my more impressive projects until they’re all in place. It takes time to dig up those decent photos!
Recently, while cruising through Youtube, I came across some of the amazing Kinetic Sculptures by Bob Potts. Check them out below:
The concept of a solar water heater is simple: use the sun to heat up the water. Black tubing is very good at absorbing sunlight. We just need to pump the water through some black tubing. Of course, that tubing takes up a lot of space, so I prefer to put it on the roof, so [...]
For the past year and a half we’ve been heating our pool with a solar water heater. It pumps the water to the roof, where it runs through black tubes, which absorb as much warmth from the sunlight as possible. This solution has raised our pool temp by about 8˚F. But, it does nothing to [...]
I whipped up a video of the engineering magic behind A Moveable Feast. Enjoy!
With all of the different elements of the Kinetic Sculpture in place it was time to do some laps around the parking lot to see what would break. We’ve literally got lots of moving parts, so it’s important to see what we need to fix. It’s much easier to repair a broken spoke in the [...]
We had only had 14 days until the Doo Dah Parade, and we had a long way to go, so we stepped things up into high gear. I started working every day and recruited as many helpers each day as possible. I didn’t take time out of my day to blog, as I needed all [...]
We’ve been working two or three days a week on this thing. This means we’ve been making a lot of progress, but I haven’t had the time to blog about it much. Let me see if I can catch things up to something remotely current… We finally got started on the driveshaft. We welded it [...]
