Projects

This section is dedicated to providing a location to store my project list. Every now and then, I will have extra time to work on things that I think are interesting. There's a lot of info on the net to learn how to do things, but I wanted to place to collect the details in a better format than just the text files that are provided with my projects. Let this location serve as a place to see how it was done, not just read about it.

I started tinkering with electronics when I needed to learn how to solder for my first drone project. All the soldering was performed on the motors to the speed controllers, so it wasn't too technical. A simple tinning of the wires made the connections pretty easy, with the right tools. I wanted to build a nice camera drone, but never got around to it.

The drone collection:
- The first one (250mm)
- The second, which I flew most of the time (220mm)
- The others I didn't build, but were still fun out of the box (250mm and micros)

After learning how to solder (well enough to make a connection at least), I built the famous "Wimpy Weather Station". This involved a lot more than I wanted, but as of this writing it has been exposed to the North West elements for over five years. I never got around to adding more sensors (wind, rain, etc.), but it has been cool all the same.

There was about three years where I didn't do many projects, but learned to brew beer. It's probably a hobby I'll always have. There's something comforting about brewing your own beer and I suggest you try it out if you are a creative person. I didn't have any cooking skills, but brewing beer really made me want to learn more about cooking. I have a couple beer recipes that are shared here, but you have to let me know how they came out. :)

After finishing my Bachelors degree, I went back to tinkering with electronics. I became infatuated by the power of the Raspberry Pi micro-computer. The weather station ran on an Arduino microcontroller, but running a Debian Linux powered computer on a little credit card sized computer was absolutely fascinating to me. If you are into getting a personal website going for your home use or to learn programming, I highly suggest you look into these. After about two years of brewing, I really wanted to build a Keezer, which is a chest-freezer that has the door pulled off, a wood rim added and the door re-mounted back on. The amount of taps you can have is only limited by your freezer size. Being a prior website designer and a little geeky, I came up with the Keezer Kiosk. This is a web-application for tracking the beers served on the keezer and allows for temp reporting on the page.

Upcoming Projects

Since I have to pretty much write down good ideas before I forget them, it seemed like a good idea to make notes of the projects that I wanted to do. I use my phone's notes app quite a bit, so there may be a project that supersedes this list and they won't be done in any order. I only have time to work on one or two at a time and don't want to get wrapped up in too many projects.

Case-less computer
I have had a really nice ATX case for a while and took it apart. After getting the motherboard and drives mounted to the wood surface for the first time, it was able to boot up and join the wireless network. The only issue was that it was too old and slow to run Windows 10. Using another motherboard, I will have to completely change the layout of the current post placement. This project has been shelved as of August 2020.

Raspberry Pi Cloud Server w/ 1TB HDD
I have the parts, but need a cable to connect to the WD Green drive. I was going to put it in an old WD My Cloud case, suspend it from the ceiling and wrap it with cotton or something. This has been sitting on my bench for six months and I am still trying to justify $50 for a cable.