Category: Projects

For the last 15 years, my family has put their pictures up on a web server so that friends and families can browse through them. Unfortunately, the images that were put up were not well catalogued, and it was difficult to find a picture even if you knew what you were looking for, and impossible to browse through them, as each image would take several seconds, or even minutes, to load and few of them had names that described their contents.

I wanted to create a tool that would build an easy to use photo gallery website around an existing collection of images. Having just used Django to create my own web photo gallery for this site I decided that I base this project on the Django template engine, and reuse some of my old photo gallery templates. I made the script produce a static website, as I felt that ...

The Idea:

I've wanted to play with embedded systems for a long while. While embedded systems programming is not my favorite branch of Computer Science, the things you can make with a micro-controller have a certain flash to them that most other programming projects lack. So, when I had the opportunity to work on an embedded systems project for a class, I decided I wanted to make something flashy. My original idea was to make a remote controlled unicycle, but it rapidly became evident that such a contraption would be well beyond my abilities to fabricate, let alone control. Instead, I decided to give my device two wheels, side by side like a Segway so that it would only have to balance in one dimension at once.

The biggest question I had to answer before I could put anything together was how sense the tilt of the device. I ...

After having learned some lessons from my first ill-fated attempt at making a cloud chamber I decided to give it another shot, and this time around I had some better results. For a little bit of background on what I have done already, you can look here and here, and for directions that I was working off of, you can look here.

The biggest problems I ran into the first time I tried putting this all together were with the jar, so I decided to put some extra effort into getting the jar set up properly. The biggest change I made was to attach the absorbent cloth to the bottom of the jar with a clip instead of using adhesive of any sort. To fashion the clip, I just cut a 6 inch segment of metal coat hanger and bent it into something resembling a circle. Because the diameter was ...

I haven’t tried doing many “do it yourself” projects from the internet, and so I wasn’t entirely prepared for what I was getting myself into. The steps given on the website I was working off of were pretty simple:

1. Get a jar
2. Put something absorbent on the bottom of the jar
3. Add some alcohol
4. Let sit for a while
5. Put on dry ice
6. See trails of awesome!

I believe I can confidently say I messed up every one of these steps in some way or another. Fortunately I learned a few things and got the contraption working in the end. This post however, is not about that. It is about all the things that can go wrong while you are trying to make a cloud chamber from instructions you get online.

Getting a Jar:

I am still unsure as to what the ideal jar for this project might ...