July 1, 2007
My nice hifi stereo was sounding pretty poor. Here's my troubleshooting story.
April 19, 2001
I've done it! I actually got a PIC program to work, and on the first try! To program it I built Michael Covington's NoPPP (NoParts Pic Programmer), and then a stupid little circuit to put an LED at each bit of PortB. It flashes the LEDs alternately from one end to the other. Here's my first ever program. WOOHOO! Many thanks to Joe Woloszyn who actually gave me my first sample PIC16F84 and lots of advice along the way.
April 3, 2001
These days I'm thinking a lot about PIC processors. It's a little microcontroller which I intend to use in many projects to come. I haven't programmed one yet, but I'm just about ready to do so. I'll put something here to describe my circuit once I get it working.
Summer, 1999
Tesla Coils This is Bill Beaty's web site which has links to all kinds of great amateur science stuff. I'm a member of a Tesla coil mailing list. The maintainer's web page, http://www.pupman.com/ has some really awesome pictures of giant Tesla coils in action. We're talking ten foot long sparks PLUS! You have GOT to check this out! I'm hoping to extract two foot long sparks from my machine someday. If I ever get it working I'll put some pictures here.
Robots. I've suddenly become interested in robots, particularly robots that are designed to fight each other! These guys have some really cool robots and some very entertaining stories. I was thinking of building a robot that my kids could play with. It would have to be very tough, so the techniques these guys use to build their robots would probably suit me well. Of course I'd have to remove the weapons!