Tom Murphy, a physicist at UC, San Diego, writes an interesting blog about energy usage. He put a post up today about measuring accurately how much natural gas his house used for various tasks (like heating water for a shower), in the face of a woefully coarse-grained gas meter. His solution was a pretty neat MacGyver-like combination of a kitty toy laser pointer, photo sensor, dish towel and plastic shopping bag. End result were some accurate graphs of where the gas was going and then some comparison to microwave efficiency.
Make a robot friend with Adafruit’s CRICKIT – A Creative Robotics & Interactive Construction Kit. It’s an add-on to our popular Circuit Playground Express, FEATHER and other platforms to make and program robots with CircuitPython, MakeCode, and Arduino. Start controlling motors, servos, solenoids. You also get signal pins, capacitive touch sensors, a NeoPixel driver and amplified speaker output. It complements & extends your boards so you can still use all the goodies on the microcontroller, now you have a robotics playground as well.
This is fascinating! I’m going to be moving to an all-electric apartment so I’ll probably run my own experiments inspired by this work. Now where’d I put that kill-a-watt?
Interesting link!
This is fascinating! I’m going to be moving to an all-electric apartment so I’ll probably run my own experiments inspired by this work. Now where’d I put that kill-a-watt?