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.
Stop breadboarding and soldering – start making immediately! Adafruit’s Circuit Playground is jam-packed with LEDs, sensors, buttons, alligator clip pads and more. Build projects with Circuit Playground in a few minutes with the drag-and-drop MakeCode programming site, learn computer science using the CS Discoveries class on code.org, jump into CircuitPython to learn Python and hardware together, or even use Arduino IDE. Circuit Playground Express is the newest and best Circuit Playground board, with support for MakeCode, CircuitPython, and Arduino. It has a powerful processor, 10 NeoPixels, mini speaker, InfraRed receive and transmit, two buttons, a switch, 14 alligator clip pads, and lots of sensors: capacitive touch, IR proximity, temperature, light, motion and sound. A whole wide world of electronics and coding is waiting for you, and it fits in the palm of your hand.
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?