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You know it's bad when your current idea of a tech project is breaking out the soldering iron to fix the fans on a laptop stand. Just finished 4 months of mad-dash project (boring business software). Please tell me you guys have something more interesting going on.
Arthur, this cracked me up but it's so accurate. Feels like my "projects" in the last couple of weeks have been fixing cables that our puppy has chewed through.
A little further back than that I've spent some time building a robot with my two boys (5 and 8). I'm giving them a lot freedom with the direction and they are loving it. I let them choose the materials out of the garage and we have been slowly adding to it. So far it has a wood body and a wood base with some casters. A head that swivels, eyes that light up, batteries and a hacked baby monitor to give it a voice from a distance. It's pretty simple but they love choosing what to work on next and finding materials and then I coach them on how to make it happen. It's a good project during this crazy time. Smile
I'm trying to hack a Garmin BC30 reversing camera to be a forward facing camera (flip left/right) - a job for which Garmin did not offer any provisions in software or hardware unfortunately and while I'm not the first person on the internet to try to use this camera in this way, there does not appear to be any prior success in actually forcing it to work like that.

Anyway warranty's voided now so on with the fun!
I've been trying to knock together a automated stop for a chop saw.  Low cost linear bearings and belt driven mechanicals coupled with a couple arduino UNO's, one to run the stepper motors (using GRBL) and another to act as the HID.  I've got motion, homing and am working on improving the error reporting and cleaning up the arduino code...not being a programmer is really hampering processing the error codes and clean up though...

Used the Lagun CNC mill formerly in the Makerspace to make the carriages for the linear bearing.  That was fun!
n8, a robot is awesome. I bet they're learning a ton. What's their next big feature for it?

shovel, good luck!

Ray, that's awesome. GRBL is definitely lacking in error handling compared to full CNC software, but it's nice to be able to toss a cheap Arduino and shield in to get motion going.


I got sick of killing computer mice in <12 months, so I ordered a bunch of switches to refurbish a few of them instead of ordering new ones. From soldering wires to soldering components. Ever closer to a real tech project again. Big Grin