I got in my car yesterday to head to Jason’s place, and noticed that the Check Engine light was on.  I didn’t think much of it, as it was probably just my seasonal “Replace a glow plug” reminder.  When I got home, I scanned it out with VCDS, and discovered two codes: P0671 (Glow plug [...]

I’ve recently been working on a Schwinn s500 electric scooter that I’ve upgraded to LiPo power, on the stock controller and motor.  Going forward, I’ll be swapping in a brushless motor and controller, with a projected power output around 4hp.  To that end, I have to figure out a way to convert my existing hall-effect [...]

Brandon’s summary for youtube really says it all: “A mind controlled water canon duel.”  This project was started at the OMGWTFBBQ last Sunday (around 3pm) and completed by around 8pm on Tuesday evening. A big congrats to everyone involved for pulling a great project together so quickly.  Here’s hoping!  

 The Makery recently acquired a large (6s, 5 amp) LiPo battery for running various things around the shop, most notably electric scooters.  Given scooters’ tendency to wreck, and Makers’ tendency to be hard on their equipment, we determined that a few upgrades were in order. The battery is housed in a polycarbonate box, along with volt and [...]

 About 2 weeks ago, my 2002 Jetta (which just paid off) developed a rather nasty coolant leak. It started dripping something red, usually right after being turned off, and was complaining about low coolant. Needless to say, I was pretty confused.  In my mind, coolant is either green or yellow, and hydraulic fluid is red. [...]

Dave K and I are working on a project down at the Makery that requires direct programming of an ATTiny85; Dave ordered the USB ISP programmer for it, but was using a protoboard monstrosity to get it hooked up to the MCU Since he’s doing me a favor flashing chips for “my” project, he ask [...]

So it’s my birthday again;  Becky and I were discussing cakes, so I turned up some photos of cakes (mostly) made by Mom when I was a kid.  The airbrushed (blue) one is obviously store-bought, but the others are assembled from various cake shapes.  I think these cakes are from my 5th, 6th, and 7th [...]

Over the long weekend, I finally got around to painting our storage cubby.  This space is at the back of one of our closets, about waist high.  The space itself is about 4x4x8 (wxhxd) and uses up the area over a stairwell.  The walls were always getting beat up, as we store “long term storage” [...]

Cars always seem to wait until the dead of winter to have problems.  Last week, the light behind my heater control flickered a bit, and promptly failed. Last night, as I was out running errands, the radio decided that it wasn’t going to power up after just a quick stop.  I’d note that both of [...]

At the Makery lately, Brandon and I [with some help] have been working on a CNC Hot-wire Foam cutter quite a bit like this one.  Ours is going to be a bit larger, capable of slicing up a 2×4 foot piece of foam (actually, the X is more like 5 feet than 4). For our [...]