Category: Idea

2019 Holiday 2020 New Years Cheer!

With the dawning of this New Christian Year 2020 as marked by the recent Gregorian/Italian New Year, as well as the various Holidays that have passed/are still happening/are coming soon, I hope you all are doing fantastic! Much joy and cheer to you!

Nothing much of an update really, things are plugging along at 4Crows and MakerCave, the steps on some days are bigger than others, but most days lately have been forward!

I’m trying out some jewellery on the 3D Printers today, just to see how it turns out and stuff like that. One is a Cosplay toy, which is also kinda fun. Pictures when they’re done added.

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Nerf Hacking Notes

My kids asked me, yet again, to fix busted Nerf darts. There’s a few sitting here beside me waiting for cyanoacrylate as I type this in fact. One or two have a plastic tip that is starting to separate, another has double splits down it’s shaft. This would be less of a big deal if we had more, but looking at the stores just walking around and Nerf replacements aren’t cheap!

This led me online and down the rabbit hole of DIY foam ammo, gun mods (dart post / air restrictor removals) and inevitably looking at DIY guns (which are very similar to the water guns). I collected the kid’s 3 Nerf guns, and started researching their hackability, to see if I could get the owner’s permission to upgrade their gun.

[Pictures coming soon, will edit the post and add them when I post them]
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Door Computer

Another use I had for a Small Board Computer was as a door security system. The Raspberry Pi with attached Adafruit touchscreen and camera would be perfect for this. Also add a magnetic sensor for “door open”, and a more general motion or even position sensor.

I actually got most of the way through the basics of this project. One of the problems I ran into was getting a clean picture to the rpi’s camera through the door’s existing peephole. It would probably be best to figure out a solution better suited to the camera, and just swap out eye-pieces when the door camera is installed (remembering to keep the original one for replacement if you ever need to).
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Balcony Computer

I’ve been thinking of how useful a little computer on the balcony would be. Not for any kind of interactive use, but for data collection and light controls and other such things. I thought I’d make up a list of these “such things”, to see what it would take to make it a reality.

The original seed for the idea was a weather station, just to see how cold and windy-ish it was, as well as barometric pressure readings. Since it’s on a covered balcony, the wind readings will be interesting but probably quite local. I’m also not going to worry about precipitation measuring, nor wind-direction measuring at first. It shouldn’t get much rain, nor will the direction of the wind be generally useful most of the time I don’t think. I’m certainly prepared to be wrong on that, but that’s what the prior versions will be for.
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DIY/Homemade Water Guns – Collected Thoughts

The heat of this summer (2015, Vancouver, BC Area), along with something that happened to my youngest child, prompted me to look into how to DIY a good water gun.

My youngest was at an end-of-the-school year party at a local park. The kids were told it was OK to bring water guns, yay! So we went out and bought a couple of cheap water guns. Long story short, my kid had fun, but was severely outgunned…

So I thought maybe I’d see if the internet had a solution to that. 😉
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