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Been a long time …

Just realised that I haven’t posted here in a long time, started a new role at a new school start of 2022 and that has been keeping me busy … in a good way.

Few projects that have been looked at in this time:

  • I did build a finished version of the RGB light controller on strip board, worked quite nicely
  • Lots of Home Assistant experimentation, including an updated receiver for the weather station to post data to HA via MQTT
  • I fixed our pool chlorinator controller, ended up being a dry solder joint, saved myself about $2000 that it would have cost to replace it
  • Brought the Macintosh SE back to life with a BlueSCSI card, this basically replaces a failed SCSI hard drive with a microcontroller and a microSD card (go read the post here).

Almost end of school holidays, which is usually when I have some time to reflect, perhaps there will be another detailed post for one of these projects?

Time for an update?

Realised I have not written any updates here for half the year, it has been a busy time. I’m now teaching the Robotics/Electronics subject but getting students up to speed with theory has cut into real hands-on time.

I also received a grant so there are resources stashed away for when I have time to unpack and set up, but our new workspace is not ready yet.

Toys to play with include:

  • a laser cutter
  • 3D printer (finally out of the box and doing some tests)
  • Arduino kits (these have been used by some of my more motivated kids)
  • micro:bits (got a bit of use already)
  • Raspberry Pi
  • a weather station that needs to be installed, then we can use it to collect lots of data
  • a couple of mBots
  • bits and pieces of electronics