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?

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

Have added pages for weather stations and remote power stations to start collecting information on availability in Australia, and links to known hacks with these devices.

Remote power switches

Weather stations

Welcome to Fox IT Blog. This should be a place to find updates on some of my experiments in code and gadgets.