A friend who recently acquired a CO2 laser cutter for his school recently sent me a message. “What is the difference between a laser that will cut metals and one that won’t?”. I thought this is a good question, as the answer will help with understanding how to work with many materials.
Tag:Edcucational
Surface Preparation and Finger Prints. How bad are they?
In preparing a surface for paint / glue / thermal paste / soldering / whatever, there is one thing to remember. A normal finger print is of similar thickness to cling wrap (0.01mm). A thick (eg post pizza) print, where the ridges are no longer visible, is closer to the thickness of a sheet of paper (0.1mm).
Rule of thumb. If you would you would not be happy with this kind of material on the surface of whatever you are coating, remove your finger prints.
ASCII-Art Arduino Pinouts
Managing arduino projects can be a nightmare because its hard to keep track of your hardware setup in your code comments. To enable easy documentation of pin assignments, I created a couple of ASCII art arduino pin-outs.
These come complete with ports, PWM and coms all marked. Simply paste as a comment into your code and marvel at your new found organisation.
Practical Iterative K-ary Tree (aka n-ary, n-tree) Traversal in C#. A surprisingly useful tool for the average programmer.
Introduction: A lot of components in the C# environment are essentially a K-ary [kay-er-ee] tree. From tree-view nodes, to serialising a type via reflection, to directory listings to menu hierarchies, and so on. Often we need to iterate through these types of structures, or our own trees, and we just write some code to do …
Continue reading Practical Iterative K-ary Tree (aka n-ary, n-tree) Traversal in C#. A surprisingly useful tool for the average programmer.
Maze Making Software
This software creates mazes of different sizes and configurable appearance. It is designed for teachers. It can save the output as printable sheets or bitmap images.
What’s inside an integrated circuit? We broke one open and scanned it for you at 12,800DPI
Because you always wondered what was inside. See if you can guess which IC it was? Useful image for teachers, overhead slides etc. NB: This is not always a good DIY or classroom activity. Be aware that some electrical components create a seriously hazardous dust when broken open. Rectifiers, Hi Power transistors, Older IC’s & IC’s with certain …
Continue reading What’s inside an integrated circuit? We broke one open and scanned it for you at 12,800DPI