Solar Engraving

Learn to focus the energy of the sun into a concentrated beam capable of engraving cardboard, leather, cork, wood, and other organic materials. If you ever experimented with a magnifying glass outside on a sunny day, you are probably already familiar with this technique.

This project is part of my free Solar Class, where you can learn more ways to harness the sun’s energy through backyard projects like this one as well as solar panels.

The science at work here is the concentration of energy using a lens. Each ray of light carries energy along with it. Usually these rays are evenly spread out over the objects they hit, so no single point is getting a lot more or less energy than nearby areas.

The magnifying glass is a lens that focuses beams of light coming into it, concentrating many rays’ energy into more localized energy. If your material is at the right distance and orientation from the magnifying glass, all the light coming through the lens is concentrated into one spot on the material, heating it up enough to burn. A similar method using fields of mirrors pointing towards a central collector is used to heat up water for steam power generators.

This project will involve creating a stencil you can use over and over, then trying it out on a few materials. To get started, read on!

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Let’s go!

What You’ll Need

You don’t need much to practice your solar engraving skills. To follow along with these instructions, gather together:

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Solar USB Charger

Let’s make something super useful— your own solar powered USB backup battery! After some simple soldering, you’ll be ready to charge your phone and other portable electronics on the go while camping or during the next power outage. What follows is a basic recipe which you can follow exactly, or switch out the solar panel and battery size to match your desired capacity, charge speed, and budget.

This project is part of my free Solar Class, where you can learn more ways to harness the sun’s energy through engraving and solar panels.

To keep up with what I’m working on, follow me on YouTube, Instagram, Twitter, Pinterest, and subscribe to my newsletter.

What You’ll Need

Parts (Adafruit shopping list):

Tools:

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First soldering project? No problem! This is a great project for beginners, and you’ll get a variety of types of solder practice while building it. You can learn how in the soldering lesson of Randy’s free Instructables Electronics Class, then come back here to assemble your solar charger.

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Solar Balloon

The first project in my new Solar Class is a classic solar balloon.

Let’s make a solar balloon that floats with the power of hot air! This is the perfect backyard activity for a sunny day. A few common trash bags taped together can become a science experiment and an entertaining way to spend an afternoon.

The black color of the bags absorbs the sun’s energy, heating up the air inside. The color of an object correlates with the wavelengths of light it absorbs and reflects. Black absorbs the most wavelengths, while white absorbs the fewest. Red absorbs all but the red wavelengths, and so forth for other colors. Black is the most efficient color for converting light energy into heat energy, which is then transferred to the air inside the closed balloon. The hot air is less dense than the surrounding air, causing the balloon to float up, supporting its own weight.

This same physics powers hot air that balloons you can ride in. It’s the principle of buoyancy— once the air inside heats up and expands, our balloon weighs less than the air it displaces because it is less dense. This project demonstrates how solar radiation can be used to create heat, and a fun day outside.

This project is part of my free Solar Class, where you can learn more ways to harness the sun’s energy through engraving and solar panels.

To keep up with what I’m working on, follow me on YouTube, Instagram, Twitter, Pinterest, and subscribe to my newsletter.

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3 Beginner Arduino Mistakes

In my decade of experience building with and teaching Arduino, I see three mistakes more often than any others. Beginners typically:

  1. bite off more than they can chew by attempting to build a project with too many elements at once,
  2. make incorrect assumptions during prototyping,
  3. and underutilize the resources available to them online.

Read more about each one in the tutorial that follows, including how to avoid making these mistakes yourself.

If you’re just starting out in Arduino, try my free Instructables Arduino Class! It’ll bring you up to speed on the basics and best practices, further enhancing your Arduino fun-to-frustrating ratio.

If you’ve got tips for beginners, we’d all love to hear about them in the comments!

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Pi Camera Tumblr GIF-Maker

I wanted a way to use my vintage cameras in a new, digital way. I have a few kicking around in various conditions, but haven’t used them in ages because the film is costly to develop. Follow along with this Instructable to see how I put a Raspberry Pi and Pi Camera inside a retro film camera, and programmed it to upload GIFs to my Tumblr.

In my desire to capture more GIFs (and b-roll of using it) and discover the remaining bugs before publishing the tutorial, I took it to Maker Faire NY today, published the Instructable soon after. 

The code is based on Lara’s free Instructables Raspberry Pi Class, which contains valuable background info if you’re new to electronics, programming, or the Pi. If you have some Pi experience, you may appreciate the Pi Tumblr GIF Photobooth Instructable, which is a more concise overview of the class content. The same code can be used to run a photo booth at your next party! I chose to take my camera mobile with a big battery pack to capture GIFs at Maker Faire NY this year.

This Target Brownie Six-20 is a 40s camera, and it was pretty dirty and didn’t take great photos, so I don’t feel bad about gutting it. I’d think twice about cutting and drilling through some other members of my collection. If you take this on, be sure you’re comfortable disabling your camera’s ability to shoot film, as my methods are a bit destructive.

For this project, you will need:

To keep up with what I’m working on, follow me on YouTube, Instagram, Twitter, Pinterest, and subscribe to my newsletter. As an Amazon Associate I earn from qualifying purchases you make using my affiliate links.

I used the Raspbian operating system for this project, which includes Python 2, but you’ll need to install some packages using the following lines of code in your Pi’s terminal window in order to run the script:

sudo apt-get install imagemagick
sudo apt-get install mpg321 -y
sudo apt-get install python-RPi.gpio python3-RPi.gpio
sudo pip install pytumblr
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Wine Cork Trivet

This week I made a trivet from wine corks. It’s a quick and easy project to make, once you have enough wine corks, or you can buy them online or from a home brewing store.

The most basic version just requires a large hose clamp and a screwdriver. You can scale down the design with smaller clamps to make a set of coasters, too!

To keep up with what I’m working on, follow me on YouTube, Instagram, Twitter, Pinterest, and subscribe to my newsletter. As an Amazon Associate I earn from qualifying purchases you make using my affiliate links.

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Vinyl Helmet Stickers

Here’s how I created custom vinyl stickers for my motorcycle helmet. I was inspired by hand painted helmet designs and chose brush script lettering to communicate my two most common thoughts about drivers while riding my motorcycle in NYC. For single-color designs like mine, you don’t need a big vinyl printer, just a hobby vinyl cutter will work fabulously. I was visiting the Pier 9 Autodesk workshop and used the Roland VersaCAMM printer/cutter because it was available. Alternatively, you could bring your sticker design files to a local sign printing shop for printing/cutting.

For this project, I used:

To keep up with what I’m working on, follow me on YouTube, Instagram, Twitter, Pinterest, and subscribe to my newsletter. As an Amazon Associate I earn from qualifying purchases you make using my affiliate links.

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Motorcycle Petcock Replacement

My motorcycle’s fuel valve aka petcock was original to my 1975 Honda CB200, and it was acting a bit clogged. Instead of cleaning it out of years of gunk, I opted to order a replacement. This Instructable details the replacement of said petcock, which is similar to most old Hondas.

For this project you will need:

To keep up with what I’m working on, follow me on YouTube, Instagram, Twitter, Pinterest, and subscribe to my newsletter. As an Amazon Associate I earn from qualifying purchases you make using my affiliate links.

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