The ramblings of g1powermac

Now this is an interesting project.  Take a look at this video:

It shows how you can harness the sun to make hot water using just a PVC pipe cut in half and the inside covered with a reflective material. It’s an ingenious yet utterly simple solution. I may just have to try that out later.

Posted by g1powermac under Construction, Interesting Stuff | Comments (0)

With the idea of adding an electric motor to my four wheel pedal cart, I got to thinking that I could make that project even greener if I were to charge the batteries using renewable power instead of from the power grid which is predominately coal powered.  I looked around the internet to see what my options were and discovered that wind power would be the best as it’s almost always windy here.  After searching a bit more, I found quite a few tutorials on how to build a wind turbine from scratch, even including the alternator.  This has me quite excited as I’ll not only be able to do something green but also to play with the welder I’ll be buying shortly.  I’ll be adding more info on this project within the next few weeks.

Posted by g1powermac under Construction, Electronics | Comments (0)

After thinking about adding an electric motor to my four wheel pedal cart yesterday, I decided that to do that kind of project I really need a welder.  After looking around, I found a nice 140 amp MIG welder on eBay for around $300.  I should be able to do lots of interesting things with a welder and metalworking than what I can do with wood like what I have used in the past.  Of course, now I need to teach myself how to weld…

Posted by g1powermac under Construction | Comments (0)

So I have this four wheel pedal powered cart that I got about 9 months or so ago.  It’s a pretty nice cart, but the only problem is that it is quite difficult to pedal the cart on anything put absolutely level ground.  So my next project may hopefully be adding an electric motor and batteries to the cart so I can easily drive it around.  But, instead of just riding, I’m planning on attaching a camera mount to it so I can use it film stuff as well.  I should have more details of the plan by tomorrow.

Posted by g1powermac under Construction, Electronics, Filming | Comments (0)

Today I decided to finish up the camera dolly project by building the track.  The track consists of two aluminum tubes six feet long and four 1″x3″ pieces of wood cut to around 20 inches.  I attached the two tubes to the four pieces of wood by first drilling a large hole in the top of the tube to allow the head of a screw and the drill bit to pass into the inside of the tube and then a smaller hole directly opposite of the larger hole to allow the screw to pass into the wood.  In between the tubes and the wood planks, there are four washers.  Two rubber washers sandwiched between two metal ones to allow further vibration dampening.  And since there is only one screw attaching each tube to each plank of wood, the whole track easily collapses allowing easy transport.  The final result is quite amazing.  It rolls extremely smoothly, and if I needed to, the track can be expanded.

Posted by g1powermac under Construction, Interesting Stuff | Comments (0)

Since today has been quite rainy and I need to work outside to build the track of the camera dolly, I decided to come up with a system that will hold the tripod securely to the moving platform.   Here’s what I came up with:

I used three 1.5″ “L” brackets per foot of the tripod.  Two “L” brackets are positioned on one side of the foot slightly bent so it can cup the tripod foot, while the other bracket is on the opposite side with a bolt drilled through it.  I tapped the hole for the bolt in the bracket so it allows you to tighten or loosen it on the tripod foot.  The nylon stop nuts are there only as a grip to allow me to twist the bolt.  With a few twists, this setup holds the tripod very securely and should prevent any accidents to happen to my expensive camera rig.

Posted by g1powermac under Construction, Filming | Comments (0)

I did some shooting for some commercials the other day with the 35mm DOF adapter.  However, I found all of the dolly shots I did, with the dolly that attaches to my tripod, to be very shaky.  There seems to be a couple of reasons for this.  First, the optical image stabilizer in my Canon GL2 behaves badly with the adapter so I have to turn it off.  Second, the adapter adds a considerable amount of weight to the camera rig causing the cheap dolly rig to vibrate even more.  So I had enough of that and decided to build myself a real camera dolly with a metal track.  Here’s what I got so far:

As you can tell, I’ve built only the dolly platform.  The track will be made out of the two aluminum pipes you see below the dolly.  Interestingly enough, the dolly will roll very smoothly on the pipes, even with the pipes just on the ground and not attached to each other.

So here’s how I built the platform.  The platform itself is 2 feet square made out of three 2 foot long 2″x6″ and four 2 foot long 1″x6″.  The outer two 2″x6″ have had 45 degree rip cuts along each edge to allow easy attachment of four “L” brackets that hold each set of wheels at 90 degrees to each other.  This allows the wheels to easily roll on a round pipe.  The eight wheels are actually skateboard wheels usually used on old school style skateboards.  These types of wheels are ideal because they are very soft and cushion the platform.  To attach the wheels to the “L” brackets, I first drilled two holes in each bracket and attached the wheels with 5/16″ bolts and nylon lock nuts.  I also added skateboard “speed” washers on each side of the wheels so the wheel or skateboard bearings wouldn’t touch the bracket or nut allowing the wheels to rolly freely.  All in all, the platform wasn’t all that hard to build, and it rolls very smoothly.  I should hopefully be able to build the track this weekend, and I may play with building some form of clamps on the platform to hold the tripod’s feet so it doesn’t fall off.

Posted by g1powermac under Construction, Filming | Comments (0)

And a picture of a bunch of old cameras has to be worth more, considering how many photos they took in their day…

After working on the oak shelving on and off for the past few weeks, I finally attached them to the wall today and decided to put my old camera collection back out on display.  These cameras have been sitting in a box for the past 4 or 5 years or so and haven’t seen much love after I decided that computer science was more interesting than history.

I do miss that time of my life though.  My bedroom looked literally like a museum.  I had a very large collection of antiques on shelving all around my room.  It was definitely not your typical teenage bedroom, that’s for sure.  For the amount of stuff that was in that room, it was always kept organized for the most part.

But after moving out here to Kentucky, I really lost interest in it all.  I discovered my new passion of algorithms and computers.  My room turned into what some would call a small computer lab of sorts which now has grown into a basement lab that would rival most labs in small colleges.

I do wish I had more of the antiques from that time since I now keep all my tech stuff in the basement, and my bedroom is now strictly a bedroom again.  Unfortunately, most of it was lost 4 years ago when we lost our house to a major toxic mold infestation causing most of our possesions to be contaminated.  We were able to salvage alot, but we just couldn’t save it all.  Those were really tough years…

Posted by g1powermac under Construction, Other | Comments (0)

Alright, getting back to the extreme green garden, I got a couple of more ideas. The biggest thing I want to do is to make the entire garden ‘off the grid,’ which basically means that it doesn’t depend on anything from the outside once it gets started. This includes electricity, water, and organic matter. From my last post about the garden, I mentioned I wanted to do solar panels and rain collection off the shed. However, I’m also thinking of setting up some small wind turbines to gain some power off the constant wind we get out here. This then may allow me to power an electric lawn mower so I can collect lots of organic matter for the compost piles.

The other idea I have is built upon my previous one with moisture sensors to determine if the plants need water. What I’d like to do is have multiple different sensors. I’m thinking of possible soil acidity sensors in the planting beds and temperature sensors in the compost pile to make sure it’s working correctly.

And finally, I’d like to use salvaged building supplies for the shed and garden to make it as green as possible.  Oh, and yes, that’s the first pumpkin I harvested from the current garden we have.  It’s an organically raised pie pumpkin, just waiting to be used in a fresh pumpkin pie, mmm.

Posted by g1powermac under Construction | Comments (0)

Alright, so I got this wild idea. Since I now have the fence completed for the new garden area, I’m thinking of building this really nice shed/greenhouse within the garden area. Not only that, I want to put solar panels on the shed to power the electronics in the greenhouse that will control the vents, fans and possibly heating units during the winter. But why stop there? I might as well add a rain water collection system for the rain coming off the shed’s roof. So now I got a barrel of water that can be pumped out to drip irrigation within the raised beds and greenhouse when needed using moisture sensors. This will allow me to have a completely self sufficient garden without using any external utilities. And not only that, I’ll have it so wired up that all I’ll need to do is just plant the plants, set the computer system, and forget it till I need to harvest the food. I need to plan this out…

Posted by g1powermac under Construction | Comments (0)