Plans, projects and How-to's for Home Machinists and Other Makers
I’ve been building large inexpensive outdoor robotic rovers that can carry a heavy payload for miles. I needed a way to measure the speed of the wheels and use that information to calculate how fast the bot is moving. I wanted software that was written with Python 3 and which would run on a Raspberry Pi. … Read the rest
I wanted to connect a power button to a Raspberry Pi 4’s GPIO pins so I could shut it off or turn it on without having to touch the USB cable. The easiest way to do this didn’t work for me and it took me a couple of hours to find out why. … Read the rest
I’ve purchased a 8KW (27,000 BTU) “diesel heater” to heat my small garage workshop with. I did not know that this kind of heater existed until very recently. They are commonly used to heat the interiors of motor vehicles and boats without having to run the engine, so they are also known as parking heaters. … Read the rest
I have an ancient Sears kerosene torpedo heater that was one of the first big workshop investments I ever made. I bought it back when I was very young and poor, and was often fixing my car in the winter in an unheated garage.
When I tried using it for the first time in about 6 or 7 years I was surprised to find that it ran with the same kerosene that had been in the tank all that time. … Read the rest