For quite a while now I’ve had the idea in my head to take a couple of solar garden lights and use them to illuminate an address sign. I’m not sure what sparked the idea since my old address sign wasn’t that hard to see, but since when did that matter. The catalyst for finally getting it done was a desire to make us of my membership to the Tech Shop and their laser cutter.
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Being a geek and a Boy Scout leader, when I read about doping a pinecone with various chemicals to make colored flames in your campfire, I knew that I had to try it. As with many projects, it took me quite a while to act on that whim, but if you spend 20 minutes every couple of months on something, eventually it will get done. I’m not doing anything new here, but I wanted to post to provide some of the details that most pages seem to gloss over.
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Most people who know me know that I served a mission for the LDS Church in the Russia Novosibirsk Mission from 1995 to 1997. And while having a shoebox full of pictures is traditional, having them scanned and safely posted on a website is much better. Full disclosure, I did this in April and backdated the post to then instead of June when it actually got posted. So without further introduction, here’s the album.

Elder Hoopes’s Photo Album 

While not technically my Christmas present, just before Christmas The TechShop was running a Groupon for a month’s membership plus several hours of classes for a reasonable price. Heidi was almost as excited on my behalf as I was so I bought the membership and just before my time off from work began, I took my first class on the laser cutter.

I was hooked.
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Image courtesy of The Falafel

So I’ve been on a major electronics kick lately. Major in that I’ve been really excited about it. Not so major in what I actually know so far. But in the midst of my Hackaday and EEVBlog reading I came across an episode where Dave blows up some capacitors. This combined with the activity to blow up a few caps myself in the Make: Electronics book Heidi was conned into buying me for Father’s day, meant that I have at least become confident in what a blown capacitor looks like.

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For Christmas this year, I was given a copy of Backyard Ballistics. Now all of the information in the book is widely discussed on the internet but there is value in having it pulled together in one place. And, with a genuine vacation from work, I was determined to make use of the information immediately since I knew I wouldn’t get to it later.

The chosen project was a PVC cannon powered by compressed air. One sprinkler system install gave me all the PVC experience I’ll probably ever need and since explosives always drive down the wife acceptance factor, compressed air seemed like the way to go.
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