[Closed] Introduce Yourself

@portersmith 

Welcome aboard, there are some other railroad enthusiasts here as well.

@robotbuilder mostly small grain farming.  We specialize in malt barley.  Most of my projects I can't share due to them being for my engineering job.  

I plan to make a grain bin humidity monitor/controller that I would like to share when it is done.  The other one on the farm has been a "dummy" speed signal for a john deere 7200 planter monitor.  Originally it used a radar sensor to detect speed and send that signal to the monitor to determine planting population and if the rows were working right.  John deere wanted $1200 for a 1990's used radar sensor, so i used a nano to generate a pulse width signal to give the monitor a signal to trick it into thinking i was traveling at planting speed.  it worked pretty well, and was a $10 fix to get me up and planting.  This spring, i'm going to go one step further and put a rotary encoder on the planter drive shaft to give live speed feed back rather than an average dummy signal. 

@frogandtoad Generally speaking our job is to take technologies created in the lab and determine how to scale them into a production environment safely, cost effectively, and within the same performance specs of the laboratory setting.    ie.  a chemist in a lab creates a new type of fuel in a lab setting using test tubes and a total of 100ml of solution.  A chemical engineer would have to analyze what they did in that small scale setting and then determine how to do 10,000 gallons of that an hr, or something in the large scale.  There are a ton of other quality and process related things we do, but I could go on for hours about all those.  If it is made in a manufacturing plant, there is a good chance a chemical engineer was involved somewhere in the process.   

Hello, 

My name is Chris and I'm a chemistry professor at Dallas College (in Dallas, TX). I'm new to microelectronics, but I've been a maker (mostly simple woodwork and 3D printing) for several years. My passion is creating new and fun learning tools for my chemistry classes. Over the past few years, I've designed and 3D printed new molecular models and puzzles for making chemistry more fun and less scary to first and second year college students.

Recently I decided to incorporate microelectronics into my puzzles. I've just finished creating a puzzle that uses an Arduino Nano, a rotary encoder, an LCD screen, a servo motor, and an RC522 RFID module. I'll post a picture of the project and an explanation a bit later. My goal is to create a series of puzzles that can be used as an escape room experience that challenges my students to work through some of the most challenging math/word problems in chemistry.

I've been following DroneBot Workshop on YouTube for a while. The videos are so informative and the presenter (Bill, right?) is so professional in his approach that I figured this forum is probably informative and professional as well.

I look forward to learning new things and sharing my projects with you.

@chemicalarts 

Welcome to the forum Chris.

Looking forward to your puzzle(s).

@chemicalarts 

Welcome to the forum Chris,
My name is Lee, also from the Dallas area (Grapevine). I got my start towards a Masters degree at one of your fine colleges (many years ago), for that I owe all of you a debt of gratitude. I am a retired Navy vet and I worked in telecommunications and network admin / engineering for many years.

I’d be very interested to learn about your puzzle project!

I know you will enjoy DBWS and the forum, it’s a fine group. Again. Welcome...

Lee

@chemicalarts 

Hi Chris, welcome to the forum!  But where were you when I took chemistry in my first quarter at Ga Tech?  Maybe saying "quarter" dates me and you might not have even been born then or at the very least were quite young.  I wish I had had a professor that could have made it "more fun and less scary."  I can go on record as admitting it was a nightmare and I received the lowest grade out of all my other classes.  And before that I loved anything related to science.  🤣 

@codecage

Just riffing on your last;  I consistently got very high grades for all the "Humanity" subjects but either got F or A plus for Calculus. You either get it or you don't.  First two times I tried to learn Calculus I was clueless and got "like" 10 percent in the exams. Utterly crashed.

Third time was the charm .. I got a lecturer who understood how to "Communicate" I fell in love with Newton and Fourier with the stories he told his rapt class of Trade School Electronics Students. I tottally GOT Basic Calculus and plenty more besides.

I know that I am far too stupid to be able to "wheel and deal in Maths" . I am smart enough however to appreciate the value of 3Blue 1 Brown in the same way as I can watch ballet without being able to stand on my tippy toes.

I realize this is Off Topic  for a forum such as this but the reason I, Most humbly, put this forward to the throng, is that none of us are certain and sure in our progression in apprehending the technologies that are sweeping over us both in rapidity and overwhelming superiority.

We need to readjust ourselves to appreciate , to enjoy , to revel in the magnificent technology that keeps hammering down upon us. Much less than learning how to make use of it...

My point here is that we can get to grips with these wondrous products. It will take skills we never learned at Trade School but we need to be patient with ourselves and learn how to learn.

I am really happy with the projects I have built and they are little machines I can point to with pride.. But in reality 90 percent of the change in my life has been the change in my cognitive ability . The machine itself is but an artifact..

Brother, If Life on This Dirt (TM) was going to be simple and non confusing I would have read the brochure and cast it aside... instead I decided to give it a go..

As others, not just me have observed.. "What a time to be alive" .. !! ~Big Smiles~

Kindest Regards

M

@mark-bolton 

Hi Mark,

So well put. I to am a product of trade school but would never become the electronics engineer I wanted to be. I could never figure out what 2+2 is. Today retired as an archeological technician for one of the greatest museums in the world and at 71 I’m studying algebra, trigonometry and soon calculus. For for it was me being not a poor student intellectually but young and immature but also incompetent instructors. 

Thank you for your words I can see myself in them. I’m having a ball now again as a student but now the operative word is a humble and yes a much more mature student. 

best,

Anibal 

@anibal Thank you so much for you're kind reply.

I never wanted to be an Engineer. I saw my self very much like the Harry Tuttle character in the movie Brazil. I wanted to rescue machines that were bricking out, out in the wild. "Where ever there's trouble ... a man alone."   ... When I was a little kid a periodical "Radio TV and Hobbies" had a regular column where a Tech would describe the fault finding process and follow it through to the conclusion. I found it utterly compelling.

I never wanted to use differential calculus to analyze H Parameters. But "Boring battle story alert" I DID .. I  was working with a Polish Refugee (1980s) who had had some involvement in submarine architecture.  He was working as a "bench tech" in a hospital with me. What a privilege!! That guy could barely speak English when I first started working with him but after six months his command of English was better than 90 percent of Australians.

Am I alone in thinking that, statistically,  we are likely to meet few really gifted people and when we do we should glory in it and "celebrate diversity"?

Any way I am more interested in asking you to expand on your work as an Archeological Technician. To me museums are places of worship.  As technology become far more complex the inevitable comparison seems to be that people in the past were primitive and unsophisticated... When we look at Mathematics nothing could be further from the truth.

I do realize I am "pumping you for a good story" and I hope you don't think I am out of line.  I do not doubt you have some gems to relate...

Kindest of regards

Mark

G'day folks, I'm an ugly old git from DownUnder who started to learn the Arduino to help out a friend and by luck managed to get a few things right and want help to translate some 'duino code to the ESP32.

Currently programming in an optimising compiler called PureBasic (current project is up to 80,00 lines Phew!) and wasn't sure I would be able to handle basic duino code. Been into coding and IT for over 40 years and still need more brainz.

Can crochet, cook and am also an older Amateur (VK3HAF)

Currently collecting some useful bits for my Mega that interest me specifically.

Hi everyone,

Have discovered electronics later in life.  Wow it is very addictive.

Used to be a mechanical maintenance engineer in the Australian mining industry. 

Used to do some programming using Basic years ago.

Moved to Lake Taupo in New Zealand.  Find the weather in NZ much more liveable.

Currently doing simple projects using Arduinos.

The current one is a small solar tracker.  This is going to eventually power a kinetic sculpture.

Dronebot workshop is amazing.  Everytime I see another video, new possibilities rush to the surface.

Anyway cheers from the "Land of the long white cloud".

Plossyl

@plossyl 

Welcome to the forum (and to electronics and the Arduino).

Is the solar tracker meant for  a sculpture that you made as well ?

@will

Yes the sculpture is going to be either a moving bird wing and or air slowly rising in a viscous clear fluid.  Either way they are meant for outdoors.   My beloved better half will not let them reside in the house.

These are only the latest of a number of things I've made,  none of them are actually useful, that's why I call them sculptures.

Up until now They have all been pure mechanical in nature.  The Arduino increases the possibilities exponentially. 

Anyway thanks for asking.

Plossyl

Hello folks,

Thanks for the add. I dont really do many forums but I like the dronebot videos so much it seemed like a good thing to do. I really like tinkering with electronics and look forward to the forum posts. I don't know too much but I do know enough to get myself in trouble. Get ready for the dumb questions.

Tracy