Our group of intrepid hackers are going to invade Detroit bringing along awesome and chaos. Sound builder’s isomorphic keyboard. Whitestar’s transatlantic weather balloon. The flame throwing pony. Power wheels racecar.

http://makerfaire.com/detroit/2011/

Home-Built Funicular (Motorized People-Mover System)

Tired of your dinky home network with restrictive consumer grade equipment? Do you want to configure your network but can’t affordenterprise grade hardware?  Well fret no more; with our new workshop we’ll show you how to install DDWRT on a cheap router and make it do what YOU want!

DDWRT is a free, open source firmware designed to run on a wide variety of consumer grade routers and embedded systems.  What this means is you can take a $60 router and make it as configurable as a $600 router just by updating the firmware.  DDWRT can also breathe new life into a dying or supposedly dead router so you can get more mileageout of your old equipment.

The first part of the class will go over installing DDWRT on a Linksys WRT54g but other models/brands are certainly welcome.  Once that is done we’ll go over some networking basics and show ways, with real world examples, that you can use DDWRT to improve your home network. Lastly there will be a quick look at some popular routing Linux distros in case you want to take things a step further and build a router out of a computer.

Time: Thurs June 9 @ 8pm
What to bring:
laptop
a network cable or two
old router you’d be OK with bricking (the install process is pretty reliable but it is still possible to completely kill a router)

I ordered the parts  we’ll need to do the first 5 experiments. I bought everything from Jameco. Here is the list of part numbers I used in case anyone is interested. We’ll start work next week.

I teach high school physics at Kentucky Country Day School. All of our freshman take physics, but there isn’t time to cover all the topics one would like. For this reason I also teach Physics II. It is taken mainly by seniors who want to learn about some of the topics that were omitted from the freshman class. Physics II is a conceptual physics course. Qualitative understanding is emphasized over calculation and I try to help the students develop their physics intuition through exercises like one might find in the book Thinking Physics. This year I decided to spend several weeks using the new Make: Electronics book. It takes the same approach of doing first to develop understanding over calculating starting with theory. The fact that it is totally hands on will appeal to my students, especially when senioritis starts to set in.  I plan to post updates here about how it’s going and to share what I learn from the experience. Keep checking back if you are interested.

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