Unschooling Share (Strew?) Everything: LEDs, transistors, and Morse Code, Oh My

Sharing everything I do with the 11, 10, and 7 year-old gang works best for me in unschooling. Of course, YMMV. Allow me to elucidate.

This morning, I decided that Forrest Cook was exactly right. The diode that was protecting the Rockmite from dying if I ever hooked up the batteries backward was also succking up 0.8 Volts that could be used to transmit a bit further. I decided to take the thing out.

But first, I called the gang in to talk about it. They've worked with LEDs before; they know that if you hook them up backwards they don't conduct, and therefore don't light up.I explained that this was exactly the same, except the here diode doesn't light up ever. It does however flat out refuse to conduct if the battery is hooked up backwards, (the same thing as the LED being instralled backwards.) I then explained that not conducting when the batterey was backwards kept other bits of the circuit from dying when hooked up to a backwards battery. Finally, I talked about how I'd have a prodcedure in place to check the battery polarity ever time I changed batteries by using a voltmeter. The whol thing took maybe five minutes.

At this point, the 7 and 9 year-old kids, Tawnse and Mota (for our purposes) left. The 11 year-old, Daize, stayed. I lost my glasses several months back. My vision is going all to hell. The kid asked if she could help with the de-soldering. (That's the diode at the end of the brown power supply wire there.)

I gladly accepted her offer of help, and off we went. She torqued the living bejesus out of the power supply plug at one point, we talked about only moving things when you need to. I dediced to go with a different type of wire thanks to seeing what the difficulties were even if you could see. The kid got practice soldering. It was good all around. We, after a lot of work involving trying to get better solder joints

wound up here:

Which, frankly, wasn't great, but we could mess around all day trying to get a better solder joint and potentially burn the pad off the board, orrrrrr we could leave good enough alone. We left good enough alone for now.

And! Well, the radio still works! Is it better? I don't know yet. I'll measure the output wave the next time I'm at our maker space. Here's the pre-diode-removal wave for reference:

It should be at least 0.8 V larger now. We'll see. But, the kid's getting interested in ham radio!

But wait! There's more! There's steak knives! (OK, there's not actually steak knives.)

This afternoon, when trying to reach other stations, the 11 year-old asked how the radio was working. I asked if she wanted to listen in. She did. She could hear a station I couldn't! Cool!!!

Also!? The seven year-old cruised by. Her interest was piqued. She asked to listen in while I called CQ. I called out the letters as I transmitted. She practiced Morse code (they're all learning the code.) We had fun!

What would have happened if no one was interested? That would have been fine too. This is so much fun!

More Cowbell! Record Production using Google Forms and Charts

First, the what : This article shows how to embed a new Google Form into any web page. To demonstrate ths, a chart and form that allow blog readers to control the recording levels of each instrument in Blue Oyster Cult's "(Don't Fear) The Reaper" is used. HTML code from the Google version of the form included on this page is shown and the parts that need to be modified are highlighted. Next, the why : Google recently released an e-mail form feature that allows users of Google Documents to create an e-mail a form that automatically places each user's input into an associated spreadsheet. As it turns out, with a little bit of work, the forms that are created by Google Docs can be embedded into any web page. Now, The Goods: Click on the instrument you want turned up, click the submit button and then refresh the page. Through the magic of Google Forms as soon as you click on submit and refresh this web page, the data chart will update immediately. Turn up the:

Cool Math Tricks: Deriving the Divergence, (Del or Nabla) into New (Cylindrical) Coordinate Systems

Now available as a Kindle ebook for 99 cents ! Get a spiffy ebook, and fund more physics The following is a pretty lengthy procedure, but converting the divergence, (nabla, del) operator between coordinate systems comes up pretty often. While there are tables for converting between common coordinate systems , there seem to be fewer explanations of the procedure for deriving the conversion, so here goes! What do we actually want? To convert the Cartesian nabla to the nabla for another coordinate system, say… cylindrical coordinates. What we’ll need: 1. The Cartesian Nabla: 2. A set of equations relating the Cartesian coordinates to cylindrical coordinates: 3. A set of equations relating the Cartesian basis vectors to the basis vectors of the new coordinate system: How to do it: Use the chain rule for differentiation to convert the derivatives with respect to the Cartesian variables to derivatives with respect to the cylindrical variables. The chain

The Valentine's Day Magnetic Monopole

There's an assymetry to the form of the two Maxwell's equations shown in picture 1. While the divergence of the electric field is proportional to the electric charge density at a given point, the divergence of the magnetic field is equal to zero. This is typically explained in the following way. While we know that electrons, the fundamental electric charge carriers exist, evidence seems to indicate that magnetic monopoles, the particles that would carry magnetic 'charge', either don't exist, or, the energies required to create them are so high that they are exceedingly rare. That doesn't stop us from looking for them though! Keeping with the theme of Fairbank[1] and his academic progeny over the semester break, today's post is about the discovery of a magnetic monopole candidate event by one of the Fairbank's graduate students, Blas Cabrera[2]. Cabrera was utilizing a loop type of magnetic monopole detector. Its operation is in concept very sim

Copasetic Flow

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