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Showing posts with the label electronics

How Unschooling Kids Learn: Environment as Classroom: Part 1 of the soldering series

Lots of people ask how unschoolers learn without classrooms or teachers.  The perhaps paradoxical answer is that they have classrooms and teachers, just not in the traditional sense.  The kids' (7 y.o. No. 1, 5 y.o. No. 2, and 3 y.o. No. 3), teachers are whoever they happen to be around when they're curious about something.  Their classrooms tend to be anywhere but our house, where we all typically decompress for a few hours around dinnertime before we head off to bed.  We do have haunts form time to time where we spend more time learning.  When the kids were younger, we had a favorite coffee shop with a grass lawn and an upstairs.  We'd hang out upstairs practicing numbers and division.  Since we've come to San Francisco, our favorite learning haunt has changed.  Google came the closest to what we use for a classroom when they implemented rolling study halls: More times that not, the gang and I find ourselves discussing 'school' subjects...

Levitation Frequency Characterization: Train of Lab Work Notes

Great news!  The bridged output mode on the Peavey amplifier I'm using here works!  That means I can apply roughly twice as much power to the levitation force providing electromagnet.  The bridge mode appeared not to be working two days ago.  A little reading of the manual provided the reason.  When in bridge mode, the speaker outputs don't like to be applied to any kind of ground.  I was trying to measure the output of the amplifier using a grounded oscilloscope.  Apparently this is what was causing the amplifier to shut itself off in bridged mode.  After removing the oscilloscope from the speaker outputs today, everything is working great.  Instead of hooking the scope directly to the electromagnet inputs, I attached it to  the pick-up coil.  As I mentioned a few days ago, this a better measure of the power available for levitation anyway. I don't have time to write up everything in a classy fashion at this point, but I would ...