Changed the oil in the Outlander

No big deal, I just did it.  0W20 full synthetic weight oil is crazy thin.  I saw that you can also use 0W30 in place of 10W30 and get better gas mileage.  I bet my cavalier would hold the oil in as well as a strainer would at that weight!  =/

Just like ours

I got a new table saw!

This should help with the deluge of projects I plan on tackling around the house this year!  It is ~240lbs so it will be a chore to get it from my shed up the hill to my driveway.  Once I get (if I get) my garage things should get much better.  I will have to make some type of all terrain table saw sled.  =)  I also picked up a 90 tooth Diablo finish blade.

RIDGID R4512
Cast Iron 10"

Suburban Triage

The exhaust on the Suburban needs fixed, in a bad way.  Today I just preformed triage and I had to make do with a few "opportunistic" parts.  (I need something like this bolt assortment from amazon.com"

Not looking so good!

Ouch

Added some support

Fiberglass wrap for sound

Metal warp for strength (note the inventive use of cotter pins)  =)

I will need to either do the exhaust work myself or have shop fix it for real.  This should hold for a while until I figure out which one I want to do.  I would like to try it myself but I am not sure how to go about it.

I would need a new tailpipe, muffler, and pipe that goes in front of the muffler.  There is flex pipe for easy routing but I don't think that is the best way to do it.  I am also fascinated with max flow and quite exhaust systems.  I wonder what a serial muffler / glass-pack, serial muffler to dual parallel glass-packs, or serial glass-pack to dual parallel mufflers would sound like.  Does 1/2 the airflow though a muffler allow the muffler to attenuate more than 1/2 the sound?  Looks like some more research!  =)

Guess an Animal

Logan was sick today.  When I got home he had a bad fever and was resting on Mommy's chest.  We switched and he rested on my chest while she finished up a great Western Beef and Corn Pie dinner.  His fever broke and he was in a much better disposition the rest of the night.

At the end of the night we played Guess an Animal and it was a blast.  Dax's animal was a hammer head shark; Grace's was a cheetah; Jocelyn's was a blue jay; Lance's was flying lizard; Mommy's was a seahorse, and mine was a snake.  It really helps the kids develop good questioning skills besides being loads of fun.

Minion Code Warriors

Lab based teach by example

Minion Lance and Minion Jocelyn learned coding for the first time in their lives today in preparation for Hour of Code on Monday.  We have already gone over a lot of the parts and pieces of the Arduino kits we bought a few months ago so all was left was to download the IDE and start working on their first project.

Helping debug code (low != LOW)

They first installed the Arduino IDE and set it up.  They set the correct COM port and selected the correct Arduino MEGA 2560.  They then hooked up their MEGA to their PC via USB.  This was all new to them and it was fun to watch their troubleshooting skills.  We had a brief talk again about electricity and how it was trying to get from a high potential to a low potential, kinda like water running down a mountain to get to sea level.  If you put a water wheel in the running water you could get the water to do work for you (see below picture).

A bit of theory

We worked though the picture schematic and they each wired up their breadboard.  I then printed off the code and had them type it in.  Lance was a quick one and said, "If you have it there you could just send it to us."  "No, I want you to type it in", I said.  They did and it was a great learning experience for them.  I was also able to help cook dinner a bit.  =)  After that they had to find all of their errors because their code would not verify.  Code has a very strict syntax, ledPin does not equal ledpin and they found this out.

What the heck is code anyway?

Once it compiled they uploaded it to their microcontroller and low and behold it worked!  Where they, and I, got really excited is when they started to change the code to try change how the LED turned off and on.  Tonight is the first time they have every coded, the first time they have ever even heard of a variable, or let alone seen what a loop does.  Their single LED blinked faster, slower, or stayed on all the time depending on how they changed the code.  I think the next session will be to remove ledPin and replace it with redPin, greenPin, and yellowPin.  I will explain how they can modify their current code to blink the other lights and help them understand variables, delays, and loops better.

All in all it was great.  I would highly suggest anyone interested in electronics to share their passion with their children.  I will leave you with a few more pictures of the Minions at work.

Battery tester extrodanar

Super excited Minion Lance (stealth mode)

Minion Jocelyn's 1st project

 

Dr. Ffreeze's blinky LED

Crazy Minion Zomie Monsters (in the dark no less)

I have nothing really to add...

Minion Grace as a Zombie

Minion Grace, Minion Dax, and Minion Logan as a Zombie

Introduction: Minion Logan

Minion Logan

Alter Ego: Logan

Minion Logan is a fun, lovable, great little guy.  He has lots to say and can somehow get it all said by just saying, "Hi".  He loves to play with cars and is spending quite a bit of time with Minion Dax.  That could end up being dangerous...