Day: April 28, 2004

Christian is always wanting to do a project of some sort. I need to find some things we can do together both this summer and then when homeschool starts in the fall. I do not have any idea what they should be, but will take a stab at it here.

Planning: It would really be a shame not to take advantage of Christian’s love for building stuff at this stage in his life. He is just crazy about doing projects that involve building things with his hands. I have been trying to give some thought to some projects he might enjoy, but I do not think I have a great list. I will put what I have here as potential projects for the summer and try to come back to it now and again if we do not get things going for him.

StepperControl.com has a stepper motor controller on their website that controls three stepper motors and costs only $100. I bought that along with three 45 oz-in. stepper motors that were also available on the website for $30 each. They should be great for some kind of a project I can do with Christian.

Planning: I have been wanting to take on a Linux programming project of some kind so that I can learn a little more about their development environment. These little items might allow me to kill two birds with one stone. There are a plethora of cool things that can be done with a stepper motor controller system. I can now add to the list of projects I put together earlier today, but first I need to decide what kind of base system I want to start with.

My initial thoughts are that we can make a little SCARA robot and from that, we can do a lot of things. We need an arm that really does something, so I am thinking of maybe doing a chess playing robot or something like that. I could add machine vision to all of this, too. This is something we could document really well while we are doing it, make the software available to whoever wants to use it, and then maybe other people can do the same sort of thing or add to what we already have in place as an open source homeschool learning project.

Costs