The final project for the Critical Making course is wearable technology. So this is a tutorial on a simple capacitive touch sensor.
A simple capacitive touch sensor
Posts Tagged → critical informatics
Running a DC motor from the Arduino Using the Creatron Economic Starter Kit
I’m teaching a Critical Making course and a question came up regarding how to run a DC motor from the Arduino. It was a bit tricky to get figure out how to do this using the parts in the Economic Starter Kit that students were told to purchase from Creatron, our local purveyor of maker stuff. There were a couple of puzzles, how to use the parts we were given and which online tutorial to follow.
I played around a bit and here is my result. I used the tutorial from bildr, which I found via the page for my MOSFET transistor on Sparkfun.
Climate Change Drives Startup to Hard Drive Farming
A blog post on Backblaze’s web site shares stories from employees, friends, and families about how they participated in a “hard drive farming.” In this scheme, they purchased external hard drives two at a time from retail stores and sent them to Backblaze to help the company survive a worldwide hard drive shortage. Although the stories are engaging and the images are amusing, underneath it’s a story about how climate change affected a Silicon Valley startup’s business plan. The hard drive shortage was caused by unprecedented flooding in Thailand, which produces about half of the world’s hard drives.
Ordering new cheques for my new BMO account is an absurdist drama
OK, dear readers, are we ready for another TWO examples of sub-optimal information systems design?
Example 1. I cannot order printed cheques for a new account from a third-party vendor, because I have never ordered cheques before.