JR

This year’s cohort at the 2024 Teen Robotics Camp at NCC was the brightest yet!

In no time at all, they got their robots behaving exactly as they wanted – and some were able to make their robots do tricks!

Many came into the camp feeling that the whole experience may be beyond their grasp. But ALL left Friday knowing that coding and robotics was easier than they ever imagined.

Thanks for being such great students!

Here is video from one of the students successfully…

It was great to meet another 14 kids … and teach them to build and program their own robot.

This year’s class at Norwalk Community College were a friendly bunch and demonstrated some extensive coding talent, despite not having had a whole lot of experience using the Arduino board.

It wasn’t long before they were able make their robots perform some really cool stunts and navigate some difficult obstacle courses.

This is my 5th year teaching classes at NCC and, combined with the…

Harvesting the bounty of my garden the Spring, Summer and Fall months is a great thrill. But harvesting in January is even more exciting!

The above photo was taken in my basement just today (1/12/2023) and it is proof that anyone can grow their own greens at this time of year, despite freezing temperatures outside.

The average temperature of my basement is ~56 degrees, which is just right for the Mesclun shown here, and many other greens.

I have them…

There was a time when I was logging a whole lot of highway miles. And, during my travels, I thought about the possibility of making a device where I could display custom messages to my fellow motorists.

After all, driving can be kind of lonely sometimes and a simple message like this could help make someone’s day.

I finally got the time to sink my teeth into this project and the results were surprisingly good!

As usual, I turned to my old Buddy – the Raspberry Pi – to power a 32×32…

I was racking my brain for gifts I could give to friends and family – and it suddenly occurred to me to harness the tools around me.

That’s when I got the idea to personalize some Cocoa Coir doormats for friends, using our 60-Watt Laser Cutter. Here are a couple of my creations over the weekend…

The whole process got a bit tricky at times. This Cocoa Coir stuff is great fire tinder and, every once in a while, a small part of the mat would start smouldering. I had to pause the…

The crisp Fall air has not settled in yet here in CT – but the season is already starting to turn up North. So we decided to take the show on the road for a couple of weekends in September to take advantage of some cool Fall weather!

While we’re there, we’ll be teaching two classes at the Manchester Makerspace.

On Saturday, September 17th, I will be teaching a class that will guide students through the process of flashing the GrapheneOS onto their cellphones. After that, we will…

We’re having a great time over at NCC this week making robots! I’m posting this for the benefit of the kids in the classes, to help make it easy for them to experiment with their robots at home.

Step 1

When you get home tonight, ask your parents for a computer you could use to work on your robot. (It can be a Mac, Windows or Unix computer.) Once you have a computer, download the Arduino software here. Click on your operating system and click Yes, whenever the install program asks a…

We had to skip the last couple of years, due to the Covid 19 pandemic, but we are back: Rippowam Labs will once again be hosting a Teen Tech camp!

This year’s classes will be held from 8 am to 5 pm during the last week of June (6/27 – 7/1) and the theme of this year’s camp is: Python Coding Bootcamp.

Students will get a fun and friendly – but extensive – introduction to the Python language. At the end of the week, they will have all the skills necessary to tackle any…

2022 is destined to be another year of big changes!

As part of this, Rippowam Labs has made the decision to consciously decouple itself from Big Tech and we’ve dumped our old Android phones in favor of GrapheneOS!

GrapheneOS is a flavor of the Android operating system that has NOT been co-opted by Google and/or Facebook (why can’t I delete that app anyway?). There’s no reason they have to know every little thing about our lives and we decided to…

I’ve been talking to some of my friends lately and we’ve become so disappointed with the big Tech companies. The social media companies cancel anyone who expresses an opinion other than that of the mainstream media and companies like Google and Facebook have the ability to track your every step – even if you have location tracking turned off.

It’s been a crazy turn of events. At the turn of the century, we were enamored with Google. They offered an array of free software that made life so…