Science Fair

This year’s science fair will hopefully be better than all my last ones. I hope I’ll win an award this year. Last year, I did “Volley!: The effect of a projectile’s weight on its range” and got into the Finalist section in the school contest. It also made it to the Synopsys county fair but again–no prizes. In sixth grade-same thing as last year, no awards, nothing (but I did make it to Synopsys and Finalist also). This year, I’m working with a partner for the first time in my life. Bah. So far I think I would have been better off alone, at least for the machining/creation of materials/experimentation part. My partner’s really good at designing the board, so I’ll let her do all or most of that. We’re doing the Effect of a Wind turbine’s Blade Shape on the amount of voltage generated. It’s coming along quite well as for now. I’m creating the blades out of sheet aluminum provided by my dad’s friend who works at a machining shop. They look dangerouussss… especially the scythe shaped one. Hahaha lollicopter. Anyways, I’m confident in making it to Finalist section again this year, and hopefully win an award. After all, my partner’s won an award twice in a row already! I have good hopes.

Of zappers and lasers…

Over the past week or two, I’ve been working on making a shocker/zapper from a disposable camera with flash (the flash circuit inside it, to be precise) I got free :O (from a film developing center, Wolf Camera) by asking nicely! I want to zap insects with it, it would be really cool! I also modded another camera so its film advance wheel would turn forever, and drilled a hole in the camera so I could access the advancement control gears! Sorry if I sound like a nerd, not all people who act like this are real nerds (forget my blog’s title lol) in other words, I’m not a nerd). I took off the camera stickers. Now it’s all black, like a spy covert camera! The one that I modded can activate its flash whenever I advance the wheel and turn the advancement control gears now (for those of you who are thinking “It could have done that before you modded it”, I tried that, and ended up rendering one of the cameras I got free useless, so beware if you’re gonna try to do this). Here’s the site for modding the advancing wheel so it can turn continuosly if you want to try this: http://www.camerahacker.com/re-use_camera/index.php I figured out where to drill the hole myself, so if you want to know where to drill it, I’ll post a picture sometime soon, if there are requests for it. For making a zapper, just google “kodak zapper” or “kodak shocker” or “camera shocker” etc.

Oh, and my lasers… I’m attempting, that is, I’m still in the process of converting a 5mW regular laser pointer to a powerful 100-200mW burning laser. Somewhere someone said that you could take the laser apart (which I’m still trying to do, the part where the outer casing meets the inner casing of the diode is so hard to remove without damaging the pieces. If anyone knows how to do this, please comment or contact me) and disable the resistors on the laser diode’s circuit board, which will boost the laser’s power. Another way to do this would be to ask nicely at a computer repair/recycling store to get a >=16x DVD Burner and disassemble it to get the powerful (about 150mW) laser diode inside! I’m still trying to find out a place near here that does that, though. Just surfing the web…   Then, you take the diode and create a circuit connecting it to something (it’s too complicated for me right now to understand) and something else (?O_o?). Then you’ll have a powerful burning laser which will light matches, cut electrical tape, stuff like that (though not as powerful as cutting metal, but still very dangerous, especially to the skin let alone the eye).

Man, I can’t wait until I complete all these projects…

A New Invention!

A few days ago at my boy scout meet my friends and I were collecting acorns, when we ‘accidentally’ invented something- an acorn filter! It works like this: a bucket/container is placed about 2 ft away from a slide’s mouth, and then acorns mixed with tanbark (to filter the tanbark from the acorns) are rolled down the highest point of the slide. All the light stuff, in this case the tanbark, doesn’t have sufficient momentum to fly into the bucket after it leaves the slide, so it falls into the 2 ft space between the slide and the container. However, the acorns and heavy stuff has enough momentum and thus flies into the bucket, separating the two kinds of objects. I’ve been researching to see if this has been invented yet, but it looks like it hasn’t. I hope someone will tell me if it has or not!!!