More On Our Budding Engineer

Our budding engineer is continuing to impress yours truly with some of his exploits. Just recently he made what I believe is a Tesla coil and demonstrated it to mom and dad the other night. Now I hope I'm getting the name right, but it hooked up to a power source and then allowed him to wirelessly transmit electricity to a light bulb. Talk about too cool for words. I was impressed, and you could tell by looking at it that it took some initiative and diligence to make, not to mention patience. This pic shows the bulb lighting with no wires.

On other fronts, he has gotten in touch with one of the teachers at the local high school who has a 3D printer and is getting involved with that. The teacher, KL, is a pretty cool cat, and he is very supportive of kids who are interested in engineering projects. He has the technology and wants to share it, which I think is really cool. Best of all, this could be something cool for N to pursue in the coming years. We'll keep an eye on that one.

He has also become interested in various audio projects. He's been making amplifiers and speakers like there's no tomorrow, and they sound good. He gathers the parts from various old radios (and not so old) appliances, or he procures them from the Listen Center or the dump, and then he goes to work. It usually involves taking stuff apart for the required parts, then soldering them back together in the configuration he wants. The power needed comes from amplifiers that he is builds, usually from parts ordered online. Also, when he gets ahold of an old computer or radio, he collect various transistor and capacitors for future use. I'm not completely familiar with the whole process or the names of the parts, but suffice it to say that it's pretty cool stuff. I used to love doing stuff like this when I was a kid but I was severely limited by the access (or lack thereof) to parts and tools. This guys got the world at his fingertips.

Finally, he's been doing his drone building, and that's pretty high tech stuff. It's amazing to me how affordable and accessible technology is today. It's a different world we live in, so we might as well make the most of it.

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Until the next time, thanks for reading.