Monthly Archives: December 2015

Two weeks ago Sean begged me to teach him to solder. I had been saying that I would teach him soon, as I felt he was finally old enough. He's been really excited about getting some littlebits for Xmas - and littlebits publishes all their schematics online, so that you can built your own bits to add to any kits you buy from them. That seemed like a really good first project for him, because it only required a few parts but would actually be useful once it was complete - instead of the normal "throwaway" first soldering project most people start with. It came out really good! He's got a very steady hand, surprisingly.

Sean has been really excited about VR all year, and a while ago he tried putting together his own VR headset using his tablet, some 3x magnification reading glasses, foamboard, elastic waistband, and hot glue. He's played around with both VR apps from the Google Play store, and he's tried tethering it to the PC to use as an external display - don't ask me how, as he's figured all of this out on his own! Dang! It works pretty well, so far. He's still got to figure out a good head tracking solution - the tablet's built-in accelerometer only works so-so. And the other problem is the lenses - the focal distance on the reading glasses is just too long to get both eye's images to resolve down to one 3D image. He's got some new lenses coming in the mail tomorrow though, so hopefully you'll soon see v2 here!

Years ago I painted one wall of Sean's room with whiteboard paint. One thing we do every December is count down the days until Christmas on his whiteboard in a unique way. In previous years we've drawn a tree and filled in one ornament per night, or filled in a string of lights in a different color each night - stuff like that. This year we drew a bunch of blank snowman bodies, and finished one per night until Christmas Eve.