Author: Simon Clark

See Also: Haiti: Lessons Learned in Plastics I recently had the opportunity to head to Haiti, part of an effort to build a small scale recycling operation in the town of Jacmel. I’ll deal with the success or failure of the machines in another post, but here I wanted to get down some of my…

See also : Haiti: Ruminations I started this project with a simple goal in mind. Build the 4 machines outlined on Dave Hakken’s Precious Plastic website, then build them again in Haiti. It is said that no plan survives first contact with the enemy, and this story is no different. When I left Haiti last…

It’s been about 6 months since we first started working on the plastic project for Haiti. A great deal has gotten done in that time, many challenges overcome, others, not. Our original goal was to make all four machines for the foster home, as well as a set for Guelph. Top priority was the shredder,…

TL:DR – Diyode is building a series of open source machines for recycling plastics. In January, I’m planning on travelling to Haiti to install them in a foster care home so the residents can turn trash into useful and saleable items. A little while ago I got an email from my cousin, Sarah. Sarah is…

For the latest IgniteGuelph contest, we needed a way to measure the speed of homebuilt electric motors. Simple RPM, not torque was the goal, so we opted to go with a light sensor on an arduino to count the light/dark cycles. First, we need to figure out the threshold value of the light sensor.  We…

So this little project came about because my younger daughter was having trouble with the concept of sleeping over at her grandparents house. We were at Diyode one Saturday morning, discussing what we could do about it.  We decided to make a machine that would imbue her with the super power of Sleepover. Scrounging through…

Over the last year or so, we’ve been putting a lot of effort into sorting what we have, rather than acquiring more stuff. A large part of this has been sorting out all our various resources using free buckets from a local coffee pub.  The system has been successful enough that I feel compelled to…

Hacking the learning process Over the break, I had the opportunity the spend some time developing and testing the first full lesson plan for the codeshield. The result is intended to be used by hackerspaces and school teachers to teach Intro to Arduino. Following the basic philosophy behind the board, I skipped over almost all…