Geek Dad: Awesomely Geeky Projects and Activities for Dads and Kids to Share (30 page)

If it isn’t yours, there is likely at least one house in your neighborhood that gets satellite television. While the modern dishes are rather more compact than the van-size versions of the past, they all use the same concept: A concave reflector gathers and focuses electromagnetic waves of a particular range of frequencies into a receiver for translation into useable data. They point at a satellite out in orbit that is blaring its signal toward the side of the Earth facing it, and the dishes collect those signals and reflect them to a middle point for greater strength of reception. Our receiver will do pretty much the same thing with the radio signals given off by your Wi-Fi router.

There are three key elements to this project—the bowl, the USB Wi-Fi adaptor, and the USB extender cable. Everything else is about how to make the setup useful and mobile, and you may want to play with other ideas.

The bowl doesn’t actually have to be a mixing bowl, but those are easily available in a variety of sizes, and while I haven’t done extensive testing, it would make sense that the larger the bowl you choose, the better the results in signal boost. You can also use a pan or skillet lid, but whatever you choose should be metallic and concave.

 

STEP 1:
To start, drill two holes in the bowl, one at the exact center (where, if you use a pan lid, there may already be a starter hole from the handle/knob you’ll have to remove), for the Wi-Fi adapter, and one partway down the side for the tripod mount. Carefully measure the adapter, and it will take a little drilling and filing skill to get the center hole right, because the cross-section profile of the adapter will probably be more of a rectangular ellipse than a circle. You should draw the profile on the bottom with a black marker, then drill two to three holes to clear most of it, and use a metal file to finish it off. If you’re going to use a camera tripod as your base, the second hole you drill should be ¼ inch, located about a third of the way down the side of the bowl or lid. Try to make sure it is located on a line that is perpendicular to the wide axis of the adapter hole (math geeks should understand that sentence; if you need help, go find a math geek and have him or her explain it to you).

 

STEP 2:
To set the Wi-Fi adapter in the bowl, start by taking a standard rubber band and loop it repeatedly around the adapter about a third of the way from the receiving end (not the end with the USB jack), so that it becomes like a gasket. Depending on the rubber bands you have and how clean the hole you drilled is, you may want to use more than one band. Slip the adapter, jack end first, through the hole from the “inside” of the bowl, until the band stops it. This should leave the receiver end at the center of focus for your “dish.”

 

STEP 3:
Hold this construct together, and on the other side, instruct your child to take another rubber band and repeat the looping process until you have a second gasket, and roll it tight against the bottom of the bowl so the adapter is securely set. If you don’t mind a more permanent solution, you could also use a hot-glue gun to set the adapter in place, though that won’t let you take it back out to show off before/after readings to your incredulous (and slightly worried) friends and family.

 

STEP 4:
To mount your dish to the tripod, simply set it on the camera head so that the threaded screw that would normally connect to the bottom of a camera pokes through the ¼-inch hole you drilled. Use the ¼-inch nut to hold the bowl securely on, tightening with a wrench if needed. Try to use a tripod with a metallic screw rather than a plastic screw, to avoid stripping the threads when tightening. Now you should have a very versatile means for aiming your dish.

 

STEP 5:
When you’re ready to test, there are a number of programs available on the Net to see detailed information on signal strength and available bandwidth. Take your dish to the place with a low signal, and set it up so that it is aimed roughly at where your wireless router is located as if you had line-of-sight through whatever walls or floors might be between. Connect the adapter to your computer with the extension cable, and start surfing with renewed vigor!

R
euse is an important concept these days. It’s not just about recycling; repurposing existing items like furniture or building materials is a great way to minimize both waste and your carbon footprint.

And with the digital revolution in media, what’s one thing we probably have lying around the house gathering dust? Yeah, CDs and DVDs. Hopefully, by now you’ve ripped all your old CDs into digital format for easy portability, and if you’re a proper technology geek, you may have all your movies and music stored on a home server for access all over your local network, and even anywhere you’ve got an Internet connection. So why are you holding on to all those discs? Sure, you could try to trade them in at your local used-music store for some kind of credit, but why not build something with them instead? And why not make it a fun project you can share with your kids?

This project is fun because it lets you play with LEGO bricks (always fun!). But beyond that and in addition to the lesson of the importance of repurposing objects, you can also dabble in some pretty cool open-source electronics with your kid while constructing this lamp.

One of the coolest open-source initiatives out there is putting practical programmable electronics into the hands of hobbyists. It’s called Arduino.

From the Arduino Web site (
www.arduino.cc
):

What this means in plain(er) language is that you can buy an Arduino board, hook it up to your home computer, download and run some free software, and actually program the chips on the board to do different things with modules you attach to the board. It will help you teach your child that all the chips and wires crammed into every piece of home electronics you own aren’t really magic boxes, but instead they are simple devices that one could easily learn how to hack with the right tools.

Before we get started, let me say that you don’t have to build this project with an Arduino board. What I mean is that the way I’m showing you to do this project is nowhere near the only way you could do it, and if you’re not in a mood to start learning programmable electronics, you don’t have to. You can take this basic concept and find some other form of bright LED to use as the illumination for the lamp. Obviously, you’ll have to play with the dimensions of the base to make sure everything fits the way you need, but that’s half the fun of these projects—working together to figure out how to do it. I still recommend using LEDs, since most other forms of light will also give off significant heat, which could be problematic with plastic LEGO as your lamp shell. Be smart and careful!

But I urge you to consider the Arduino. Think of it as a gateway drug for promising electronics junkies. Once you and your kid have worked through the instructions for setting up and programming the board and light, you’ll have started down a road of learning and discovery that will demystify every other gadget you ever own, and encourage a sense of invention and ownership that most people never have.

For this project, we’re using the Arduino Duemilanove board, with a BlinkM Smart LED. The Arduino board can be found for around $30 and the BlinkM for under $15 many places all over the Web, though I got both of mine from the kind folks at
www.makershed.com
. Another great resource for these boards and many incredible basic electronics projects is
www.adafruit.com
.

I’m not going to go through the detailed instructions on setting these up and programming them, for the directions are available online. You should get the appropriate links when you receive the parts (and see Appendix A for some links as well). The short of it is as follows:

Now you have your light source, programmed however you want it, powered by USB. All we need is to build the lamp structure into which to place it.

Once again we turn to LEGO as our favorite geeky building material. The lamp has to have two key sections: the base, into which the electronics are set, and the disc area, where the old media will be stacked. Since the Arduino and attached BlinkM boards are much smaller, the controlling dimension of the entire build is the diameter of the discs, which is approximately 15 LEGO studs across. To allow for 2-by-2 vertical posts to hold the discs in place, I created my base 20 studs by 20 studs. You may need to start on a larger base plate, or a number of smaller base plates interlocked to get to the correct size, depending on the bricks you have handy. Obviously, this is the time for improvisation, because the plates and bricks you have available will determine what your lamp looks like.

The base needs to be only 2 standard LEGO blocks tall. The challenge is to set the electronics board into the base so that the LED is just about dead center, and the USB port will be accessible from the side. You’ll want to use bricks set around the board to hold it in place, and then cover over the base structure with another layer of places that leave just the LED exposed.