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Summer 2025: Allagash Wilderness Waterway Kayak and Canoe Trip

Posted on December 28, 2025 by admin

This is a very long post. But, the adventure here was full week in duration, so it deserves a long post! My grandfather, Stewart Coffin, is well know for making many beautiful wooden puzzles. Less well known is that he ran a fiberglass canoe and kayak manufacturing business for a few years before the puzzle business, and he moved to puzzles because early epoxies were pretty bad to work with. During his whole life, he has always loved adventure canoeing, logging an impressive series of voyages which can be read about here. He took my mom on some of these

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Nov 22nd, 2025: Solo hike up Mt. Lafayette

Posted on December 15, 2025 by admin

These days I’ve been having a bit more fun getting out for adventuring. It’s annoying to wake up early, drive two hours, and then start hiking. But now that I own a small bit of property in NH, I can stay the night at the dam, which enables getting a good night’s rest and an early start. Pretty nice! I’ve also been a bit into solo adventures lately, its really nice to just be able to explore on your own. Mt. Lafeyette is special to me because I hiked it on a family trip when I was 12. I’ve not

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Hydro Dam, Part 3: Testing the Control System.

Posted on October 9, 2025 by admin

In the previous post, I built and mostly coded the hydro dam boards. But, of course, a system with this many things going on needs to be tested to find the inevitable weird problems. I had to figure out how to test a hydroelectric dam control system, at home, in my living room, without the rest of the hydroelectric dam. How? Time for a Hardware-In-The-Loop test! I wanted to test the control system end-to-end, and confirm that everything was working properly and as expected. Here are the things I needed to confirm: Let’s start with the power side of the

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Hydro Dam, Part 2: Building the Dam Control System.

Posted on October 4, 2025 by admin

Part 2 of the hydro dam project: time to build some new stuff. Rather than attempt to get the dial-up-connected 1985 PLC control system to work, I decided to pursue a lifelong dream to have a nucleo connected to something way bigger than it really should be. A plan began to form. It was time to build a hydroelectric dam controller, nucleo edition. At a high level, the control system of a dam has two functions. Firstly, the system must be operated correctly and safely, doing things like properly executing startup and shutdown routines, and shutting down if anything goes

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New Big Project: The Hydro Dam. Part 1

Posted on October 1, 2025 by admin

Hey all, time for a long overdue life update. What ties together gas engines, buck converters, brushless motors, and steam engines? The ability to convert energy from one form to another potentially more useful form, be it heat to mechanical, electrical to mechanical, or electricity from one voltage to another. I have long been fascinated by energy and power. When one uses a lot of energy in their daily life, it becomes natural to ask, where does it come from? In New England, most energy these days comes from natural gas. But a nonzero, and rising, fraction comes from renewable

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Turning up the Adventure-O-Meter: Prop Drill Boating and River Scrambling, Summer 2025

Posted on August 6, 2025 by admin

This summer has been the summer of turning up the adventure level. This is probably a result of hanging out a lot more with the rock climbing folks, who are already pretty solid adventurers, and then continuing to adventure more. These days, I’ve found that my sweet spot of adventure has been to go for scrambling through cool terrain. Compared to rock climbing, you can cover much more distance, and therefore go on much more of a real exploration into the unknown style adventure. This weekend I went on a trip to Vermont with some friends. We would be camping

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Deep Dish, 1lb Plastic Melty Brain!

Posted on June 16, 2023 by admin

Over the past week I built a lil 1lb melty for a low-key local plastic ant competition. I have tried several times before to build melty brain robots, but never had the greatest luck. Now armed with many more years of breaking stuff robot experience, it was time to try again. I’ve always found the biggest problem with melty brain robots to be keeping the rapidly spinning robot synchronized to the rest of the world. Most melty brains have used an IMU sensing centrifugal acceleration to calculate velocity, and then integrated velocity to get position. This works ok, but because

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Turning on the Camry Booster

Posted on January 23, 2022 by admin

Ain’t nuthin better than getting a hunk o’ junk on Ebay and turning it on, and even better: making it do something useful. The original plan for the Big Dyno was to use a Prius inductor– based buck converter. However, the good ole Prius inductor proved just barely not quite up for the task, with a saturation current of around 175A. Practically, this means it is only good for about 150A of boosting, and I was really hoping for the full 200A (although I will use that quite rarely, it is a nice-to-have for sure). I was able to find

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I bought a camera!!

Posted on December 16, 2021 by admin

Big life update: I bought a camera. I’ve wanted to buy a nice DSLR for literally 5 years or so, but only now with some side consulting could I justify shelling out the cash. Turns out, my great grandfather was a professional photographer. So, camera time… I knew I would be using this camera for product photography on a near-daily basis, so I decided to go for a nice camera right off the block rather than putzing around with an APS-C with the plan to upgrade. All of my friends have Nikon’s so I chose to stick with them so

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Saturating the Prius Inductor

Posted on December 15, 2021 by admin

The good ole’ 2nd gen Prius boost inductor. Extra large, extra cheap. I was unable to find a measurement of the saturation current of this inductor on the internet, so I set out to measure it myself. This inductor is one of the beefiest I’ve ever set my eyes upon, at about 400uH, and I estimated it had a saturation current somewhere between 150 and 200 amps. I measured the line-to-line resistance at 19 milliohms. At 150 amps, this equates to over 400W of resistive losses alone. I plan on using this inductor for the big dyno, where it will

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