River Camp 2017

Anders's treehouse.


This is the sink he made.


Some of the tools and materials the kids use.

carrots!

Pride

Father's Day cocktails

(Yes, technically the day before Father's Day, but the boys were out of the house, so a good time for cocktails.)

Coppola Pool

This year, we brought friends.

now THAT'S a cookie

celebrating the graduate

Isabel's done with high school, and ready for college!

mathematician

North Class potluck

With Soren moving on to first grade this fall, this is our last year in the North Class.


Before the North Class potluck, the Dolphins showed us some of what they had learned in music class this year.



During the potluck, there were some traditional end-of-year songs.


Soren's Dolphin class gave the North Class a new water table (represented here by a large card, as the actual water table hadn't yet arrived).

dimmer

A few days after putting the bunk bed up for the boys, I installed some LED lights on it. Some time ago, the knob on Anders's dimmer switch fell off, and I couldn't find a replacement knob. I could have just replaced the dimmer innards, but I never did like the cheap dimmer switch, because almost all of the useful dimming range was in a few degrees of turning, making it hard to adjust the low end of the dimming. I've had it in the back of my mind to fix this by making my own dimming circuit, and finally got around to it.


Here is a prototype of the circuit. I wired a rotary encoder to an microcontroller, and futzed with it until I could use it to dim a single LED.


I then switched everything to a bit of strip board, using a smaller microcontroller, and adding a MOSFET that allowed me to switch the 12 volt power that the LEDs on the bed use.