Tinkering Thursday: 18th December, a tale of two wave types

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A simple Tinkering Thursday this week as we start to – let’s be honest – tidy the office so it’s not quite such a heap when we return in early January. Carol produced a lovely little ripple tank which had apparently been in one of the many cardboard boxes strewn around the office, and we proceeded to set it up.

Joe and Carol set up our new ripple tank

Joe and Carol set up our new ripple tank

We’ve more testing to do with different depths of water, but we managed to get some pretty decent-looking wave patterns and interference effects, as you can see at the top of the post (click the image to expand it). It’s a nice piece of kit, and we look forward to playing with it experimenting further.

I outsourced my tinkering for the week, taking my car to the garage to treat it to a new wheel bearing for Christmas. This post is late because I had to run out of the office early to collect it, which you really don’t need to know but hey, human detail and open communication are the keys to being approachable. I’m sure I read that somewhere.

Joe, meanwhile, had a busy afternoon. Yes, that’s our camera strap around his head to hold his normal desk phone in place so he can continue to monitor a conference call on mute, whilst talking on his mobile. Who needs a bluetooth earpiece?

Joe goes hands-free so he can operate a second phone for multi-tasking conversations.

Joe goes hands-free so he can operate a second phone for multi-tasking conversations.

Tinkering Thursday: 11th December

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In the photograph above, Joe is pointing a telescope at the sun. Two things about this are remarkable:

  1. It’s December, we’re in Newcastle, and we actually saw the sun today.
  2. Joe can still see.

We all know – obviously – that looking at the sun through telescopes, binoculars, even cameras is, in general, a really really bad idea. But let’s be clear, just in case this is news to you:

Looking at the sun through a telescope, pair of binoculars, or indeed any sort of optical instrument is a really, really bad idea. You’re quite likely to blind yourself.

Don’t do it.

…unless you have a solar telescope. Oh heck yes, we have one of those. It has a very, very precise and very, very dark filter, and through it the sun looks like this:

The sun’s disc, with a little cloud, as seen through the solar telescope. December 11th 2014.

The sun’s disc, with a little cloud, as seen through the solar telescope. December 11th 2014.

So that was fun. We’ve some work to do getting the best performance out of the solar telescope, but the good news is that we’ve managed to extract the weird bits of material that were floating around in the eyepiece, so the whole thing doesn’t have to go back to the manufacturers. In California. Phew.

Back in Think Lab, we continued Tinkering Thursday with Joe making rather more smoke than he’d intended. He was attempting to make a lightbulb from scratch, but since we haven’t yet worked out how to isolate the smoke detectors in the Lab, we packed that in sharpish. We’ll come back to it.

Our attention turned, therefore, to the more careful (and less combustible) pursuit that is trigonometry. There is, it turns out, good reason you learn sines, cosines, and (in this case) inverse tangents in school: so you can make adorable little robots draw not-quite-lined-up Christmas trees:

This sort of thing makes us happy. If you look closely you might catch a glimpse of some extremely rough-looking code – the main output of the afternoon was, perhaps, a bug report filed with the lovely Mirobot team. We continue to be big fans of our dinky little robot friend, and as the software settles down it’s proving even more capable than we’d hoped.

More Tinkering next Thursday!

Filming: Metalwork

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Ann Cairns, President of International Markets, Mastercard

Ann Cairns, President of International Markets, Mastercard

We’re collaborating with the North-East Chamber of Commerce to produce a series of careers case-study films. I’ll avoid saying too much about it (is it hush-hush? I’m not sure…), but to the left is our first interviewee and below right, our second.

Jacqui Miller of Miller Engineering, Cramlington.

Jacqui Miller of Miller Engineering, Cramlington

Yes, it’s all a little high-powered.

Filming Jacqui involved a trip up to her company’s factory in Cramlington, which was fantastic. Modern engineering only very rarely involves molten metal, which speaking as a photographer is rather disappointing. Welding and sparks and smoke and all the rest look amazing on camera, and it was a delight to get alarmingly close to a laser cutter whilst it was doing this:

laser cutting

So, coming soon: pretty pictures, illustrating insights from leading figures in STEM businesses, from and in the North-East.

Tinkering Thursday: 4th December

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This week Think Lab has been playing host to a delegation of Chinese architects – hey, it’s all go here – so we set to work in our office instead. We already have a hundred snow globes strewn around the place, what harm is there in adding a little craft mess?
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