CosmicWatch is an inexpensive “home-built” cosmic ray detector designed by physicists at the Laboratory for Nuclear Science at MIT. You can read more about it here: http://cosmicwatch.lns.mit.edu/about The claim is that a college student can build one of these as a project for about $100 in about 4 hours1. I’m skeptical, but it’s an interesting idea, […]
Year: 2018
Raspberry Pi Initial Configuration
Whenever I flash a new SD card with a Raspbian image, there are a number of configuration steps that are needed to tune the configuration. This post is just to record the steps for my own future reference. It’s based on the latest (as of this writing) release, which is Raspbian Stretch. Edit the […]
Van de Graaaaafffff!
My colleague and friend Glenn Geher from the New Paltz Psychology department was visiting our new building, and so I showed him around our teaching lab space. He was especially excited about the Van de Graaff generator, so I gave him a little demo: What’s happening? As I explained at the beginning, the […]
Vernal Equinox in Wooster Hall: Irregular Interval Time-Lapse Animation
Wooster Hall on the SUNY New Paltz campus was completely remodeled recently, and a neat new feature is an alignment of the skylight over the main stairway such that the bottom of the stairs is lit up at exactly solar noon on the Equinox (both spring and fall). This spring when I observed this I […]
Vernal Equinox in Wooster Hall
The newly updated Wooster Hall has a neat feature at the bottom of the staircase between the first and second floors. Above that stair there is a large skylight with 4 windows, and at the bottom of the stairs there are markings on the floor that show where the shadows between those windows will be […]
Repairing a Cenco 33031 Power Supply
by Laurence Rowe and Eric Myers We use the Cenco 33031 Low Voltage Power Supply (Figure 1) for several of our electricity and magnetism labs. It can provide variable DC up to 6 Volts at up to 5 Amps, and it can provide a steady AC voltage at around 22 VAC. Unfortunately, our students sometimes […]