My son's weekend project

[Tmuir]

My 13 year old son is very much into computer coding and has moved so far beyond my coding ability that I don't understand half of what he is telling me he is doing now, but I thought I would post a picture of a project he did over the weekend.

But first I need to mention he is a big fan of aircraft clocks and very quickly took my Russian AChS-1 'MIG clock' to sit beside his computer and then when I restored my WWII German Kienzle aircraft clock he very quickly grabbed that one too.

 

But back to my son's project.

He has always wanted an analogue dial in the style of an aircraft clock to display the CPU temperature of his computer, so he decided this would be his weekend project.

I found him a micro servo in one of my drawers left over from my RC plane days and gave it to him.

He then wrote a C# sharp program for his computer that runs in the system tray and reads the temperature of the CPU and passes this value out on one of the USB ports to an Arduino he had programmed to read this value and drive the servo with a PWM output.

He then designed a dial inspired by the 'Mig Clock' at half scale on Fusion 360 which he made sure the dial size would fit one of my larger spare watch crystals.

We then 3D printed it on Sunday and he then designed a dial to fit it and finally I fitted the watch crystal to it for him tonight and here is the finished product.

 

He now has the C# program running on his computer passing the CPU values to an Arduino driving his analogue CPU temp gauge.

He has plans to expand this and create another gauge for the GPU temperature now and is talking about changing the case design to incorporate an RGB LED, so it can shine blue, green or red depending on how hot it is.

When I was 13 I did enjoy coding in 'BASIC', but never did anything that complicated.

 

How times have changed.

Tony

 

 

[watchweasol]

When the sons teach the Fathers, Taught my son to play chess now can not beat him, taught him snooker and pool, now if I tried I would be eight balled he is now 51 still good.

[AshF]

Hi @Tmuir, I'm a professional computer games programmer with over 27 years in the industry and 36 years of programming experience.  I volunteer in schools teaching coding, tech and trying to inspire young minds.

If your kid needs any coding advice or has questions about the industry PM me and I'd be more than happy to help.

[Tmuir]

Thanks AshF.

I will keep your offer in mind.

My son got a RaspBerry Pi 4, 4 Gig for Christmas, which we set up this morning, gave it a static IP and set up SSH on it, so that is his new coding test bed.

Tomorrow we will be soldering some headers onto the 128 x 64 Dot Matrix LCD display I got him and then he hopes to use it to run a program he has been working on for the past few days of simulating how a liquid would run through different shaped objects he crates in 2D. He has no real application for the program its just an exercise in coding for him and is already beyond my level of understanding. I also found him another micro servo so in the next week or so I can see a second temperature gauge been made to monitor the GPU temperature, but this one incorporating an RGB LED.

My son has high functioning autism which helps give him almost laser like focus in what he is interested in, hence why is coding is way above the level of most 13 year olds.

If he ever shows an interest in Horology I know he could become very good at it too, but as of yet other than taking my restored aircraft clocks he isn't interested in how to service or repair them yet.

Edited December 25, 2020 by Tmuir
Fixed typo