Christopher's Factory

  Christopher, AKA Christopher's Factory is an American YouTuber, content creator, and internet personality. He was born and raised in central Texas. After living in Thailand for two years, Christopher went to Texas State University, where he received his Bachelor's of Science in Finance. Now married, Christopher still lives in Central Texas, where he continues to make videos and content relating to STEM, as well as project-based vlogs and how-to videos. He has a special affinity for electronics and homemade wind turbines.  (Okay, I'll write in first-person from here) Is Christopher's Factory an Engineer? No. I went to school for finance, my first love. I've always been enthralled by the world of finance. I like to joke around that while being into stocks and crypto is fairly vogue now, when I was a teenager, it was relatively niche, and largely unheard of for someone my age. I opened my first brokerage account the day I turned 18, with a new FinTech company that bo...

  The Top 5 Arduino Starter Kits Wondering what the best Arduino starter kits for 2023 are? Arduinos are at the heart of electronics prototyping, and have taught countless beginners an introductory course to hardware and embedded systems. I use Arduino constantly in my projects, and I thought it would be useful to rank the best starter kits available. I will be ranking them by value and the quality of the supplementary materials, after all, you want a good deal on the kit, and you want to be able to follow the directions keenly to learn. This ranking has a special place in my heart, because I consider an Arduino kit to be the single product that has had the most impact on my life. Personally, my very first kit was #2 on this list, but read on to find why I thought #1 was better. #5: Official Arduino Starter Kit K000007 Value for price: Low Quality and diversity of components: Fair Supplementary & instructional materials: Fair Price: $114.90 (2023)      With a pr...

  Finally! The ultimate stackable, modular, open-source, customizable, green energy community project for all the VAWT enthusiasts out there! VAWTs are gaining increasing attention for their low profile and sleek appearance. This type specifically is much easier to make than a HAWT, and I think it's a good intro for someone that has never played around with generating their own power before. Even if one chooses not to, though, it still looks great on a balcony.  As I mentioned, the real excitement in Build-a-VAWT comes from the fact that it's modular and uses a standardized mount, so I really hope it takes off and others design fun parts as well. This post will mostly detail the geometries needed to comply with the BAV mounting system. For information on best practices in printing and assembling your own BAV, you can watch my YouTube video below. My BAV shafts have an exterior diameter of 30mm and a variable interior diameter that must be no less than 8mm (the ID of the 608 be...

Absolute position encoders are actually fairly rare, and I wanted to make my own for the sake of education. I decided to make an absolute position encoder with a 3D-printed disk and lasers used in tandem with photoresistors to detect position. With 5 bits of encoded data, this encoder can detect position with 360/(2^5) = 11.25 degrees of accuracy.  The huge bonus of absolute position encoders that many people don't realize is that the common relative position encoder can't remember a position unless the embedded system remains constantly powered. This problem can be somewhat alleviated by adding memory, but this complicates the system greatly, and doesn't help much in situations where there is consistent rotation, such as an anemometer, which was the use that I originally intended to use this design for.  This absolute position encoder I designed can be left unpowered for indiscriminate lengths of time and still provide accurate readings when polled. On this article is the ...