So here is, as promised, the little story of Friday.

On the program this week: modeling clay, 3D printing, paradise beach and quantum physics.

Pioupiou gets a makeover

Take a good look at this Pioupiou… it's the last time you'll see him:

Now that the electronic part has demonstrated its capabilities, it's time to tackle the mechanics. Bye bye the commercial anemometer, make way for technological robustness.

« Pioupiou 0 » is therefore retiring, to make room for the youth: « Pioupiou 1 ».

Back to pre-school

So here we are back at the starting point.

We are constantly told: the solid foundations are acquired from kindergarten. Either. So it was a modeling clay workshop.

Not being able to draw in 3D in my head, it was the perfect tool. Simple and efficient.

At least on paper. Because in reality, I made a huge mistake: If one day you have to buy modeling clay for your children, please don't buy the branded one. Harmony sold in the Leclerc in front of my house !!!!

poop in yoghurt pots

Next time, I'll go to five stores if necessary to get real Play-Doh:

THE sure value

In short, all this to lay this:

It looks like a red, ugly thing, but it's actually much cooler. It allowed me to test a whole bunch of shapes. (and also to make the colleagues of Co-Work)

Bring me to life

Thanks to my dough blocks, I was able to find the approximate dimensions of my machine.

In a more professional way this time:

Well, in the end it looks like this:

Finally, it looks like this… on the screen.

Bzzzz Bzzz BZZZ BZZZzzzz

Knowing that I was going to spend a lot of time playing around with hardware, I invested in a 3D printer.

It's a machine that looks like this:

It's about the size of this:

The advertising time:

If you are in Grenoble and want to trade beer for the right to play with a 3D printer, call Pioupiou on 09 72 13 34 57.

Brief. She turned non-stop all week, in search of a perfect shape for our bird:

A new design for @BalisePioupiou ? pic.twitter.com/JdNmcJ00i0

— Pioupiou (@BalisePioupiou) October 8, 2014

Admittedly, it's mega slow, but it's still quite magical to be able to draw an object on the screen, and to have it in your hands thirty minutes later. (because we reduced the size and quality to make it print faster)

Here is what the finished Pioupiou looks like:

And here is how to show a Pioupiou sunbathing by the beach, while remaining quietly in his living room, playing with a badly printed model:

And if you look from above, you will see that my Yogurt pots are made near here:

I promise, as soon as I have 5 minutes, I'll put the 3d files online on open.pioupiou.fr .

What am I going to put in there?

Now that we have the form, let's move on to the content.

When I was little, a very, very, very long time ago, my parents wouldn't give me electronic toys. I never had the remote control car I dreamed of. They weren't crazy: she would never have survived my screwdriver more than ten minutes. " You don't break a thing that works for a DIY! »… How many times have I heard this phrase? And yet, I was, at the time, much less hardcore that now.

So for once, instead of breaking everything to see how it works, I'm going to do the opposite: find out how it works, then build. We talked about ultrasound and square the tricks. But in the end, I was overtaken by reason: for this first Pioupiou, let's keep it simple, do well and do it on time. Then we will complicate.

So let's start with the challenge of Pioupiou: Make a weather beacon that is not expensive, and that is very small, cute. Here is my proposition :

Needless to say, your comments are welcome.

It's the whole beacon! It can be installed in two ways:

In there, we box everything that we could put in a classic tag:

Finally, we make sure that our Pioupiou is equipped to withstand the most extreme conditions:

We abandon the breakable cups for a stronger propeller (which, by the way, is easier to manufacture), and we pay particular attention to the quality of the mechanical connections.

But solid mechanics aren't everything. You also need to have sensors that hold up. How many times have you changed the potentiometer of your wind vane?

Here is the solution I propose:

Both sensors are based on state-of-the-art electronic technologies, mass-produced for smartphones. As a result, they are reliable, predictable, and inexpensive.

For wind speed:

A tiny magnet is placed in the propeller. The magnetic field of this magnet travels a few millimeters until it reaches the electrons hidden in the electronic chip. Once it has reached the electrons, it comes to play quantum mechanics with their spin. Thanks to all that, we still don't know if the famous chat is finally dead, on the other hand we can measure the angle of the propeller, and therefore its speed of rotation. Yippee 🙂

For wind direction:

Finally, this entire beacon is a weather vane. So we need a way to measure the orientation of Pioupiou with respect to the earth. If Steevie managed to put a compass in her latest iFone, it shouldn't be rocket science to put one in Pioupiou. It's a chip that works on the same magnetoresistive principle as for wind speed. (and I think we should be able to find a solution so that the North measurement is not disturbed by the magnetic field of the propeller.)

Lots of advantages to this system:

– The beacon “orients” itself. No need to align it to the North. Installation is therefore even easier.

– It opens up new uses. For example, you can put the beacon on a buoy, to measure the wind in the middle of the lake of Laffrey.

– It's indestructible: these sensors are not worn out. As long as the rules of quantum physics apply, they will work.

I'll stop there, before it's over Friday. It's 23:57 p.m., it's still Friday, so I kept my promise. Here is your little story. See you next Friday for the next episode!