Math has always been a weak point for me. As a kid, I had the common math phobia that I hear lots of other kids have. At my age, schools were horrible for teaching math, especially the basics to kids. There never seemed to be any point of reference to make sense out of what we were trying to learn.
I had other personal issues at the time that made the whole experience multiples worse.
Now I am trying to learn to fabricate and mill things in order to make parts for machines like ATVs and farm machines. That is where I am trying to turn this Steelbak toward.
It all comes down to MATH as the root skill and understanding.
I have learned that I need to get to a high proficiency in Trigonometry at least. This is were the tools are for understanding measurements that are required for accurately and precisely making useful things. It is also the base understanding for electrical studies, which is my next goal.
Enter Khan Academy
What a great time to be alive.
I’m using this free and excellent tool to learn math from basic arithmetic all the way through to at least Trigonometry. It is helping me a ton.
I am not even good at basic arithmetic and I feel like I am filling in all sorts of holes in my knowledge at a very fast pace using this tool. My goal is to get to Trigonometry in about a month.
Other Current Skill Goals
- Blender: Blender does it all. I am currently trying to learn to use it for precision modeling, similar to CAD.
- Milling machine: Necessary for making machine parts.
- Lathe: Necessary for making machine parts.
- Basic Electronics: Obviously, we need electrical components for almost everything. I want an understanding of what the components do as well as have the tools skills to properly do the work.
- Hydraulics: Larger machines and bigger loads require hydraulics. Currently, my overall goal is to build an open source track loader (maybe better called a skid steer) from scratch.
Documenting Everything and Working on the @DiggnDeeper.com Maker Wiki
Working on Wiki’s kind of sucks.
For those that may not know, this is my personal account, but I also own the DiggnDeeper.com site and @DiggnDeeper.com account on Hive (I do wish that I didn’t use the .com, but I did).
Its yet another skill and learning curve to get through. Editing is tedious, but they definitely serve a great purpose. For example, I have been looking everywhere throughout the Internet for a good outline or curriculum to get up to a good solid foundation of maker knowledge and skills. There doesn’t seem to be such a thing out there, so this is a good opportunity for Makers.DiggnDeeper.com.
Could There Be Hive Powered Wikis?
This brings me to a big question that has been nagging me lately… When it comes to incentivizing and decentralizing Wiki’s can #Hive fix this? I don’t have the technical chops to understand what it might take to create a front end or any other tech that could allow this, but I think using Hive to incentivize and decentralize wikis would be frick’n awesome.
This is something I will be trying to explore a lot more in the future?