TL;DR – Didn’t do more with floppy drives after all. Instead cracked open a brand spanking new (non-functional) VCR. Turns out what was wrong with it was melted belts. I replaced one with rolled up gaffer’s tape and it worked! I took a lot of video of that. 

So it is quite a bit harder to do these recaps several days after they actually happened. This was a busy week for me in other ways so I didn’t have time to do an immediate recap that was thorough.  I think going forward I’ll pick immediacy over detail because it isn’t like I remember a ton now.

• I charged a 9V battery successfully using Jen’s solar panel and used it later that night for the Intro to Arduino class.
• Soldered up a potentiometer to the lead wires stolen of a fan so I would have a female molex connector on it (no picture, for Arduino class)
• Investigated the parts in the VCR. This was an older model so some of the layout/technologies look a bit different. One thing is the giant honking transformer and all the trim pots. Also there is an interesting looking encoder I want to examine more closely. I really loved the honeycomb texture of the base.