High SQ (Silliness Quotient) Projects

摘要

In these days of high uncertainty in the Coronavirus lockdown, a comedic antidote often brings a smile. Monitoring the voltage produced by solar cells for another project, I realised that as the reading varied with the cloud cover, it made a useful overcast-meter. This is of course how a photographic exposure meter works. It might be calibrated in 'Octas' (of cloud cover, or eighths of the sky), even to making a meter scale to suit. A meter should not be connected to solar cell without a load because it shows unrealistically high voltages. In this case, the LED lighting was the load. Thinking about this further, a Very Silly project would be to use a different meter scale, showing the difference between day and night... "The silliness is terrific" as 'Inky' Singh didn't say in the Billy Bunter books.