A little more than four years ago, when Jamison was in sixth grade, he did an engineering project for his school’s science fair. It was a lot of fun for both of us.

Being the proud dad that I am, I wrote a series of blog posts on Jamison’s project as he was doing it. They have been some of my more popular posts and the subject of a few comments and many emails asking for help.

The first questions came from three 8th graders who asked for help in the comments to the project’s first post. I did my best to help them and steer them away from danger.

More questions continued to come by email from college engineering students, many apparently hoping to score a quick senior project. One particularly excited individual described himself, “im really glad to see u in ur forum nd im doin btech 2nd year frm india..!!” He also asked for the information to “send me links which r accurate standard pdf ‘to make it as theory’!!!”¹If only he’d gone to the Instructable Jamison used, he could have downloaded it as “accurate standard pdf,” and it includes a theory of operation section. I pointed out the information he was requesting had already been provided.

This morning, I received another email:

Dear Logan,

I saw the interesting and simply designed wireless powering project it have been done in your website.

I am a PhD student, a part of my project is wireless power transfer.

I am wondering if you can send me the schematic of the wireless project.

I send you the attachment to know which project I mean.

I appreciate your hel

Thanks

Regards

Nabeel last name²Almost all personally identifiable information redacted. But the requester emailed using his university email address and has a Facebook profile describing hims education as “Doctorate at [prestigious university] and stating his opinion that The Spice Girls are the greatest British band of all times.
prestigious university
country

I think this is the first Ph.D. student asking for help—at least, he’s the first to admit it. Jamison should be proud that his 6th-grade science fair project is helping graduate students worldwide. My response (with all snark hopefully removed):

Dear Nabeel,

Thanks for your interest in my sixth-grade son’s science fair project. I’m sure he’ll be proud to learn that a doctoral student would like further information on it.

Jamison followed the instructions documented in an Instructable: Low-Power Wireless Charging.³This fact was mentioned in the fourth post of the series, Wireless Power Transmission, Part IV. I have added a footer to each post in the series to make this fact more obvious to future knowledge seekers. There’s a lot of really good information in the Instructable, including a theory of operation section and schematics of the various modules. You should be able to find everything you need to duplicate Jamison’s project. After all, it was Jamison’s primary source of information.

Best of luck with your project. I know Jamison had fun doing it!

-Brent

• 1
  If only he’d gone to the Instructable Jamison used, he could have downloaded it as “accurate standard pdf,” and it includes a theory of operation section.
• 2
  Almost all personally identifiable information redacted. But the requester emailed using his university email address and has a Facebook profile describing hims education as “Doctorate at [prestigious university] and stating his opinion that The Spice Girls are the greatest British band of all times.
• 3
  This fact was mentioned in the fourth post of the series, Wireless Power Transmission, Part IV. I have added a footer to each post in the series to make this fact more obvious to future knowledge seekers.