Hello.

Welcome to the Wax Drum. My name is Charles Estabrooks, and this multi-purpose site serves as a repository of information for my students, a platform for sharing my creative interests, and a sandbox for my ongoing learning and experimentation.

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Student Resources

This area of the site is provided for my computer science and engineering students. Here you will find links to Project Lead the Way along with general resources and documentation.

Estabrooks Reads?

Some of you may be interested in what I read outside of the classroom. Here are some of the books and authors I've read or plan to read.

Tech Blog

I began blogging as a way of learning various publishing frameworks such as Wordpress, Drupal, and Django. I also needed a place to document solutions to technical problems that arose from time to time. The tech blog was the original "Wax Drum" and has now been relegated to a subdomain.

Computational Art

I have always loved programming computers, going way back to the Apple ][ and TRS-80 days. The more sophisticated they've become, the more I've become interested in what they can do creatively in the visual, sonic, and multimedia arts. Here are some of my visual musings.

FIRST Robotics

Just about the hardest fun you can have and still retain your sanity (barely). FRC Team 1740, The Ledyard Cyber Colonels were the 2022 Western New England District Finalists, 2020 Connecticut Event Winners, and the 2017 "Steamworks" Worcester Event Finalists

Ham Radio

After teaching electronics for a few years, I wanted to expand my understanding of how radios work. In 2015, I passed the required exams and became a licensed ham radio operator. Since then I have made contacts all over the world.

Back before the internet, when two hams made a contact, they would typically exchange postcards in the mail to commemorate their "QSO". These cards are known as "QSL" cards. This is what my QSL card looks like. The photo shows us sailing REBEL downwind. I'm the one in the middle, trimming the spinnaker. I have a lovely painting of this scene by my friend and talented artist David Bareford. I photographed many of the paintings which appear on his web site.

Photography

Prior to teaching, I operated a commercial photography studio in Westerly, Rhode Island. This is my old web site I used for that business which I discontinued in 2012.

Why Wax Drum?

In the early oughts I setup a home recording studio which I dubbed "Wax Drum Studios". The origin of this term comes an earlier century when the first audio recordings were made using wax drums. They were not nearly as durable as later media. When I was looking for a domain name, this analogy seemed appropriate for digital media in "the cloud" as well, so I kept it.