Making stuff and taking names. Well, making stuff, anyways.
Since I last wrote about my Painbox project (part 1, part 2), progress has been very lumpy. Here s a bunch of short updates on various aspects of the project. The grill Replacing the clunky copper tubes through a 2 4 test grill was high on my list of priorities, so I tackled that first. I considered a [ ]
Operational overhead is all the costs you incur just to keep your app running, totally separate from initial and ongoing development. This is all the behind-the-scenes work necessary to support ongoing operation: updating special models ( categories , countries , etc.), auditing capacity consumption, re-running failed scheduled tasks, granting access or privileges, etc. It s uninspired busywork…
I bought a Shapeoko 2 about six months ago. One of the things the mistakes I made on day one was the lack of a permanent, high-quality bench for it to live on. Not thinking ahead, I built my SO2 on top of a knock-down bench I built for doing dirty tasks it s just a sheet of 3/4 particle [ ]
In my last post, I introduced my painbox project and talked about the prototype I d assembled so far. The basic functionality was there, but the performance was subpar. The device itself was also a giant mess, making it hard to iterate on. Time to make some improvements. New parts I decided to try to improve [ ]
I m a big fan of the Dune series, so when this post about the Thermal Grill Illusion popped up in my feed reader, I was immediately hooked. For those of you who are not acquainted with the Dune franchise, the pain box which is never actually named in the series is a device which causes an [ ]
A few months back, we moved out of our apartment and into a rental house. Among the many great things about the new place was the two-car garage. With only one car, what s a suddenly space-rich maker to do? Set up a workbench, of course. Initially, I was planning to design a bench out of plywood [ ]
I do almost all my physical designs in OpenSCAD, and sometimes I want to post an image of my models. Since these are 3D models we re talking about, a static image is kinda insufficient, but an animated GIF can do the job nicely. OpenSCAD has an animation feature which allows you to create models that [ ]
I m a big fan of DIY capacitive touch sensors. Without any custom parts or special fabrication techniques (beyond regular PCB creation), you can create really impressive interfaces. I first used this on the Question Block Lamp (Getting ready to ship! Order yours now!), and ever since I ve been looking for great places to apply the technique. [ ]
Here s a simple circuit for driving LEDs at constant current. I like this one because it can be built with a variety of different components based on what you have on hand. I built my version with two 2N2222A transistors and a sense resistor from my resistor kit. How does it work? A small current [ ]
Most of the time when I m driving an LED, I do it with a simple ballast resistor, and that s all there is to it. Lately, however, I ve been working on a few LED matrix projects, and while it s certainly possible to use the same simple resistor approach, this leads to a very dim display. (Since any [ ]