I was inspired by the Magnetic PCB Holder that Sneakypoo (yeah, that's his(?) handle!) posted on Thingiverse... and then was honored when he agreed to share the original files with me. But then I wanted to do it very differently, so I remodeled from scratch and made this pair:

...stuck to the fridge

They're meant to hold printed circuit boards during soldering or other such work. They have strong magnets embedded in them. They're pretty sweet!

I'm not actually working on that Arduino - it was just the closest PCB at hand when photo time rolled around.

I'm realizing I haven't actually posted them on Thingiverse yet. Hmm. Gotta do that now.

Edit: okay! All Thingiversed up, good to go.

As luck has it, the organizers of Confluence made a nicely shot video of the speech and shared it on Vimeo. It's over an hour long, but if you've got a little time and you'd like some unparalleled makernspiration, here's the thing for you:

Even if you don't have time for the vid, here's a screen capture showing Chris in front of a picture of his grandfather, working at a cat-laden drawing board! [insert dumb joke about Cat-Aided-Design here]

All the more reason to keep a lot of scratch paper on your drawing board.

Yikes!

So disappointing. But it's all good. Pull back, take a look around, and restart that cut!

PS: friends of the blog have commented that its content hasn't included nearly enough woodworking. I agree! Sorry about that. Though 3D printing is the new and flashy thing, wood does remain my True Favorite Medium. I'll try to get the blog content to reflect that a little better. 

Matchbox for planes

I abandoned the slide-over approach and went with a slide-all-around design, very much like a standard match box design. I had to add a curve to one side to introduce enough friction so it wouldn't accidentally open up.

Next step? Genericize the internal open areas to permit a range of plane designs to reside therein. It's time to be designing my own planes, not just using the design handed to me.

In the meantime I have plenty of those!

fleet fab prep

Old Toy Plane!

This is actually a toy I had when I was a little kiddo. I sent my mom a picture to confirm and she said, "Oh yes, you definitely had one just like that. But yours had a propeller!"

So this will be a good 3D printing exercise: it definitely needs a new prop, maybe something that uses emmett-style snap pins to hold it on. The wheels too are a bit worn, though not as obliterated as the propeller.

I wonder how long this thing stayed in production. The date on the bottom suggests it was initially released several years before I was born:

Sooooo old.

But it occurred to me that it would be fun to have one, no, two of these with me everywhere I went.

Unfortunately, that's the unsuccessful first draft of the pocket storage device. I'll keep you posted when I made one that, you know, can actually be stored in your pocket!

Yesterday Jennifer said, "Okay, time to try something different." And it turned out beautifully:

Canoe as lampshade. 

PS: there's actually a website called Canoes And Lampshades, featuring pictures of boats of exactly this type made exquisitely well. Check it out!

Matt Jordan's Knox Makers logo, for the first time ever embossed in Cafe Bustelo

This is exciting and fun stuff. It's one of the first things printed on Knox Makers' group-owned printer, soon to be opened up for general group access. It should also be noted that this printer is the grandchild of Dr. Tyson: Dr.T printed the parts for the printer that subsequently printed the parts for this printer, the one that printed the espresso tamper.

As the name suggests, I think it's handy. Handy if for no other reason than that it's been a good thing to have waiting in the wings ready to keep the printer busy when I'm trying to finish up the design of the thing I actually want to print right then. 

But it seems awfully mundane. Shouldn't I be reserving this 3D printer, this miracle technology to which I am always delighted to have access, for life-changing critically-important newsworthy efforts? 

No, I don't think so. It's marvelous for those things too, don't get me wrong. But the explosion of the 3D printer's usefulness is because it's become available to little people like you and me, people who have mundane little problems in their lives like disorganized shelves, problems that can be solved by purpose-printed mundane items just such as this bin. I'm livin' the dream here, the mundane problem solving dream.

Shown with tiny vidcam hacked on.

Why do I need one of these, you ask? Ermmm.... I'll get back to you on that. But I do. I know I do.

Oo! I've got it! Remote review of various shop tools' condition: if you've got a CNC machine running and you need to leave the shop, maybe this thing could be web-controlled to fly around it and check stuff out? The usual solution, put a stationary webcam in place, is... well... too stationary. 

Maybe that seems like a flimsy excuse for getting one. Maybe that's why I haven't clicked "buy" yet. But wow I'm close. Help me think of less flimsy justifications!

The promo video makes this great promise: LEARN (just enough) TO MAKE (almost) ANYTHING! I completely love it.

And that's how it works. Every time.

But I can tell you one thing: it's going to involve magnets. I've been excited about embedding magnets in 3D printed stuff, and the idea of doing that with an air hockey puck (and having matching magnets under the table surface) seemed just perfect. Here's the first draft:

The thing is... that's too many magnets. Not only is it crazy strong (each of those silver circles is a 0.5" x 0.1" thick NdFeB magnet), it's also crazy heavy, at least by air hockey puck standards. And last night we discovered that's a scary thing when the puck gets moving at... however fast it is these things go. Too fast! 

Also, there were fabrication difficulties: these were meant to be fully enclosed by the printing process, but things got... weird. Magnets flying everywhere, etc. So there are several things to work out, it's fair to say. But this was a fun start. I'll be sure to post updates here as things progress.

The next morning I came into the shop and... found the pile of plywood strewn across the floor, mostly covering the remains of my lovely cart. Yes, the cart had failed.

Here's the key area of failure:

Check out those threads!

This is too close to really see the cart structure or what exactly this was prior to its catastrophic separation, but the general idea was for two vertical elements to serve as a stand against which the plywood could be leaned. This block was where one of those vertical elements met the horizontal rolling base. And this block apparently could not take the torque! The screw on the leftern portion of the block is actually the sheared-off remains of a screw. The screw head is still in the now-recumbent vertical support.

I was very disappointed with the failure, of course, but in a way it was a vindication. I usually overbuild this kind of thing, and then I never know for sure if I could have built it a little more minimally. This time, though, I know: no!

1. laundry detergent
2. dishwashing detergent
3. all-purpose cleaner
4. deoderant
5. toothpaste

So I decided to try toothpaste.

The stuff.

I really want to be all even-handed about this. Heck, I really want to be all like, "Yeah! Woo hooooo, maker toothpaste is an awesome substitute for that expensive storebought stuff!

But I can't be like that. It's kind of awful. It's so intense. It's pretty much like having a mouthful of salt. And the peppermint oil is just the slightest hint of something, not a big help in the long run. And... I'm really not sure it helped me have a fresh and minty mouthbreeze to share with the people around me. You'll have to ask them. On second thought, please don't.

Anyway, does anyone have any other DIY toothpaste ideas? 'Cause I still like the idea. Just not this way of doing it.

Huh. That sounds ominous. To be clear: I definitely mean the bot, not the astrophysicist!

I'd previously purchased a little jar of electrically non-conductive thermal paste. That is, it conducts heat... but not electricity. Not sure why I felt that last sentence was necessary. Or that one.

Whoa! Awful picture!

Anyway, that image above shows a MakerBot Replicator Heated Build Platform taken apart. The hardware at the bottom right is the ten screws that hold the heater board (red) to the aluminum surface on which print substrates rest. Four of those screws are longer, allowing them to work with the springs to mount and level the platform. 

Here's what it looked like as I slathered on the good stuff:

Somewhat better.

In that image you can really see what the heater board is all about: it's a series of these traces that run all over it in a maze. The idea is that you run a lot of current through them and then, through their resistance, the plate heats up. The golden color is because there's a layer of Kapton tape over the traces, which is supposed to reduce the risk of shorting between them.

Anyway, the whole purpose of this was to improve the uniformity of the plate's heating. It seems to have worked, judging by the reduced need to constantly relevel the plate, so, yay!

I wish I could remember where I first read about this. Maybe it was in that same Wired magazine article that got me excited about the vacuum heat exchanger glove thingy I've been working on. Anyway, the story I read was about a research team that made a belt with a multitude of vibrating motors (think pager or cellphone "silent" ringer). They attached it to an electronic compass system, which then sent commands such that the northmost motor always buzzed very slightly. Thus, as you turn in a circle, you can feel each motor in sequence start up buzzing and then fall dead as the next one rotates into the northward position. 

As the participants in that initial study wore the belt they were initially annoyed by the motors. Then they grew used to them. Then they developed a subconscious perfect sense of direction! Shazam. I thought that sounded so cool.

Then last week I discovered there's actually someone making something not unlike that. It's a group called Sensebridge (awesome name, right?) and the product is called North Paw (even awesomer, right??). They intend it to be worn as an anklet, and maybe I'll do that at first, but I think it would be less in the way if worn as a belt. 

Here's the stuff I've got soldered up so far:

I just got the kit yesterday but I'm already anxious to be wearing it and developing this new sense.

North Paw PC Board in housing.

The housing is clunky and way thicker than it needs to be. It's begging to have a custom-designed housing 3D printed. I need to not do that yet, though, but rather make sure I focus on completing the assembly work first. Maker priorities!

But really I just haven't put enough time and effort into it. And when I do put a little time or effort in and manage to have a little success with a DIY automotive repair or modification, it usually turns out to be quite interesting to me. And then I forget again, I guess?

Yesterday, as I was prepping to head out to the makerspace for some more boatbuilding, I finally decided to try a car modification I'd been reading about: I decided to disable the Hill Holder mechanism on my car. This is a 2005 Subaru Forester, manual transmission, that we bought new almost exactly eight years ago now. It's been an awesome car, useful and reliable and fun all at the same time. But it's got this "helpful" feature called the Hill Holder, which is meant to keep you from rolling backward when you start on an uphill. And it does that, and I'll admit that, at times, that's pretty handy. But the same feature also grabs at various other times and can have a tendency to make the car feel just a little balky. 

I've previously asked Subaru dealers if it could be disabled and they all say no. But then I found this article, in which Lackhead describes the process in simple terms that even I can understand. So I took a couple of wrenches and just... did it.

That white cable in the middle of the photo above is the one in question. It passes through a little pivoting thingy and is held in place with two nuts, one gray and one brassy.

After! 

After removing the nuts it was easy to pull the cable out. I replaced the nuts, just for storage, and then used a zip-tie to keep the cable from flopping around. 

And that was that. Super easy, and WOW is the car more fun to drive now. It was a minor annoyance, but it's so nice to have it gone.

Anyway, I previously mentioned printing on plates of glass. Though the Replicator comes with an aluminum platform for printing, putting a layer of glass atop it helps provide a super-flat surface and a substrate on which to try different print-enhancing coatings such as hairspray or other things that can improve adhesion between the part and the plate.

When this hairspray+glass thing was first discussed on the group, there was casual mention of the possibility of doing a group buy of some glass. I happened to know a vendor through previous product development work, so I volunteered to run said buy. Now a couple of months have gone buy and I've ordered, received, re-packaged, and shipped well over a hundred plates of 3.3mm thick borosilicate glass to people all over the world! Well, okay, just to the US, Canada, and Australia. But still.

It's been an educational process, both in learning about robust but quick packaging of fragile things...

...and in just getting things out the door:

I'm not sure I'm going to be in a big hurry to do another group buy in the super-near future. But probably someday. It really is fun, despite the effort.

For the record, I made some effort to do so. But it was not going well. Attempts to even begin to separate the clear plastic from the rest of the watch body were just not bearing fruit.

So...

Sometimes you have to give up, I guess. Sometimes you just have to go out and buy a new watch. Hopefully we're trending toward a world in which we have access to the tech to fix such things, and manufacturers make such things in a way that helps rather than hinders possible fixing attempts. But for now... buying this reliable simple Timex was a small price to pay to get me back the land of the punctual. Or at least a little more punctual.