June 20th, 2012
A while ago we visited Becky in London and she took us to Unto This Last on Brick Lane - it’s a really clever operation - design nice furniture that can be made using a simple laminated CNC-cut plywood process and then make it on-demand on a massive CNC mill in the back of the shop.
Sadly they don’t deliver outside of London but it got me thinking whether or not an amateur could follow more or less the same process either at home with a manual router and hand-made templates or using a local CNC service (there are several within a short drive of Bath).
we’ve been after a TV-stand-come-side board for a while and I’ve been playing around with designing something which could be built using this process:
It would need cutting up to make sensible use of the ply boards (otherwise it would use something like 10 1.2x2m boards at ££ each) but I think it’s doable.
From a home-made perspective I was also thinking it would be cool to make it using recycled wood in small sections and then press it together hotch-potch style.
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October 4th, 2010
This has been a long-running (standing/sitting in a box?) project, I got some nixie tubes, in ooh, it must have been 2002 but have never had the guts to make a high-voltage (albeit very low current) controller board from scratch. Fortunately the nice people at Arduinix.com have come up with a simple board which uses cheap Russian BCD demultiplexers for not too much money.
So far I’ve built the board and tested it with a single tube (at 170V) which works fine:
Anyway the build page is here: http://www.zoot.org.uk/wiki/index.php?n=Projects.NixieClock
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May 18th, 2010
I managed to get my CurrentCost thingy to submit data to Google PowerMeter, thanks to the tweet-a-watt hack.
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November 23rd, 2009
The decade is coming to an end in one month and 8 days and an apathetic wave of Noughties nostalgia seems to be sweeping over the country, a breath of relief after the tentative steps of a new millenium in which nothing broke (except the international banking system, respect for international law and modern socialism) if you will.
Musically I would describe the 00′s as a bit of a low patch from my point of view, the first five years were almost entirely taken up with my Ph.D. , an activity involving the purchase of almost no new music and latterly i became 30 which I think pretty much disqualifies me from having a valid opinion on music, if I ever had one in the first place. Thie NME has just released their top 100 albums of the decade and it’s time to compare notes.
NME top 100 comparison
Tags: music
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October 20th, 2009
Whlie waiting for Hagen’s thesis to print I did a little parametric design for my turtlebot chassis. It’s done using GeoGebra. Stuff like the servo and battery dimensions are fixed but most of the other basic properties are variable or dependent thereon.
Now just need to figure out where to mount the brain and the lasers.
Tags: robot
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September 18th, 2009
I’m trying to get into the habit of working with my laptop at the right level and with keyboard and mouse at work as it seems to be better for my wrists/general state of “wellness”.
A while ago I saw these guys selling laptop stands made of cardboard and many other people who had made them from scratch, so I decided to have a go at making my own. Some (100% recycled) laser jet paper boxes, a craft knife, parcel tape and about 1/2 an hour later I ended up with this:
The results turned out quite well if I say so myself (no religious connotations intended, it’s just a very stable structure!).
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June 17th, 2009
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May 27th, 2009
Having stumbled through to my mid-twenties on a archaeic mix of personal music technologies such as “tapes”, “minidiscs” and “listening to music through speakers in the privacy of my own home”, about 5 years ago I got my first MP3 player. The player in question is a Cowon Iaudio X5 (which is very good by the way, especially with rockbox) but over time the battery has been dying and a year or so ago I managed to drop the mean time between intermittent failures on the disk to about 2 days by unceremoniously propelling it across the office in a cable-tripping-over incident. Instead of buying an iPod I decided to have a go at fixing it:
New battery (ebay) : £10.
32Gb CF card ( MyMemory) : £45 (it was on sale currently seems to be about £60).
CF- 1.8″ Toshiba adaptor ( LinITX) : £10 .
Opened case, removed drive, de-soldered old battery, re-soldered new battery (make mental note, buy a new nib for soldering iron and some flux, curse EU for banning lead solder), reassemble.
Charge, test, play, woop.
Tags: projects
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March 27th, 2009
One of the most annoying things about our new house is the flapping letterbox, we are quite high up (175ft anyway) on a relatively exposed spot and the wind makes it flap continuously.
Fortunately I ordered a big box of Neodymium-Iron-Boron supermagnets a while ago from wondermagnet :
.
I was able to affect a successful repair by supergluing two connecting magnets to the flap and the letterbox respectively:
Prompt snubbing of those people who claimed that owning 100 assorted supermagnets would never be of any use for anything.
Tags: house diy magnets
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March 22nd, 2009
I do realise that decoration is very boring, but this will not stop me from inflicting my enthusiasm on you (and other people):
Dave the plasterer came and did a fantastic job on our fireplace :
There is something about taking a bag of powder and some water and making things which are not flat or solid-looking, flat and solid looking which I am unnaturally excited about. Either that or I’ve drunk too much tea (plasterers seem to drink a lot of tea).
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