Topic: Making
2023-01-02 09:57 - Making
A while ago I made "The Bedsofa", a sort of headboard designed like the back of a sofa, for comfortable sitting up (and reading) in bed. When I made it, I was living in a loft apartment, and it was designed to work with the mattress sitting right on the floor. (The loft was around four feet high, no room to put the mattress up on a real bed, there.
The riser I've designed, plus an "exploded view" to plan how many boards will be needed to build it.
So this is the plan: a simple little frame, to raise the bedsofa the same amount that the bed frame will raise the mattress. Almost. My original design didn't work out perfectly so the cushions hang a bit lower than intended. Raising the bedsofa a little bit less than the mattress will make those sit up where they were originally intended. So this will be ten inches tall, while the bed frame is twelve.
I've still got the rest of the material I upholstered the bedsofa with, so this riser should blend right in. Now I've just got to figure out the best way to get some two-by-four boards home!
2022-12-31 21:38 - Making
I moved almost exactly a month ago. The bedroom closet has a unique closet rod situation: self made hangers, from 1x4 lumber, around the perimeter of the closet. Since the closet is shallow but wide (I guess), they were installed to allow either two front-to-back closet rods on the sides, or one across the width. But the long closet rod in there isn't long enough to reach the hangers on either side, and the width is much more than double the depth. I'd like to use the long closet rod, but I can't as-is.
There's also some pipes feeding the radiator upstairs, tucked on one side. So the solution seemed to be to build a new hanger in the right position to support the existing closet rod, plus avoid the area with the heating pipes at the same time. I started by cutting a board to length, and finding the right shape hole to match the one already in place. I cut a second board the same length, to be a backstop so the rod can't slide and fall out.
Once cut, the boards were painted white to better match what already existed in the closet. Four "toe-screwed" screws support the main board, with the cutout, from each corner. Two screws go through the face to support the backstop board from there. Once installed, you can see the preexisting hanger already along the wall, which the rod couldn't reach.
2022-02-13 12:48 - Making
I had to do laundry, and I was out of funds so I had to trek to the basement to recharge my laundry card. While there, I passed the electronics recycling bin. I spotted a nifty looking two-outlet four-USB power strip. Sometimes people toss things that are perfectly working. This one was not.
But it looked pretty nice, so I took the time to look into it. First I tried the USB ports, nothing. A little dot on the front looked like a status light, not lit. Then I tried the AC outlets: those also didn't work. At this point, it was time to open it up. There were two visible screws on the bottom, but that wasn't enough. There were two more screws, under two of the four rubber feet. Then some plastic clips holding the base on, and I was in. I found a much larger and more complicated circuit board to run the USB ports than I'd expect, and one smaller one.
The smaller board was directly connected to the AC input, one leg via the switch. Once I flipped it out, I found what not only looked clearly like a fuse but also was labeled "F1" on the board. And it was blown. I couldn't see what its original ratings were — this was a little glass fuse, the ratings are normally stamped on the metal ends. I ended up putting an 8 amp fuse in to replace it, from what I already had on hand. Which was a bare fuse, no leads like the original had. So I took some short wires, soldered it in, and covered everything in shrink wrap (like the original) to be safe. You'll have to look close at the picture to see it: it's at the bottom/right of the picture. A large black blob is the original shrink wrapped board. The smaller and closer black blob is the new shrink wrapped fuse, with little green wires leading back to the board.
Once I put the fuse in and closed it up: everything works fine! And of course, the status light is an awful bright blue thing. The hole for it is small enough, but tons of light leaks around the USB ports.
2021-09-09 18:08 - Making
As mentioned earlier, I've been streaming my video game play online. To improve the stream, I've added a webcam to show my face. I've got a (probably?) unusual setup, in that I'm just sitting on my couch, looking at my TV, as I always have while video gaming. No good spot to put the camera. My first try just twist-tied the camera onto the tripod, then aggressively cropped that, to keep just the part that's my face. This moves the camera much closer to me while keeping the legs further away, because they need to be given the furniture layout!
It's a tiny piece of wood, drilled and tapped for quarter-twenty, to attach to the tripod. A matching hole is drilled in a bit of "angle iron" (aluminum, actually) I already had lying around. At the front is a 3D print I quickly threw together which (thankfully on the first try!) friction-fits around the angle and the camera's own mounting knob.
My streaming setup is pretty cobbled together, like this. Which is absolutely fine for now!
2021-05-05 20:15 - Making
I love rechargeable batteries. Much cheaper over time, and more convenient: it's pretty easy to keep a few charged and ready, and thus never need to worry about running out or getting more. For a while I had two little plastic buckets (old takeout containers!) to hold charged and used batteries each. But that's still a bit messy, and doesn't allow for even rotation.
It's pretty easy to buy battery holders, but the ones I could find are bulky (almost all including lots of C and D cell slots I don't need) and surprisingly expensive for a little chunk of plastic. So I made my own chunk of plastic! It's just a little box with some circular holes, of the right size to fit AAA and AA cells. I can put them + side up to signal that they're charged, and build a left-to-right kind of plan to make sure I'm always picking up the oldest one to use next, and putting the used ones back in at the "end of the line".
2021-04-14 21:44 - Making
I've wanted extra lighting on my 3D printer for a while, but only a little. A while back I replaced the broken extruder(s). The old ones had fans built in, but they always seemed pointless: they were mounted on the outside of the extruder, so they couldn't even cool the stepper effectively. And they were incompatible with the new extruders so they came off.
This left extra unused power connectors exactly where I planned on installing lights. Today I finally took the time to put some LEDs from the strip I already had in place, using that connector. They provide decent illumination, but reveal how unreliable the 12v rail is: I can now see as the heaters kick in, because they cause an immediate dip in the brightness of these LEDs. I'll need to try adding capacitor(s), at least.
2021-02-10 21:12 - Making
Stuck at home so much, my habits have shifted a bit. I haven't made much of anything in quite a while. I dropped a whole three dollars (shipped!) on a little mini tesla coil kit just to shake things up a bit. Here's how it arrived, no instructions at all, which worried me at first. But there's very few parts, and it's actually almost impossible to get them wrong. Turns out they're tiny, but the markings right on the board disambiguate everything.
Weird parts: it came with two resistors and two LEDs — and the description called this out specifically — but there's only one place to put each, same for the little capacitors: comes with two but only one spot to put one in. It came with four little feet, but there's only three spots to put them. The component nearest the middle of this shot is a neon lamp, which doesn't connect to anything at all!
It only took a little while to assemble. Here it is in operation, hooked up to my bench power supply so I could vary, limit, and monitor the power it consumed. It claimed to need 9 to 12 volts, and it works across that range and below. It doesn't actually do very much, but it does cause quite an electric field to be established. As a result, the little neon lamp it comes with will illuminate when it's nearby and the coil is powered on. But not connected at all! Spooky!
To rather dimly illuminate this small bulb, it consumes around six watts. And the little heat sink gets quite hot!
2021-02-07 15:22 - Making
I got a 3D printer a few years ago when I came into a lucky collection of free filament. Long story short, things were okay, but I had trouble with the (free) ABS filament, it's extra hard to work with. I got some PLA recently, which slightly but not totally improved things.
I eventually figured out that the cause was a cracked part. The "extruder" of a 3D printer is responsible for pushing the plastic filament down into the "hot end" which melts it, so that it can be laid down into the design in question. This particular part pinches the filament onto the drive gear, so that it can be pushed. And the crack means it wasn't pinching as strongly as it should, so it would slip and not move correctly.
My 3D printer is "dual extruder", so it's capable of using two different filaments at the same time. I almost never use that, so I simply switched over to the other non-broken extruder for a while, but that wasn't a real fix. I ordered some replacement parts, made of metal instead of plastic, and here they are installed. You can see the (brass) gear in the middle, of the metal extruders in red. The spring pushes the top arm up, which pivots on the top left screw, pinching the silverish roller into the brass gear. The plastic filament goes between them, and down from here.
This much is a nice improvement. No longer does the drive gear turn but just slip past the filament, not pushed strongly into it. Now I've got a new problem to solve: for some reason somewhere around the second layer it stops trying to drive the filament at all!
2020-09-26 16:12 - Making
I live on the back (away from the street) side of my apartment building. So things tend to be pretty quiet, and there's no street lights outside my window. But there is another building, with a hallway with windows and bright fluorescent lights that never turn off. It's not much, but it's enough to be annoying at night.
So a while back, I got some black curtains and a rod to hang them from (which friction fits between the support beams). This basically solves the problem. They're thin but good enough to block most of the light from outside in the "upstairs" sleeping loft where my bed is. But it does leave a section open. I always wanted to fix that. When I first set this up, I considered continuing the curtains straight across to the wall. that would have divided the hallway a bit too much though.
After quite a long time I finally came up with an idea I like. I've got a standard curtain rod, intended to bridge across the top of a window. But this spot is a concrete support beam: not easy to screw into for mounting. The solution was some tiny brackets, with enough surface area to simply hot glue to the wall. One of them ripped the paint/plaster off after a day or so, but that was a week ago and they've held fast since, after being re-glued to the bare surface beneath.
First I had to do some sewing, to fit the curtain around the support beam. Then it turns the corner and covers the remaining open area on this side. It's a minor change but a great improvement in feel.
