Much of the feedback I received on my introductory post revolved around how I didn’t really introduce or explain anything. This was intentional, and for good reason. You see, trying to plan out 5 weeks of cohesive blog posts seemed hard. So I didn’t do it. Besides, if I had explained the idea behind how all my posts fit together up front, then what would this conclusion be? A past tense reiteration of the introduction? Meh to that.
Furthermore, some of the projects used in the blog are still in somewhat active development. Any progress on something could change its importance and position in the overall blog. For example, half my post on 3D design was tentatively going to be about the planned v3 of my arc reactor. It’s going to be 3D printed with channels and grooves for pressing wire and other components into, creating a solder-free pseudo circuit board. You know, if it works. Either way it seemed like a cool potential post, but as predicted, I made no progress on it this quarter. So I’m sure glad I didn’t promise to write about it.

Anyway, now that I’ve justified all that, I’ll explain the loose vision behind my blog that ties it all together. Not counting the introduction, the first post is about the rather large wooden boombox I built in high school, along with some of my complaints on how it could have been better. The main issues are that I didn’t have sufficient manufacturing ability or electronics knowledge to build what I wanted. The next few posts are stories about smaller projects where I learn about 3D printing and solder blinky lights to coffee cans. Post 5, about the MLP BoomBox, serves as the current culmination of my progress since the high school boombox. Alternatively, you could just call it a bunch of stuff that I’ve done and group it together that way.
Although I wasn’t always sure what style I was going for, and it varied wildly between informative and jokes-only, I had fun writing it. Hopefully it wasn’t too bad to read.

 

That’s pretty much it. Our entire organization thanks you for your patronage. The end is NOW!

 

Coming next week: nada! But you can check me out Thingiverse to see more dumb stuff I’ve made. New designs posted occasionally! 

 

ps- It feels weird to make a post without pictures of colorful doodads and whatnot, so here’s one of my current 3d print station!

note: This post was originally titled 5 Years on the Back Burner: Why Your Project Should Replace Pop Culture References with Bluetooth. If you’re looking for that, this is it. We apologize for any confusion.

2011

During my senior year of High School  I built a boombox. It’s huge, heavy, and the exact stretch of ‘portable music player’ I envisioned it to be. However,  due to the costs associated with building a 60 pound boombox , still incomplete. For starters, it needs more buttons, less hanging wires, and a new coat of paint. But the real issue is power. Lead-acid batteries, while somewhat effective, would nearly double the total weight. I actually tried running it off of D-cells as an experiment; they lasted 8 minutes. Lithiums would probably have done it, but were far out of my budget. I realized that even if battery tech improved and prices dropped considerably, I still wouldn’t be able to afford it for many, many years. The only thing to do was shelve the project and wait until I had the means to complete it. 

“But then again,” I thought to myself, “mayhaps this wait could be lessened if the damned thing were more smaller!” Happy with my somewhat eloquent deduction, I started keeping an eye out for suitable parts.

2012

In what was probably 2012 (but possibly 2013 because I don’t really remember) the make-a-smaller-boombox plan made notable progress. I had acquired a decent set of small speakers at a thrift shop, as well as a new smart phone. This is significant because it marked the official retirement of my old clickwheel iPod, and with it, the death of the iPod dock. At least within my personal boombox designs.
Perhaps even more important was the current pop culture. None of the hipster (I think that’s the correct terminology…?) I knew would shut up about Doctor Who, Minecraft or My little Pony. I had a notion to try and harness some of this trendiness for my boomboxes. The plan was to build a few extras, slap a creeper sticker on the side, and try to sell them to cover my costs.

Anyway, one day I’m stranded in a toysRus and run across this thing:

A cheap metal lunchbox, about the right size, featuring perfect MLP graphics. Perfect as in it literally has the music themed horse on it. I believe its name is Skrillex Pony. There was just one problem: the walls of the lunchbox could never withstand the weight of the speakers. It would need some sort of internal structure, with the lunchbox as a wrapper. Of course I had no way to build a perfectly fitted internal structure for this purpose, so on the shelf it went.

February 19th, 2016

Here we are at present day. I now have an adorable 3D printer, and enough DIY electronics experience to probably not catch anything on fire. A pair of 18650 lithium batteries is only 14 dollars on amazon. As proved by my UE Boom, Bluetooth audio can now have passable quality. The My little Pony fad has fizzled out, at least to my knowledge. Maybe I’m just getting old. At any rate, I have tentatively decided to drop the MLP lunchbox from my design, add a bluetooth module, and hope I get this thing built before yet another wave of culture and technology passes me by.

And that possibility is closer than ever! As of 2 weeks ago, I have all the internal components I need. All that’s left is making enough free time to 3D model and print the casing. Easier said than done! As usual, let’s close out with a gallery.

 

In a prior post I described the not at all long or harrowing process of getting my 3D printer up and running. With that out of the way, it’s time to move on to the hard part of owning a 3D printer: Figuring out how to make use of the thing. Having that level of manufacturing potential just sitting around creates a pressure to utilize it. It’s like this nagging feeling that a stopped printer is time wasted. Shouldn’t this thing be constantly churning out organizational and life hack tools that are a brilliant blend of form and function? Yes it should. But coming up with ideas is hard, and sitting around trying to brainstorm inventions is a waste of time. At least for me it is. Trying to notice solvable problems as they annoy you in everyday life is more effective. Once you get that mindset, all your problems are solved! Need a place to store your laptop so you stop almost stepping on it? Just hop on Thingiverse, download some wall mount brackets, and enjoy harnessing that vertical storage space. Smartwatch dock? Spare appliance knob? A weirdly large number of egg holders? No problem. A bracket to hang your bathroom squeegee* from the mirror? Nope. Thanks for nothing, internet.

Designing the Ultimate (aka only) ikea Bathroom Squeegee Mirror Clip

I whipped out the calipers (a must have tool for 3D printing!) and designed this in about fifteen minutes with Sketchup. I was aiming for a very high value to effort ratio, so while I did at least make things symmetrical, it’s not the prettiest design. You may notice the giant triangle cut out in the middle. This is a very lazy way to shave down on material. Proper designers utilize fancy bubble patterns or other fun tricks that reduce material and look appealing, but I guarantee that sort of thing takes at least several minutes longer. 

Take a look at the cut off corners that are highlighted in yellow. Originally those corners were fully intact. When designing this I had only ensured that the squeegee would fit, but did not all account for how much accuracy it takes to guide something into a slot like that. It took an hour and forty minutes to print that piece out, and it was unusable. I saved myself having to reprint by clipping off the corners with wire cutters. This is fine, but the moral of the story is that even after you have the means, and the idea, it can still be hard to execute it well. “Measure twice, cut once.” comes to mind, although “Measure twice, and try not to overlook obvious design problems” might be more appropriate. 

See below for a picture of the real thing, and come back next week for  TBD  5 Years on the Back Burner: Why Your Project Should Replace Pop Culture References with Bluetooth

 

 

*Do you suffer from moderate to severe mirror fog? Get a bathroom squeegee. They make towels look like idiots.

If you were here last week, you might recall that I made the following claim:

“Coming next week: LEDs, Microcontrollers, and How to Build your Halloween Costume in a Cave from a Box of Scraps”

That was a lie. But, regrettably, my replacement article “Box Cats: Putting Cats in Boxes” did not pan out. So today I actually will be talking about some stuff I did for Halloween.

2013

Halloween was fast approaching, and I had no costume or money. But I DID have the following:

• a soldering iron
• kitchen scissors
• a packet of LEDs from some project I never got around to
• wire and connectors
• 1 paper plate
• Folgers coffee 
• one of those clear plastic dummy CDs that comes with packs of blank discs
• 17 different colors of duct tape
• the change in my pocket
• AA batteries

 

Alright! Time to build…(did you catch it?) an Arc Reactor! Since this has apparently become a How-To article (note: It is not), feel free to build your own as you follow along!*

 

Step 1: Brew and drink all of the coffee. This will take a while. Also, we need the lid off the coffee can.

Step 2: Cut the CD down to the size of the coffee lid. If your scissors aren’t working, persist for many hours. 

Step 3: Line the inside of the coffee lid with duct tape

Step 4: Draw a wagon wheel on the paper plate and cut it out. Cut it down to the size of the coffee lid. You may actually want to do this before ruining your scissors cutting up the CD.

Step 5: Solder 3 LEDs together end to end, with a power connector completing the loop. If you do not have wires or connectors, but own a desktop computer, try opening it up. Most of the stuff in there is extraneous, so just take what you need. A small cutting or grinding tool may help with this.

Step 6: Get 2 wires, one for positive and one for negative. Put a connector on one end, and solder the the loose ends to your shiniest pennies. 

 

At this point, you should have something like this:

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Did you end up with that? Great! For the last step, tape a bunch of AA batteries together into a pack. Try connecting different numbers of them to your LEDs to adjust for brightness. If the pack gets hot, don’t worry! It will be very cold out on Halloween, and since the pack will be close to your body, this heat will be beneficial.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

2014

It was a month til Halloween 2014. I didn’t have another fun idea for a new costume. But I did have an $25 Amazon gift card. It was time to drop the jokes and various fire hazards. It was time for Arc Reactor v2!

v1 has a number of flaws:

• heavy, bulky battery pack
• no resistors to protect the LEDs (I didn’t know they needed this in 2013)
• the LEDs weren’t the quite the right shade of blue

I ordered myself some new parts to rectify these problems:

• RGB LEDs
• an ATtiny 85 microcontroller
• A 3 volt coin cell battery
• a cheap compact mirror

I already had an Arduino (brand new in the box!) and some old LEDs so I spent a little time with the Arduino blink tutorial https://www.arduino.cc/en/Tutorial/Blink while I waited on shipping. I wanted to blink my LEDs super fast so that they looked on, but with an occasional flutter, for added coolness. This might save on battery, since the LEDs are off some portion of the time, but I don’t know if it’s a meaningful amount. What’s cool is that depending on how you change the delays, you can create either a blinking or dimming effect, or a combination.

After my parts came, I used this guide http://highlowtech.org/?p=1229 to program my ATtiny with my Arduino. If you want to do your own ATtiny project, pay close attention to the pins! The order of all the pinouts change based on whether you’re using them in analog or digital mode.

My LEDs are common anode, meaning the ATtiny is wired to the ground wire of the LEDs. This is called current sinking, because the current is being sunk INTO the microcontroller. This means that in my program, setting a pin to LOW turns the LED on. (common cathodes wired in reverse of this, with power flowing from the microcontroller to the LED).

I also added a red mode, with a power button to switch between them. Here’s some picks of v2, and a link to the code if you want details.

https://drive.google.com/file/d/0B7eJ8-sLX8UCTl9taFhQS0dvZU0/view?usp=sharing

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

*Do not do this. This article is for entertainment purposes only.