shinyhappyrainbows

I never knew such a thing existed until a few nights ago, but there's an open-source housing project called WikiHouse , described as, "Simple, beautiful, zero-carbon building, for everyone." It's not a perfect open source project, the CAD file formats are mostly commercial, online and industrial grade, although there is a FreeCAD tutorial on how to convert wikihouse cad files to the open source FreeCAD application, it's still complex and largely inaccessible to those not trained in industrial design software. Switch house, source WikiHouse.cc As yet, there are no PDFs for those with an electric jigsaw and a pallet load of ply sheets, a truly accessible format, but the WikiHouse is an example of the idea of open source being a way to drive a socialist economy, without a top down management system. The principle of the whole WikiHouse concept, as I see it, is that housing is a human right, not something that is to be exploited by renting out hoarded property to t

A friend's brother was giving away their drill stand, my friend put their hand up with me in mind, I scored. Giving away. No money! It's not perfect, a broken worktable lifting crank, but I can probably print a replacement, probably a crank wheel, rather than a crank handle, for finer control. It may need new belts. This is a proper workshop tool, not a handyman piece of junk. This lifts my capabilities to some basic milling jobs, like slot holes for making adjustable brackets or facing/rebating aluminium bar and rod. The work height range is huge - I'll need a new rolling bench, but I'll be able to build that from a 1200x1200 ply sheet with material spare. Christmas has come early!

Meccano is a Gen X (and older) boyhood right of passage. My innocent days were that cusp of Boomer to X, the latter being how I identify, despite most picking me as a boomer. I remember a toybox under my bed, full of Lego and Meccano. My train set, a Hornby, of course, was for most of its useful life on a table that was hinged to the wall to rest on my bed posts. My dad was ingenious like that. And then we grow up... I never have, by conventional wisdom. I've had lego most of my life, still do. So it was that my 63rd birthday was a haul of Lego and, for the first time since the 70s, Meccano. It's not an English brand, anymore, French, I think, but it's true to its roots, while well modernised and updated. So, seeing as my major public project is a robotic drum kit, and the hardest part of the design and prototyping has been figuring out how to do hi-hat control, my new Meccano's first task was to roughly model the "dual de-clutched" lever mechanism to lift th

Gotta say, I'm pretty chuffed with this project! Yeah, the repo's still a bit messy, I've yet to mount the electronics, even in prototype form, on the drumkit yet, but I have basic hardware test code working and a basic MIDI operated, non-blocking, Arduino-driven, four-piece kit capable C language package ready to run an Uno or Nano board driving 11 channels of percussion via 11 MOSFET buffers to switch the 24v actuator supply. Most are dynamic, ie: they have velocity, using the analogWrite() command, a few are simple digitalWrite() commands. This video shows an initial test run of the simple hardware test code... I have to admit, the MIDI driver code is probably still a bit unreadable, too. I'm trying to work towards flexible CAD models that can be given presets for popular drum kit product lines and Arduino code that can be scaled to a number of compatible boards, both 16 bit and 32 bit, with sufficient analog pins to run multiple beaters per percussion instrument (

Bugger me, this design task has been breaking my brain! But I've broken its back, I think. At rest, they're locked off at the "sizzle" position. Lift the top hat to open them for a ringing sound. Lift the bottom one to close them for the "tick." Tiss, tiss, tiss, ting^-suppˇ! The rest is just a matter of four solenoids, one to lift the bottom hat, one to lift the top hat, on for left beater and one to operate the right beater. "What the HELL are you raving about, Crunchy?!" you ask. The robotic drums, silly!!! Since I gave up on ever getting a usable way of having car door lock actuators to operate quickly enough to make it work like a "real drummer", and went with solenoids for motive force, the "hats" have been bugging me. It was as simple as using two clutches! You know, the thing that holds the top cymbal on the rod which the pedal pulls down! Bottom cymbal loosely over the pedal riser, held in plase by a lifting mech, to

The linear rails modified Ender-3 has its new, high flow, high heat hot end and printed lift feet for the new telly. No new land speed records, like what killed the cheap nasty hotend, but this was a cosmetic print, anyway. But seriously, these machines are like an abusive partner we keep going back to. They rarely fail at the start of a print or, if they do, it's your fault for not setting it up right. No, most of the time, they'll fail ten minutes from the end and waste most of the roll of your most expensive, least recyclable filament. Still, we makers keep patching up the beast in what looks, from the outside, like a bad case of sunk cost fallacy. Today, this "grandfather's axe" of a machine delivered. I must have modded it enough to have doubled its AU$300 ticket price, so it bloody well ought to deliver, but it really delivered. It's only a practical print, the new telly doesn't quite have enough clearence underneath its stumpy by elegant legs for