Experiments

"A test under controlled conditions, demonstrate a known truth, examine a hypothesis, or determine the efficacy of something previously untried."

When I experiment and test stuff it might end up here, things like failed projects or tests for a project than never will become reality.

For one of my children I created a small sign that said "Roblox" and I really liked the aesthetics of it so I created a larger version with built in light. From the start I maximized the size of the letters according to the printable volume on my 3d-printer. But the printing took ages, and it was close to 400g material per letter so I scaled it down a bit so for the end-result the letters are 13cm tall instead of 25. I feel that they would have been a lot more impressing at their original size, [...]

In our office we have a suspended ceiling that we wanted to attach stuff to. Firstly we wanted a curtain rod to partition off a bit of the open plan. And later two small lights for a disco ball! First version, intended for curtain rod The first version worked quite well for the curtain rod, a couple of the small hooks got broken off but I made plenty enough. But it was a design flaw with the ABS-plastic too brittle. I used the same design for the lamp holders, but it became obvious that it was too [...]

To be able to measure the Wifi quality over time I created a small program for ESP32, probably works for ESP8266 also, that every five minutes reports the ping RTT to the local gateway and the RSSI to the connected AP. The idea is to get a handful cheap ESP32 boards and litter them around the house and send the data to influx-db to be able to create a dashboard. And to be clear, this is not a project, just a small experiment to see if it's feasible to use ESP32 to monitor this. You can find the [...]

Quite a while ago I bought an IKEA Vindriktning air quality thingie on sale with the intention to connect it to my Home Assistant setup. It’s a quite simple affair, there is a RS232 TX pin on the Vindriktning board that spews out values, so just connect a ESP32 to that and push the values to MQTT. There's quite a lot of guides online that are easy to find, Fabisoft, Oversubstance, Instructables, Turanis, if you want some inspiration. Instead of writing my own software there are plenty open-source [...]

For a project I'm working on I wanted to test to oxidize copper to get it to look old and used so I read up on the internet and got some ideas. So I got hold of the chemicals I wanted to test with. Ammonia Table salt (fine, flake and coarse) Hydrochloric Acid Citric Acid Some texts indicated that you could apply Ammonia get the oxidizing to start of and add acid and salt to speed up the process and improve the patterns. The first three tests I performed was to soak a bit of paper towel in ammonia [...]

After I received my new PCBs I wanted to get a feel for them and start using them as fast as possible. So I grabbed a 22mm thick sheet of MDF from the stack and started cutting in to it. For the tray to have a bit more strength I soaked it was watered down wood glue a couple of times before I painted it black. The result wasn't amazing, or above average. But it at least let me start using my new nice pcb and keycaps while I created the first proper case. [...]

After trying hand-wiring i decided that I wanted to try to make a custom PCB. This would be the first that was a bit more advanced, with a MCU and USB. I also wanted a PCB for the vintage SMK switches I just bought from Ebay. SMK gen2 switches I used EasyEDA to design it since i would be ordering from JLCPCB and there is a nice integration between EasyEDA and JLCPCB which made the ordering a lot easier. Screenshot from EasyEDA, v1.5 of the PCB I created my own footprint for the key switches and [...]

During the first months of the Pandemic I bought a small tabletop CNC machine from Switzerland (read: China). It has a working area of 60x40cm and work very well for wood and other softer materials. I've added some things to it, a vacuum-shoe for example. I've used it to make several prototypes of keyboard cases in wood. I've used oak, birch, pinewood, MDF and plywood. It's fun to design something in the computer and a short while later have it as a physical object. One idea I explored was to [...]

A small experiment with distorting jpeg-images with Javascript in the browser. You can test it here: https://louie.se/dumpster/misc/jpeg-distort/And find the code here: https://github.com/the-louie/jpeg-distort Mostly simple pixel manipulation, like scrolling and skewing, but also a function to introduce random byte-errors in the compressed jpeg-data itself to get some unpredictable but nice effects. [...]

During the summers of 2013-2014 i played around with a raspberry pi and a 1-wire sensor placed near the beach Rocksjön in central Jönköping. Thanks to the kind people at Hasse på Sjökanten which is a Hotel and Resturant just by the beach I got to use their Wifi and power for the Raspberry Pi. I had 50 meter of outdoor cat-5e that I wired up to a DS18B20 in a aluminium tube filled with silicone. It was cold. The data was uploaded to a public website that the Hotel and Resturant used to include [...]