Making – The Louie

We have a cage for rabbits that we has small plastic hasps that somehow have a tendency to disappear. So on request from my wife I created a handful new ones. Original (white) vs. 3d-printed (green) After a couple of minutes in Fusion360, and 15 minutes in the printer we had a result, and it worked as well, if not better, than the original. Fusion 360 sketch [...]

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, [...]

After three [1, 2, 3] Ursa inspired keyboards it was time to try to do something different. For a while now I've seen several keyboards inspired by the original C64 design and colours, but I wasn't a Commodore guy, I had an Atari STe when I was a kid. The first ideas and sketches started to form properly around the start of the year, but it would take until the start of the summer before I had something to type on. I started with trying to get the characteristic F-buttons of the Atari ST to work. [...]

I have a handful of cheap ESP32 development boards, and some expensive, that all sometimes gives me the error A fatal error occurred: Could not open COM6, the port doesn't exist. But I have found a workaround. The simplest way I found is to start with opening the Serial Monitor (in Arduino IDE) to see the status of the com-port easily. Then unplug the USB cable from the dev-board, hold down the EN / reset switch while plugging it in again. If it worked (which it does 9/10 times) the yellow bar [...]

For quite a while I have been annoyed that I didn't have a phone stand for my phone that would charge it wireless. But then I remembered that I had an old wireless charger that I didn't use any more. The evolution of the stand The first crude version had a design flaw, I had not accounted for the precise positioning needed for the wireless charger in relation to the phone. So I quickly printed a half-moon shaped "bodge-spacer" to test it out. When I had the first version I realized that I wanted [...]

I have a water radiator on my top floor mounted in a small niche, so small that there is only about 1cm of space between the air-valve and the wall. The problem has been that I since I moved here 10 years ago have been looking for something that would fit so I could air out the radiator. But it seems like the closest I found was some image of one. The last couple of weeks we have had quite cold weather and the need for getting the radiators up to max performance was needed more than ever. So after [...]

A friend at En Produktions Byrå was assigned to design a section of a Fagerhult exhibit for their permanent showroom located at the headquarters. The display consists of several clusters of buttons, resembling vintage radio buttons where only one can be active at a time in each group. A sophisticated display mounted on an adjacent wall is controlled by the buttons. Modern radio buttons After doing some research, we purchased a number of Adafruit buttons with integrated Neopixel (WS281X) lights, [...]

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 [...]

After my second Ursa inspired keyboard was finished and I wasn't completely satisfied with the bulky look I decided to leave fabric and go back to a material I've worked with a bit more, wood. Also my newest PCBs had arrived a while back and I was eager to use them. I've also gotten some LOTR themed keycaps, more specifically the dwarvish set from Drop. So I started on the third iteration of the original design idea form Andreas Chlupka. Main body So I started with getting some oak planks and [...]

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 [...]