Hackspace

Since I’m already a self-professed nerd, and I need to learn how to use an Airbrush properly to be able to realise my dream of painting my Astroneer figure - I decided to get some practice in by painting gaming miniatures (yes - the D&D kind).

Here’s my current setup:

and since it’s just gone Halloween, what better than spiders?

The front one in this image is technically hand painted, but the back two are airbrushed, a closer look at one:

Surprisingly once you’ve got past the paint thinning, constant clogging, hours of cleaning up of mess, the right paint to thinner to drying retardant mixture, and a whole lot of practice - it’s actually really fun.

These guys we’re like “Psssh - done”.

I now have a huge desire to “finish” my Astroneer figure and started looking around for options.

Hundreds of thousands of people the world over are renowned for painting their own 3d miniatures for tabletop games such as Dungeons and Dragons, or even other hobbies such as model train sets, etc.

Enter my “humble” self - “that can’t be too hard...”. I mean, who wouldn’t want to be able to do something like this:

image from https://acrylgiessen.com/ - check them out!

I invested in some airbrush equipment, and originally had it set up in the garage where I had a full sized compressor I could use temporarily.

I was schooled pretty quickly that airbrushing is hard.

Clogs, overspray, paints too thick, paints too thin, blobs, having paint spat at me through the cup... wow. I can truly understand folks that put it down and give in.

In order to give myself the best chance, I bought a quiet indoor compressor and set everything up in my office. Now I have no excuse not to get some practice in after work as its right there behind me.

And that practice, is slowly paying off... here’s me practicing painting a reflective visor surface on a test print (please try to ignore the rest of the paint job!)

What no one seems to warn you of though, is that your workspace quickly ends up like this!

One of my favourite games in the whole wide world is Astroneer - and after finding someone had painstakingly modelled the character and put him on MyMiniFactory for free I just had to have my own.

I now have this guy to be proud of in really quite beautiful detail:

I recently acquired an Elegoo Mars 3D resin printer, and have been really quite blown away by the quality of some of the prints that are possible these days. 

It’s an extremely messy process, but yields results that make it all worthwhile:

A quick comparison vs. my FDM printer and it’s easy to see why resin prints are so exciting for people wanting detailed models. These are tiny... sharpie for scale:

I wasn’t quite prepared for what resin printing really entailed though, and if you’re interested in jumping into this too just beware that there’s a heavy cost in terms of cleaning prints, and just extra bits you’ll want on hand:

Nitrile gloves (don’t get resin on your skin, its bad for you).

Extra resin. You’ll be surprised how quick you can get through it.

I’ve had best luck with the manufacturers own products

note that darker pigments take longer to cure and increase print times dramatically

Isopropanol alcohol, you’re going to want to use a lot. The 2.5L tubs are great.

If in your budget, an ultrasonic cleaner is a great tool

Spare FEP release film

Spare LCD monitor

Cleaning gear: brushes, kitchen roll, cloths

A decent respirator / mask

Eye protection when releasing still-wet models - a splat of resin in you eye will hurt like hell for hours

Lychee Slicing software (not free, but its way better than what comes with the machine)

Despite all the above - it’s absolutely one of the best purchases I’ve made in a long time. The fidelity of the prints is astonishing and I haven’t regretted it one bit.

Kind of work related, but I genuinely had fun learning for and sitting these two AWS exams.

They're also testament to how the IT industry continues to move at the speed of light.

Is this thing on?

It's been a while since blogging about anything interesting going on in my spare time. Work has been a whirlwind of excitement, and I found myself forgetting to blog about the things I enjoy!

I’ve been wanting to work with metal for a long time, and so I recently bought a new toy for the workshop:

Using some excellent Youtube Videos for reference (clickspring), I managed to make my first metal thing! A scribing tool for marking out work out of some aluminium bar:

A good while ago Matthias Wandel posted a video on youtube of him cutting out some 3d reindeers on the bandsaw. They looked pretty cool so I thought I’d have a shot at making them too.

What I didn’t realise, of course, is that Matthias is amazing - and makes these things look incredibly simple. I was in for a rude wake up call.

Anyways, I persevered and eventually coaxed my tabletop bandsaw into cutting though 3″ of material

Click for more details:

FlipDot displays are pretty cool old technology that used to be used for public announcements and service information in places like train stations.

There are a few hackspaces that regularly play with these things, for example:

Sadly, coding for one is a bit of a pain unless you’ve got a display in front of you, so I put together a project that receives the control protocol used by Raspberry Pi based display driver and renders it in a browser instead.

Now code can be tested in at home without a display, and then simply pointed at the real FlipDot panel at a later date. Yey!

Code and more information can be found on my github page: https://github.com/holozip/flipdot-sim It looks like this:

I've been toying with the idea of playing with thermite for a long time, but never got around to it. About six months ago I ordered some powdered aluminium, iron oxide, and some magnesium; and then promptly forgot all about it.

Cleaning out a cupboard today, I found the metal - and decided to knock up a batch! :-)

I made a video of me having fun setting it off, enjoy!

After getting nagged by the missus for always having laptops, books, wires and random stuff all over the floor I finally got around to making myself a purpose built bedside table.

The front shelf / slot is the perfect width for a Macbook - and I managed to make it from bits of an old wardrobe that we’d retired about a year ago - bonus! :)

The side door to our garage was disabled when we moved in, and didn’t come with a key. I was tired of using the front ‘car’ door to get into my workshop so converted it to RFID based entry using an arduino and some bits other bits and pieces.

Here’s an example of how it works:

Parts for the project were mostly sourced from Amazon.

Bill of materials:

Arduino Uno

Sainsmart 2 Channel 5V Relay Board

DC 12B 10A Switching Power Supply

DC 12V 2.5A Push Pull Type Open Frame Solenoid Electromagnet 10mm 55N 12LB

SunFounder Mifare RC522 Card Read Antenna RF Module RFID Reader

Project Case (Maplin)

Wire / Connectors

The RFID Reader itself is pretty straightforward and easy to use. It’s hidden inside the black project case on the outside of the door, and not visible in the video. Here’s what it looks like:

There are some pretty good examples on how to use this with Arduino available here: http://playground.arduino.cc/Learning/MFRC522

The code I used was relatively straightforward, and based largely off the work already done by omersiar, which can be found on github here:

I’ve been watching a lot of Mattias Wandel on YouTube recently, and his passion for bringing engineering to woodworking is always pretty inspiring.

One of the projects I’ve always wanted to make is a rack and pinion type system for my router table fence - to make it easy to position accurately and lock it in place.

I still have a fair way to go to get to that point, but I did manage to learn how to design and cut my own involute gears modelled in OpenSCAD:

The code for generating these can be found on thingiverse.

Here’s the result:

I’ve been slowly converting my garage into a mini workshop where I can hack around with things in my spare time.

One of the main things I was missing was a decent sized workbench to assemble projects or ponder things at. Over a Saturday afternoon, my dad and I put this bad boy together:

Then the following day I set about making a huge stool from a laminated board I had lying around. The shop is finally starting to come together!

Recently a colleague asked me if I could have a go at laser cutting him a vinyl sticker for a design show booth he’s setting up.

I’ve never cut vinyl on the laser cutter before, and despite loads of warnings about chlorine gasses and other nasties I gave it a shot anyway (with the exhaust fan set to full whack though!)

Here’s how it came out, pretty sharp!

Router Table

I've been slowly putting together a router table / workbench in my free time. Taking a leaf out of Matthias Wandel's book, I decided to try and stretch myself a little whilst making the fence by mounting it on a rack and pinion system.

Sadly I'm not skilled enough with a bandsaw to hand cut gears, but instead let the laser cutter churn them out. Nevertheless, it was a fun experience learning OpenSCAD and 'programming' the gear patterns.

OpenSCAD script adapted from: http://www.thingiverse.com/thing:172508