A dark grey couch with a white pegboard on a drawer slide protruding from its arm. The pegboard has a magazine holder, pen holder, and several other miscellaneous bins holding odds and ends on it.

Sofa Armrest Is A Nifty Storage Spot

If you’re like us, you’re always in need of a little more space to store things. [Javier Guerrero] realized his sofa wasn’t living up to its full storage potential and designed this sofa armrest storage.

[Guerrero]’s sofa arms were hiding 80 liters of space, so he really wanted to do something with it. After disassembling them, he found his original plan of just cutting them up wouldn’t work due to the minimal structure inside. Not to be discouraged, he drew up some plans and built replicas from 15 mm plywood.

For one armrest, he made a single giant box that opens from the top where he can store a couple of folding chairs. On the other side, he made a shorter top-opening bin for charging phones and storing the remote. Underneath that is a large pull out drawer with a pegboard for organizational bliss.

The arms were upholstered using the fabric from the original arms plus a little extra from another slip cover. Separate arm modules and easily obtainable matching fabric aren’t a given for every couch, but we expect that almost any sofa with arms could benefit from this hack given a little ingenuity.

If you’re looking for more storage hacks, checkout this Modular Storage from Old Filament Spools, the Last Component Storage System You’d Ever Need, or the ever popular Gridfinity.

Steel Pegboard Makes For A Tidy Charging Station

Do you have a bunch of electronic devices that all have different styles of chargers and batteries? Of course you do, so does everyone else. While there’s been some headway made towards standardizing on USB (and more recently, USB-C) for charging, there are still plenty of gadgets out there that march to the beat of their own DC adapter. For all those devices, [Tom Barnes] has a tip for making a cheap and easy centralized charging station.

The idea is to get a power strip, ideally one that has a switch on it, and use zip ties to attach it to a piece of pegboard. [Tom] used a nice black steel board which is obviously very strong and shouldn’t be bothered by any potentially high temperatures, but you could get away with the hardware store MDF variety if you had to.

All your chargers, mounted around the periphery of the board with Velcro hook and loop fasteners, have their individual power cords run through to the back of the board where they are nearly routed and zip tied. This is where using the steel pegboard really helped, as it has a lip around the edge that makes a void for all the wires to be run through when hung on the wall. If your particular flavor of pegboard doesn’t have that space behind it, you’d either have to settle for running the wires across the front or build out your own space in the back using a wooden frame.

Even in our high-tech world, no shop is truly complete without pegboard. Whether you’re using it to vertically mount your development boards, or pushing it around on wheels to keep your tools close at hand, there’s no shortage of ways to use this versatile material.

Superbly Synchronized Servos Swaying Softly

LEDs and blinky projects are great, and will likely never fade from our favor. But would you look at this sweeping beauty? This mesmerizing display is made from 36 micro servos with partial Popsicle sticks pasted on the arms. After seeing a huge display with 450 servos at an art museum, [Doug Domke] was inspired to make a scaled-down version.

What [Doug] didn’t scale down is the delightful visuals that simple servo motion can produce. The code produces a three-minute looping show that gets progressively more awesome, and you can stare at that after the break. Behind the pegboard, a single, hardworking Arduino Uno controls three 16-channel PWM controllers that sweep the servos. We like to imagine things other than Popsicle sticks swirling around, like little paper pinwheels, or maybe optical illusion wheels for people with strong stomachs.

You won’t see these in the video, but there are five ultrasonic sensors mounted face-up on the back of the pegboard. [Doug] has optional code built in to allow the servo sticks to follow hand movement. We hope he’ll upload a demo of that feature soon.

Servos can be hypnotic as well as helpful, as we saw in this 114-servo word clock.

Continue reading “Superbly Synchronized Servos Swaying Softly”

Repairs You Can Print: Fixing Pegboard Clips That Break Too Easily

Right now, we’re running the Repairs You Can Print Contest, where one lucky student and one lucky organization will win the fancy-schmancy Prusa i3 MK3, with the neato multi-extrusion upgrade. [Budiul] is a student, so he figured he would repair something with a 3D printer. Lucky for him, the pegboard in his workshop was completely terrible, or at least the pegboard hooks were. These hooks were made out of PVC, and after time, more and more hooks broke. The solution? Print his own, and make them stronger in the process.

[Budiul] started his fix by taking the remaining, unbroken hooks on his pegboard wall organizer and measuring the relevant dimensions. These were modeled in Creo 4.0, printed out, and tested to fit. After many errors and failed models, he finally got a 3D printable version of his plastic pegboard hooks.

Of course, replacing PVC pegboard hooks with ABS hooks really isn’t that great of a solution. To fix this problem of plastic pegboard hooks for good, he printed the hooks in halves, with a channel running down the middle. This channel was filled with some steel wire and acetone welded together. The result is a fantastically strong pegboard hook that will hold up to the rigors of holding up some tools.

While printing out pegboard hooks might not seem like the greatest use of time, there are a few things going for this hack. Firstly, these aren’t the pegboard hooks made out of steel rod we all know and love; this is some sort of weird proprietary system that uses plastic molded hooks. If they’re made out of plastic anyway, you might as well print them. Secondly, being able to print your own pegboard hooks is a severely underrated capability. If you’ve ever tried to organize a workbench, you’ll know that you’ll never be able to find the right hook for the right spot. There is, apparently, a mystical superposition of pegboard hooks somewhere in the universe.

This is a great hack, and a great entry for the Repairs You Can Print contest. You can check out a video of the hack below.

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Electronics Workbench Goes Vertical With Pegboard Mounting

[JesusGomez] has certainly put work into his Vertical Laboratory concept. There’s a bit more to the idea than simply using 3D printed parts to move electronics from the desktop onto a metal pegboard, although that part is certainly nicely done. There are 3D models for securely mounting various hardware such as Raspberry Pi, Beaglebone, ESP32, cable management, breadboards, and other common parts to a metal pegboard. Instead of having parts and wires splayed across a workbench, it can be mounted and organized vertically. Having a project or prototype mounted on pegboard is easier to store, saves room, and frees up desk space in small work areas. It also makes for an organized and visually pleasing layout.

A clever piece of design is in the plastic mounts that he created. He wanted parts to remain securely mounted unless intentionally removed, allow different mounting orientations, and to never require access to the back side of the pegboard. To accomplish this, the parts use a combination of pegs that slide-lock with bendable sections that act as lock tabs. Once mounted, the parts stay put until the lock tabs are released by gently prying them out of position. Since mounting and removal can be done entirely from the front, wall mounted pegboards with inaccessible backs can be used.

Metal pegboard has its uses, even if the more common dead-tree version shows up more often in projects from DIY vacuforming to making a modular work surface for when space is at an absolute premium.

Vacuum Forming At Home

A little dumpster-diving let [Nick Skvarla] build his vacuum form machine for around $5. He pulled a vacuum cleaner out of the trash, which was tossed away because of a broken power plug. He put it into a box which had been sealed with spray foam and used a piece of pegboard for the top side of the enclosure. He takes a piece of 40 mil PETG plastic from the hobby shop and mounts it in a wooden frame. That goes into the oven on broil until the entire sheet is sagging, then onto the vacuum former. Above he’s making forms out of some figurines which he’ll walk you through in the video after the break.

There’s a whole world of manufacturing processes that use these forms as a starting point. What would you use this for?

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Web-enabled LED Pegboard

[Norm Santos] whipped up an LED light board that you can draw on through their web interface. We tried it out but unfortunately the live feed is currently offline. That doesn’t diminish our appreciation for the time-lapse build video after the break. Indeed it was a mountain of hot glueing and a couple of days of soldering. Our only beef is that for every LED on the board there are three empty peg holes. To us this is just begging to be augmented with blue, green, and white LEDs for a more spectacular result. What they have now encompases 350 LEDs managed by five microcontrollers, which took about two days to solder (for five people) and to hammer out some code. Continue reading “Web-enabled LED Pegboard”