Quilting Desk Is An Absolute Unit

August 1, 2019 by Kristina Panos 10 Comments

Most hobbies come with a lot of tools, and thread injecting is no different. Quilting itself may be Queen Hobby when it comes to the sheer volume of things you can buy: specialized templates, clips, thimbles, disappearing ink pens, and so on. And of course, you want it all within arm’s reach while sitting at the machine.

Years ago, [KevsWoodworks] built an impressive custom quilting desk for his wife. He’d added on to it over the years, but it was time for a bigger one. This beautiful beast has 21 drawers and 6 large cubbyholes for plastic bins. At the wife’s request, one of the drawers is vertical. [Kev] doesn’t say what she put in there, but if it were our desk, that’s where we’d stash all our large plastic rulers that need to be kept flat (or vertical). There’s also a lift, so any sewing machine can be brought up flush with the enormous top.

Fortunately for us, [Kev] likes to teach. He documented the build in a series of videos that go nicely with his CAD drawings, which are available for download. Thread your way past the break to see those videos.

Want to do some thread injecting, but don’t want to spend hundreds on a machine? We got lucky with our entry-level injector. If yours is a piece of scrap or has limited stitch options, replace the motor, or add an Arduino.

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Tiny ThinkPad Plays Tiny Games

July 31, 2019 by Kristina Panos 7 Comments

[Paul Klinger] can’t seem to get enough of building tiny, amazing gaming rigs, and we love him for that. They combine two of our favorites: miniatures and portable gaming. His newest creation honors the form of the formidable ThinkPad.

Of course it has the red nipple and lid LED—wouldn’t be a ThinkPad without ’em. ThinkTiny’s nipple is a 5-way joystick that plays Snake, Tetris, Lunar Lander, and more on an OLED screen. Like its predecessor the Tiny PC, [Paul] used an ATtiny1614, which (FYI) has a new one-wire UDPI interface. He can easily reprogram it through pogo pin holes built into the case.

There are some nice stylistic details at play here, too. The lid LED is both delivered and diffused by a 2mm grain of fiber-optic cable. And [Paul] printed the cover with a color change to transparent filament to make the Think logo and the charging LEDs shine through. Maneuver your way past the break to see it in action.

If you haven’t leveled up to AVR programming yet, introduce yourself to Arduboy.

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ESP8266 Sound Machine Soothes Baby Remotely

July 28, 2019 by Kristina Panos 7 Comments

[Zack] had trouble getting his six-month-old to sleep through the night. That was before he found out about ‘shh’ videos on YouTube. These are exactly what they sound like: eight hours of someone whooshing white noise into a microphone. He set a phone up on a charger in the nursery and let one of these play overnight. But the phone was unreliable. It would lock up, or just crash completely, making the baby’s distress worse.

To restore peace in the house, he built a sound machine that both simplifies and fortifies the white noise shh-loution. It uses an ESP8266 and a DFPlayer Mini to loop a lone MP3 file of shh-video audio and play it from a small speaker. By integrating the machine with Home Assistant, he’s able to trigger the sound remotely at baby’s bedtime. ESP Home has no module for the DFPlayer, but [Zack] built one that he’s happy to share.

If you are mired in early parenthood, this is a nice, simple solution. The DFPlayer does all the work of reading from the SD card and converting the signal to analog for speaker output, so there’s no need to get your hands dirty wasting valuable sleeping or kid-playing time.

Once the kid starts toddling out of babyhood, [Zack] could turn to ESP8266-based ambient lighting to help establish the difference between sleep and wake time.

DIY Teensy Looper Multiplies Music

July 23, 2019 by Kristina Panos 10 Comments

If you’re into electronic music, chances are good that you like to roll your own. While step one is usually to build something, anything that makes sound, a natural step two is to build a looping device to extend and play with those sounds.

[Cutlasses] has finished version one of his Teensy-based Eurorack-style looper. He plugs in a thing, records some tunes, and the resulting loop gets divvied up into eight equal pieces. He can cut the loop together live using the eight buttons to jump around between sections. It supports unlimited overdubs, although too many will cause clipping. But hey, that just means free derivative sounds.

The looper records its audio to an SD card. Since this is typically a slow endeavor, [Cutlasses] used two circular buffers. One reads audio, and the other writes it. This took a lot of trial and error, which he may have to repeat with future SD cards.

[Cutlasses]’ plans for future versions include a separate audio CODEC for better sound, CV control, and a pedal option for hands-free operation. We’d love to hear some sweet Theremin loopage, wouldn’t you? Jog past the break to watch [Cutlasses] demo his looper with a kalimba and a DIY noise box that uses a string bow to make metal tines sing.

Feeling out of the music-making loop? There are (slightly) easier ways. Check out this LEGO looper or this multiplayer Pi-ano.

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DIY Industrial Oven Brings The Heat

July 21, 2019 by Kristina Panos 4 Comments

When [Turbo Conquering Mega Eagle] tried lost wax casting, he ended up with a fireball and a galvanizing sense of disappointment. There wasn’t enough heat to get all the wax out, and the paraffin ignited. Though a bit burned by the experience, it didn’t extinguish his desire to do lost wax casting. In a textbook case of project-spawns-project, this eagle decided to wing it and made his own high-temperature oven.

This is true, seat-of-your-pants DIY. For this project, [TCME] treated himself to a virgin sheet of mild steel, a metallic delicacy for a guy who seems used to using whatever is available. The oven consists of a welded-together box inside a larger box, with insulation between the two. The door is a shallower box filled with insulation, with hinges on the right and a sturdy-looking gravity catch on the left. [TCME] welded together a nice little box for the 12-volt, 1000 °C temp controller module, and tacked some tabs to the outside to help wrangle the wires. Lower your visor and click past the break to watch this hot box come together.

We hope [TCME] answers the burning questions of how well the thing loses wax, and how fast it bakes a pizza. Meantime, here’s a clay oven that’s built to pizza.

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Salty? Tip Canister To Rage Quit Games

July 5, 2019 by Kristina Panos 42 Comments

Do you long for a more pronounced way to rage quit video games? Smashing buttons comes naturally, of course, but this hurts the controller or keyboard. You can quit your longing, because [Insert Controller Here] has an elegant solution that’s worth its salt.

The Salty Rage Quit Controller is simple. The cup is filled with distilled water. When you pour salt in it, the two bolt terminals tell the Arduino Micro that the resistance in the water has decreased. The Micro sends whatever keystrokes you want, so you could call out your deadbeat medic before quitting, or just plain leave. [Insert Controller Here] has example code on his site to get you started. Click calmly past the break to watch the demo and build videos, or we’ll have to ban you for aggro.

With the right tools, you can turn anything into a game controller. Check out this car controller that uses Python and CAN bus sniffing.

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Mary Sherman Morgan, Rocket Fuel Mixologist

July 2, 2019 by Kristina Panos 54 Comments

In the fall of 1957, it seemed as though the United States’ space program would never get off the ground. The USSR had launched Sputnik in October, and this cemented their place in history as the first nation in space. If that weren’t bad enough, they put Sputnik 2 into orbit a month later.

By Christmas, things looked even worse. The US had twice tried to launch Navy-designed Vanguard rockets, and both were spectacular failures. It was time to use their ace in the hole: the Redstone rocket, a direct descendant of the V-2s designed during WWII. The only problem was the propellant. It would never get the payload into orbit as-is.

The US Army awarded a contract to North American Aviation (NAA) to find a propellant that would do the job. But there was a catch: it was too late to make any changes to the engine’s design, so they had to work with big limitations. Oh, and the Army needed it two days before yesterday.

The Army sent a Colonel to NAA to deliver the contract, and to personally insist that they put their very best man on the job. And they did. What the Army didn’t count on was that NAA’s best man was actually a woman with no college degree.

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