hardware

Try fixing your things. It’s already broken - no need to sweat. You might learn something. Level 2 - push for things to be easily fixable. It’s good for you. It’s good for the planet. I m g 20160612 120723 I m g 20160612 120730 I m g 20160612 120814 I m g 20160612 120945 [Read More]

After 2 months of waiting - my CNC router arrives. 8 weeks lead time they said - 7 weeks and 4 days it was ! Who are they ? TanieCNC people [CheapCNC in Polish :]. Although it may look like they don’t know how to make websites AND their name does not instill a lot of confidence - but hey, they certainly know how to weld and make precise machinery ! [Read More]

I thought it would be cool to share with you the tools I find surprisingly useful. Behold the first in the series: the PCB holder ! I cannot overstate how much is that of a difference from the ‘third hand’-type of holders. The grip is very firm but won’t scratch the surface nor short anything because the jaws are made from a soft plastic. And the whole thing ROTATES ! [Read More]

SD cards are not really a reliable storage, especially when used constantly e.g. while sitting in always powered-on Raspberry Pi. Because of that I’ve recently needed to perform lots of backup/restore operations ;) I wrote this script for backing up: #!/bin/bash if [[ -z $1 ]]; then echo "usage: $0 device_to_clone" exit fi device=$1 timestamp=`date +%Y%m%d` dest_file="/tmp/$timestamp.dd.xz" echo "about to clone $device to $dest_file" echo "ctrl-c or [enter]" read sudo umount $device? [Read More]

It was some time since the last photo-story so, please accept these pictures of my standing desk. On the actual desk, there is a laptop stand serving a role of a keyboard and mouse rest. Laptop itself is flipped on its back, motherboard attached to the back of what once was a lid. The whole thing is flying on standard monitor desk mount, using custom vesa-to-acrylic mounting system ;) I m g 1238 [Read More]

I find it useful to hang as much stuff as possible on the walls, instead of using shelf/floor/desk space for that. Here is just a quick hack I did to allow filament spools to be mounted securely to a wall. It turns out that if you cut off the bent part the rod it fits perfectly into the spool’s handle hole. I m g 1071 I m g 1073 [Read More]

Remember my sunpowered Pi installation on the balcony ? The only indication I had, since recently, on how well the system is doing was an LED blinking red when battery was low. Not really helpful in making predictions or making measurements over the time. I’ve searched for simple ADC solution to hook up into Pi and allow for some voltage and power measurements. I’ve decided on ADC Pi, as it seemed very straightforward in its design and also comes with example python code. [Read More]