Diary of an Emacs tragic

Category: Making things

  • Clock Part 3

    Clock Part 3

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    Jason
    in ,

    I finally finished the outer case of my clock. Only 19 layers of 3mm acrylic stacked on top of each other. I built a finger slot into the back of the clock so it’s easier to carry, but also to house the barrel jack for mounting the clock flush to the wall, allowong me to hide…

  • Clock Part 2

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    Jason
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    Previously… A bit more progress on my clock. I installed the dirty pink gel filter to increase the contrast ratio of the 7 segment displays, and started cutting the final case out of red 101 acrylic. Lots of laminations.  

  • Backup your Beaglebone Black

    Backup your Beaglebone Black

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    Jason
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    Using a method I previously wrote about, it’s quite easy to backup your Beaglebone Black over the network. ssh root@bbb ‘tar cf – / 2>/dev/null’ | pv -cN tar \ | bzip2 | pv -cN bzip2 > bbb-backup-tar.bz2 It runs the bzip compression locally because presumably it will be faster than on the Beaglebone Black.…

  • Progress on my clock

    Progress on my clock

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    Jason
    in ,

    I finally wired up the big LEDs and made an acrylic mounting board for all the parts. I laser cut holes in the board and tapped them with an M3 tap. That allowed me to mount the circuit boards directly to the mounting board. I used Dupont connectors to wire everything up which gives a…

  • LED Clock Project

    LED Clock Project

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    Jason
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    For a long time I have wanted a bedside clock that would keep accurate time via some external mechanism, and would take care of daylight savings automatically. I eventually decided that the best approach would be to use a wifi enabled device and use the NTP protocol for keeping the time accurate. After wasting several…

  • 3D Printed Heated Towelrail Brackets

    3D Printed Heated Towelrail Brackets

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    Jason
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    Our heated towel rail’s brackets broke from old ages recently. After investigating getting a new towel rail and finding out they were quite expensive, I decided to try and design and 3D print new brackets for it. The first cut of the design turned out to have too little space for the nuts. A second…

  • FreeCAD

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    Jason
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    Hack A Day has a great article introducing FreeCAD. FreeCAD is a parametric 3D modeler. Parametric modeling allows you to easily modify your design by going back into your model history and changing its parameters. FreeCAD is open source (LGPL license) and completely modular, allowing for very advanced extension and customization. There are several great things about…

  • Programmatic CAD, OpenSCAD alternatives

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    Jason
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    There are quite a few programatic CAD, OpenSCAD alternatives out there. I am collecting a list of them and providing links to them here. The requirements to be included in this list are: Free and libre. They are a programming language as opposed to a GUI. OpenSCAD: The most well known programmatic CAD program. Probably…

  • Using magnets to keep dust out of the cupboard

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    Jason
    in ,

    We recently bought an old kitchen cabinet that has a fly screen on one of the doors. I have found that it lets dust in over time, and when I go to use the glasses, they often have to be cleaned because they are dusty. I decided to make some sort of clear perspex screen…