Sibling rivalry........nearly

You may have gathered that I live in the UK,

I have, however, a very close friend who is American and lives in the state of Georgia. We have been friends for so long, it almost seems like forever and as we also share many interests it sometimes happens that a bit of rivalry creeps into our relationship. Just before Christmas 2019 I received a parcel with a little electronic gift that Todd had made for me.

Based on a Raspberry Pi Zero, it has a small screen that plays a series of photos of our last holiday with him interpolated with  inspiring messages.

It was really great and I kept showing it to family and friends all through Christmas.

In fact, the only minor problem was that Todd had needed to use a case from another project to build it into for safety and looks. And looks were not brilliant as he was at great pains to tell me.

Well, it didn't bother me but I knew I had my Prusa on the way. I also had some fairly extensive knowledge of using Neo-Pixels and that's when it all got a bit competitive.

My idea was to build a very small version of the Christmas display and make it shine through a non transparent case so that, when not switched on, it just looked like a block of white plastic. Making something that small should be a doddle after making power supplies. Well it wasn't. I realised about two days in that I was becoming a bit of a perfectionist. Added to which, I had begun to learn a lot of useful stuff about 3D printing and coding for Arduinos. It took nearly three weeks to come up with the final design but it was worth it as the final product looks very elegant and simple. I shudder to think about the wasted filament but told myself it was all about learning how to do things properly. And then along came Ann and gave me a challenge. "Can you build me a Tesseract?

Power Supplies #1

I looked at the scruffy way I had mounted the little power supply on the back of the boards and realised there was a much better way of doing the job.

I had a 3D printer and I could simply print a box to contain the whole thing neatly.

And I could put mounting points on it and make the cable and DC plug for the Arduino Uno part of the whole thing. They might even come in handy for other things so I'll need four but I'll build five because it's so easy when you have a fabrication process at your beck and call isn't it?

It all started well, I had already installed my preferred design software when I bought my first 3D printer a few years previously. 

I had designed and printed a lot of simple things very successfully on it and was very fond of it but it had one major drawback, it used the larger, 3mm, filament.

So, a couple of years previously, I bought a cheap but very nice Chinese clone of a RepRap and had more success with that.

That was what I would use to make my power supply cases.

Well, I made three of my cases and began to realise what I had let myself in for. The printer was fine but my design was lacking in detail. I tried to improve the detail only to find that the printer wasn't able to do some of the things I was asking of it. It just wasn't accurate enough.

About then, I read a magazine article comparing various 3D printers and pointing out their good and bad points. The one that really stood out was a Prusa i3MK3s. It actually came top in two sections so I had a much closer look at it online. I'm not here to sell you one so I won't go into detail but I realised that this was the one for me. I ordered it and, shortly thereafter, it duly arrived. 

I fed in the same file I'd had only moderate success with before and it printed perfectly, first time. The "First time" bit is quite important as I have a box full of failed prints from before then.

So the last two power supply cases got printed and they were really good.

It all began with Christmas

After a gestation period of nearly two years, I finally managed to make a Christmas display for our four windows in 2019. Despite a very poor finish at the time, not one failed me over a three week period.

Once they came down, I felt obliged to rebuild them for a longer life and better appearance.

The originals were pretty much held together with duct tape and drawing pins but the tape was very useful in all the places where it couldn't be easily seen and judicious use of some very good quality insulating tape also made the whole thing neater and less prone to shorting out on the reflective foil.

The lights are cut from edge lit Neo-Pixel strips that only use three wires to control the whole display. I used a cake base from a cookery shop for the circle and cut a strip of 57 Neo-Pixels for each one. The power for each board was a small ready made block from China that inputs between 100 and 240 volts AC and outputs 5 volts DC. They were the first item I changed once Christmas was over.......... It wasn't that they were unsafe, I had used some heavy insulation on the AC side but the whole thing looked very inelegant and a bit scruffy. 

And this was when the story really started!

And this is number one..............................

Well, everybody has to begin somewhere.

So what is a "Big Thing" anyway?

Well look at it this way, we all have ambitions to achieve something in our lives.

Sometimes we do and, more often, we don't but we usually give it a try.

A good example of this would be a "Bucket List" of things to do before we meet the grim reaper.

Well, I've been pretty lucky with my ambitions and I pretty much achieved everything I wanted to do by the age of fifty at which point I started to achieve a lot of stuff I didn't want for a while.

Probably the most exciting of these was an inordinately large amount of hospital time involving various operations upon my person.

Looking back on the past 21 years, it has been a bit of a pain in a lot of places quite frankly.

So I have returned to an old ambition that I thought I had fulfilled many years ago and when I retired, I updated it and began to play with digital electronics.

The trouble was, being retired, I should have had a lot of time to play with but that wasn't the case at all. I had the inclination and the money but no time so I ended up with a pile of bits but no end product.

Until Now!

covid 19 has given me the time to dig in and get on with it at long last.

About two years ago I began a project to make some Christmas light decorations for the front of our house. I just managed to put them on display last Christmas...............slightly unfinished.

In the new year I was putting them away and realised that they were a good idea but badly executed so I re-built them properly and then put them away. Then I thought of several more ways they could be improved that involved using a small mains power supply. So I built one.

That was pretty successful but looked tatty so I bought a much better 3D printer and made another one using the same files and it didn't look tatty any longer.

By now I was getting quite enthusiastic about 3D printing as well so I built two small light displays with a self designed case and learnt a lot about designing for electronic devices in the process. Shortly after my daughter was looking at the little light show and asked whether I could fit something like it but larger into a stage costume she was thinking of making and we decided to collaborate on that.

Then, some friends saw my first two lighting projects and asked me to build a handheld unit for her to carry at comicom type conventions so I did.

Then I built me a better mouse trap........actually a better power supply.

And then, I had my idea for my next "Big Thing".

But you'll have to read about how I made everything else first before I 'll reveal just exactly what it is or they are!