Category Archives: possibly useful

Let There Be Light

Posted on December 4, 2019 by paulwallich

I remixed an old openscad christmas tree design to include space for a coin cell and an LED. Coincidentally I have a bunch of green LEDs lying around — their light gets through the plastic a lot better than the … Continue reading →

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Maker Faire day 2

Posted on September 28, 2019 by paulwallich

Huzzah! Today we were inside and had decent wifi. Bill started right up and connected with no problem, and we spent the day cutting and engraving for curious onlookers. The exhaust went out one of the Coach Barn’s venerable windows, … Continue reading →

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Unexpected Consequences of my Crowdfunding Addiction

Posted on September 23, 2019 by paulwallich

only to discover that “available” didn’t mean “stable” Continue reading →

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CircuitPython for early hardware exploration

Posted on April 3, 2019 by paulwallich

I’d expected the software side of using CircuitPython chips to go more easily than coding in Arduino, but what I hadn’t really expected was for the hardware side to go more smoothly as well. It’s early yet, and most of … Continue reading →

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Cooperative Editing whether you want it or not

Posted on January 7, 2018 by paulwallich

The last time I tried teaching some kids how to program arduinos, the room we were in had no wifi to speak of. Getting working copies of the desktop IDE onto half a dozen ancient underpowered windows laptops was a … Continue reading →

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Glowforge!

Posted on July 12, 2017 by paulwallich

My laser cutter arrived a few weeks ago. It’s pretty cool. Partly because I’ve been anticipating it for the better (worse?) part of two years, but mostly because it’s just there. I’ve used a laser cutter before, and this was … Continue reading →

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Buy extension cords, not wire

Posted on March 1, 2017 by paulwallich

When you’re in the sticks, your supply options are limited. That’s why the other day I bought a couple of extension cords instead of the bulk wire that was right on the other side of the aisle at the hardware … Continue reading →

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Solder first, Trim Headers Later

Posted on January 26, 2017 by paulwallich

I had a bunch of Adafruit Metro Minis to solder up for a workshop I’m teaching, and –as usual — almost all the header strips were longer than they needed to be. I guess it’s much quicker to pack a … Continue reading →

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Lubricate your fans

Posted on October 28, 2016 by paulwallich

(tl;dr: if you have a fan that cools your hot end or heat break, lubricate it. It may solve some problems.) It’s a good thing I splurged on the dual extruder for my printrbot way back when. Not that I … Continue reading →

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Everything is parallel

Posted on October 6, 2016 by paulwallich

Or at least multithreaded. I was prototyping some vaguely image-related ideas in Processing, and decided that I wanted to pick which image file I was going to mess with on the fly rather than hard-coding the filename and path into … Continue reading →

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