Category Archives: possibly useful

Printrbot Metal Plus thermal fixes

Posted on February 6, 2015 by paulwallich

(UPDATE: See the next post for the fix that’s been sent out by Printrbot, which works a treat.) A lot of people have been complaining about the heated bed on the Metal Plus. The original design didn’t heat the bed … Continue reading →

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Future-proofing the workbench

Posted on December 29, 2014 by paulwallich

I think the workbench was one of the first things I built in the basement after we moved in 14 years ago, out of leftover flooring from the previous place. It’s long since become just one more flat surface punctuated … Continue reading →

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Like kids in a candy store

Posted on December 18, 2014 by paulwallich

This morning I had a short meeting with the Cardboard Teck Instantute (aka Ben Matchstick and Pete Talbot), who have a residency at Generator next month.  These guys are so good at building toys, games, vehicles, whatever entirely out of … Continue reading →

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This year with less risk of exploding batteries

Posted on December 16, 2014 by paulwallich

So there was this spot in our living room that was just perfect for an Ikea lamp. The only problem was that we didn’t want to pay an electrician to put in a new electrical line, or a sheetrock/painter type … Continue reading →

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I am amazed that this works

Posted on December 1, 2014 by paulwallich

I knew those clip-on magnifiers were good for something other than soldering. That’s an 0603 surface mount LED, held down by wire glue. The traces are silver conductive ink, and those huge-looking red and black conductors are 22-gauge hookup wire. … Continue reading →

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An unintended consequence of wire glue’s high resistance

Posted on November 16, 2014 by paulwallich

In my previous piece about playing with copper tape and wire glue and silver-ink pen, I was having trouble figuring out a way to hold a surface-mount LED down and get it electrically connected at the same time. Mashing copper-foil … Continue reading →

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More Shapeoko parts

Posted on November 6, 2014 by paulwallich

I’ve been working on a revised set of shapeoko-2 endstop parts, and now they’re up at Youmagine, along with a few pictures. I decided on mechanical endstops for all three axes, both because that’s electrically simpler and because microswitches are … Continue reading →

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Hallowe’en in a box

Posted on October 23, 2014 by paulwallich

Just add switches and a 9-year-old geek. That’s Adafruit’s FX card, which can store 2MB of sound files and spit them out to a powered speaker based on any of 11 trigger lines. With additional modes including looping, sequential (play … Continue reading →

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Beautiful scrap

Posted on October 14, 2014 by paulwallich

Scanning electron microscopes are really heavy.  I know this because our local high school just sent theirs to the scrapyard,  and I got to spend the morning scavenging all the bits I could take off  with a screwdriver, and a … Continue reading →

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It never rains but it pours

Posted on October 7, 2014 by paulwallich

So now there seem to be three separate makerspace initiatives in town, all serving more or less disparate potential communities — youth/educational/entry-level, light hacker/maker, heavy-equipment expert maker. In some ways those are useful divisions, because you don’t necessarily want to … Continue reading →

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