Thoughtophone

I can't remember how I stumbled on this idea. I think I noticed the connector on a set I had, and thought I'd Google it. I was thinking this would make building a CNC mill easier: no need to worry about backlash in the hardware: just measure where you are. Anyway, a long time later, I asked myself the question: how can I use the mill to accurately cut a square hole. My X-Y table doesn't have stops, and it has terrible backlash. I found a youtube video which used a DRO to do it, and was reminded. There are lots of articles on this. I've used this one at nerdkits.com as a starting point for the adapter. It provides an easy power supply circuit. I bought some sets of stainless steel callipers on ebay which turn out to be complete rubbish. I've just soldered some wires onto the terminals so I can play with them using a breadboard: On reassembly, they mostly work after some screw re-tightening, but are a bit jittery. I think I won't do that again: I'll...

I've been a little dismissive of 3D printing. Mostly, it seemed to me the result wasn't all that strong. Anyway,  3dhubs  came along, and that's persuaded me to give it a try: no big upfront investment, so why not? It's a great user experience - upload your STL file and it lists services with a price next to each one. I picked a place a few minutes walk from my office so I could go and pick it up. So I designed and printed this little robot chassis: After thinking about it for a while they gave me a voucher, so it cost me £3. Otherwise this costs about £12, which is not bad either. The top fits on it pretty neatly, after trimming off some excess filaments. I have made a few mistakes, which I think I can fix with the milling machine easily enough. I'll put that down as a learning experience. I don't have time to fit the components just now (actually a bunch of soldering needs to be done as well).

PlatformIO is very useful! I've just been trying it out. I've forked it and added a command that lets me update the IDE config without running init. This is handy since you want to re-run this each time you #include something from another library: PlatformIO works out the include path from the names of the things you include, like the Arduino IDE does. This has led me to notice that MBED is a nice framework. Because it's superficially Arduino like I'd never noticed that it has a convenient RTOS library, among many others. I think I'll port my RF24 library to MBED, and add it to the PlatformIO index. PlatformIO might be a good way to get some use out of the ESP8266 modules I have lying around as well.

This is rather good: http://www.sonsoftone.com/?page_id=287 I wanted to create something like this before I went away on holiday. It didn't occur to me you could buy dome housings like this. They are cheap! I already have the pan tilt unit.