Makerspace: Just a few more things for the shopping list

Is there a word for the feeling when you place an online order and the moment you hit “Purchase” you realize there was something else you wanted and now it’s too late?  No?  Um…  me neither.

Since publishing a large blog post about my wishlist / shopping list for building a makerspace two days ago I’ve got two new things to add to the list.  I wonder how best to maintain this list.  While a wiki would be the best for maintaining evolving content, the tone of my posts tend to be a mix of useful things and nonsense and I’d have to heavily edit / format the content.  Maybe one day I’ll get organized and create a page on this site that’s something of a shopping list with links back to the rambling posts.

  1. Low Rider CNC.

    1. My buddy Andrew suggested the Low Rider CNC belongs on this list.  I haven’t done a deep dive on this yet, but just checking out the main documentation pages, it looks amazing.  While a full table sized CNC can run $7-10k, this Low Rider CNC appears to be community supported, open source, and designed for people to build themselves for ~$100 in hardware and electronic parts, plus  3 kilos of 3D printed parts, zip ties, conduit/rails, router, table, and wood.  An affiliate appears to sell partially assembled and fully built options from $900 – $1,500, which appears to include shipping.
  2. Hot Foam Cutter.

    1. I was reminded these existed after seeing this Mastodon post from Concretedog about his 4D CNC hot foam cutter.  However, it’s possible to build a hot foam cutter with little more than some nichrome wire, a battery, and some random stuff.
    2. While I don’t have a ton of uses for a hot foam cutter…  but I did purchase some nichrome wire two years ago specifically to make one of these for … reasons I no longer recall.  I made the purchase some time in October 2024, so it couldn’t have have been for Maker Faire and likely not for Halloween…
    3. A little extra research brought me back down a rabbit hole to rediscover why I started thinking about hot wire foam cutting.
    4. At Maker Faire 2023 I was excited to see Robert van de Walle’s “composite structures with low VOC materials” 2023 Maker Faire project.  The project showed off how he would avoid the use of fiberglass and resins in favor of laminated paper using glue over an insulation foam structure.

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    5. Robert also has an interesting tutorial about using Harbor Freight floor mats for making inexpensive, lightweight, and flexible structures using contact cement instead of expensive pink insulation boards.  Robert’s video was in turn inspired by Evil Ted Smith‘s video demonstrating how to copy forms into inexpensive foam mats by covering the object in aluminum foil, that in duck tape, taking the coverings off, cutting them into flat shapes with “darts” for alignment and to allow the formation of curves, cutting these out of foam, heat forming, applying contact cement, then reassembling.  Both of these videos had previously sent me down a rabbit hole of looking into making “poor man’s fiberglass” to make a foamie using cloth and wood glue over a lightweight structure.  And, more recently Nighthawkinlight’s videos about making strong lightweight structures with what amounted to lumber made from cardboard, covered in a water proofing coating.  I remember watching a video about biomimicry and how the how the toucan’s beak can be both strong and lightweight because it is essentially a lightweight, nearly hollow, sparse structure wrapped in a tight hard shell of keratin.
    6. Anyhow, I think I was researching these things after Maker Faire because of how miserable it was to cut sheets of foam with a craft knife which then lead to soooo much sanding.  I figured in the future I could design something that would let me create almost a small hot wire cutter to consistently and easily cut shapes and beveled edges into foam.

Sometimes I want to add an update only to discover that I never published a blog post about a thing I wanted to link back to.  I guess it’s time to dust off my pictures from 2024 leading up to Maker Faire to share information about how we made my kiddo’s Fallout inspired combat armor from Harbor Freight floor mats.

With the magic of time travel, I’ve now created that post and can now link to it.  :)  Share and enjoy.

Making a Makerspace
  1. Tool Recommendations for Making a Makerspace
  2. Makerspace: Just a few more things for the shopping list
  3. Building a Cardboard Cutter Table With Cardboard

CopyLeft Trolls, AI, Lesser Evils of Autocorrect and OCR

This is likely to be a rambly kind of a post.  I typed the blog title first, but, as Hector Barbosa might say, they’re more of what you’d call guidelines than actual titles.  Fair warning – as at least one reader will point out, this may be some more AI bellybutton gazing.1

I basically stopped using Creative Commons pictures in my blog posts and websites a few years ago when I learned of some CopyLeft troll nonsense litigation.  I did my best when using these pictures to provide proper attribution and even wrote a WordPress plugin to help others do the same.2  Learning that a picture from Flickr or posted for free use under Creative Commons could lead to abusive litigation and extortion was so disheartening that I pulled a lot of pictures from my various blogs and either left them with no images, broken images, or if they were very important to the post/page making something to go there.  From that point, I generally trended towards using/making memes to add visual interest to the blog posts.

I was reminded of this after reading a well written post on Mastodon about various alternatives to using AI generated images in blog posts.3 While I don’t think these are all necessarily practical when it comes to finding an appropriate and aesthetically pleasing image to go along with a blog post, I thought this was a worthwhile and thought provoking suggestion.

I do like adding pictures because it adds a little bit of visual interest to what would otherwise be a wall of text.  Many times, I will add a screenshot from OpenSCAD or a photo of a sketch / sketchbook page.  And now, a short digression…

Someone far more pithy than I comment recently that twenty years ago regular people were sued for posting song lyrics, sharing MP3’s of music, and low quality movies, while these days people are becoming AI millionaires by shoveling the entire internet and the collected written works of the human race into machines.

…What should people opposed to AI slop do, then?  Do we stop driving because of license plate scanners and stop going out in public because some asshole will be wearing Google Glass Goggles or Facebook Meta Glasses and feeding our information into facial recognition software? 45 I don’t share photos of myself or family on social media, but should we not store our photos in the cloud and avoid fun community events at the local library?  Even writing this post, I’m  unwillingly contributing the corpus that will be fed into the next version of an LLM.

I feel damned either way.  If I don’t use any LLM, they will consume my writings and original pictures, use my original pictures to track me across the internet, sell me things or sell me to other things.  If I do use an LLM it will do all of that plus train on my interactions.

What is the most defiant thing to do when this blog post is almost certainly going to be read by more web crawlers, spam robots, and LLM’s than humans?  Should I only post new pictures to add visual interest to my posts at the expense of embedding even more meta data into each post?  Is it more subversive to use an AI to generate a fitting copyright-free but soulless image that adds little new information to the algorithm’s endless hunger?

I don’t have answers to any of this.

As I was working yesterday another thought occurred to me.  Where is the line between “software” and “LLM/AI”?  I had just run optical character recognition on a large document to help figure out what was in it.  All OCR is just pattern recognition, making trained “black box” guesses at what’s a given letter/word/pattern.  I’ve never liked the auto-suggest “feature” of my phone’s texting app or gmail, but I like the auto-complete feature of LibreOffice when I start to type a date.  I don’t mind when my text editor suggests the name of previously used variables and functions – it’s actually quite helpful.

Why am I comfortable with an heuristic’s OCR/autocompleting dates/autocompleting variable/function names, but I hate auto-suggesting messages?  Perhaps because it’s no something I can turn off.  I just know I find these kinds of “helpful suggestions” to be far more intrusive.  Maybe I don’t mind these helpers in documents – but I don’t want them stepping the communications between myself and another human?

I don’t mind using an AI image generators for a stupid joke, but I hate seeing them in advertisements.  I would never use an AI, local or otherwise, to write something to someone I loved, client, colleague, coworker – but I don’t mind it when I’m trying to wrap my mind around a new API, updating an old program when certain parts I’d written are now deprecated, or even writing something in a brand new language.  It’s hard to tell if I’m justifying my uses or if there really is a decent use case for these things.

I guess I’m trying to come to terms with what kinds of AI/heuristic usages I like, am ambivalent towards, and those I hate – to better understand why I feel/think these ways.

  1. Hi Pete! []
  2. More than twelve years ago now! []
  3. TLDR:  Take a picture, use Wikimedia Commons, screenshot from video game, lego diorama, use art supplies/image program to make a picture, stickers, pictures of a shelf. []
  4. I read once that Meta had figured how to associate photos with people based upon the scratches and dirt on the lenses from photos that had been uploaded! []
  5. This is why I generally rescale/blur/distort images before posting them online.  But, I mean, how much time am I going to devote to this if I just want to share a quick picture of something? []

OpenSCAD Shadow Boxes, Shadow Casting

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A friend recently requested some less LLM-centric content.  I’ve often said this blog is largely a lab notebook for various ideas or build log.  It’s also merely a subset of the stuff swirling around in my brain than a dedication to any one topic.  In any case, this post is dedicated to Pete.

I saw the above 3D printed box on Instagram.  It looks like a wanted poster from the show “One Piece” of a character named Roronoa Zoro who carries three swords.  The box contains a small post in the very center which seems very out of place – until the lights are dimmed and the light under the tip of the post is activated, revealing the light is blocked by the irregular edges of the box and casts a shadow of the silhouette of a figure holding three swords.

I’ve seen other implementations of this stereographic projection technique, but this was easily the coolest.  The disparity between the size and shape of the box and shadow was almost startling.

My mind went wild with ideas upon seeing this box.  One of the first ideas I had related to some fan-made movie posters by Kevin Collert many years ago.1 Imagine a small projector / box of arbitrary shape that could project that kind of silhouette behind you?

Yeah, a Tony Stark cosplay is neat… but what if you had an inconspicuous stereographic projector on your back that threw up a huge Iron Man shadow behind you!?

This could be extended in any number of ways.  A Luke Skywalker cosplay that casts a Darth Vader shadow, Bruce Banner with a Hulk, etc, etc.  But, also, what about a shadow of a familiar?  A little dragon perched behind you.  Or two thugs standing to your side like evil shadow henchmen?  Or a crowd of zombies?  The neat part about the box / lamp shown on Instagram was that the box didn’t look like it would display that kind shadow of a shadow.  It just looked like a box with weird edges to it.

But, how did they do it?

He makes a good point (iykyk)

I’m terrible at Blender.  I’ve watched tutorials, tried to use it, but I just can’t wrap my feeble mind around it.  My one string is the ability to make things in OpenSCAD.  There are plenty of others who can make incredible things in it, but I’m no slouch.  The code may not be pretty, but, well, as they say…

And, really, that’s all that counts

I started with a few assumptions.

  • The light source has to be a single point.  If there were multiple LED’s or filaments, it would create fuzzy / duplicate shadow edges.  This should be possible with a single bright LED.
  • The shadow is basically a cone.  The edge of the shadow everywhere must be essentially some sort of a distorted cone, with the center point being the single point of light and the edges of the silhouette being the edge of the cone.
  • The top edge of the box must be where the cone intersects with the box.  If we decide how far off the wall the point of light is and we know where we want the shadow to be and where the shadow edges are, we should be able to intersect the shadow-cone with a thin walled box.
A rough sketch of the idea

Creating the box itself shouldn’t be that big a deal.  It’s an easy few lines of OpenSCAD.  Creating the arbitrary “cone” was initially a much harder problem.  Now, if the design I was trying to create was very simple or entirely convex, I could just use the OpenSCAD hull function around an SVG of the desired shadow and a very small sphere for the point of light.  Since a simple shape would be uninteresting, I knew that hull wasn’t going to work.  For a while I tried really hard to build a python program that would work by creating a polyhedron built out of the large SVG in the desired location and a very small SVG at the light point – and stitching the sides together programmatically.  If you’ve ever worked with the OpenSCAD polyhedron functions, you know what a pain it is.  If you don’t define the faces in a certain order or order the faces properly, you’ll end up with flipped faces and a pile of useless triangles.  Even when the faces were properly built, the result ended up being difficult for OpenSCAD to render since it involved so many points converging on so few points and weird little overlaps.  It was a mess.

I’m listening…

You mean, all I have to do is RFTM?  Apparently the linear_extrude function has a parameter called “scale” where you can define how small something should get as it is extruded.  This is literally exactly what I needed.

I needed the shadow on the wall to be extruded off the wall as high as the point of light, but scaled down to that same point of light.  But, would this work???  I haven’t printed it yet, but I believe it should.

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From there, the next question is… does this OpenSCAD back-of-the-napkin sketch really work?  Again, I’m not sure – I haven’t printed this for a few different reasons.  If this design were printed “as is”, there would be a ton of overhangs and support material.  I believe when you look at some of the pictures of the lamp lit up from the side, you can see the infill patterns on the sides.  I can’t tell from these videos – but I suspect the easiest way to 3D print this box would be to do so in big flat panels.  At the point you’re just trying to turn filament into 2D panels, why even bother printing it when you could lasercut it in a fraction of the time?

Let’s look at a few stills of the lamp.

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Now, for my quick mockup I just used a simple square shape – but you can definitely see the same features as in the lamp in the video stills.  The head, the crossed sword tips at the left, the jagged edges on the bottom right, the floating sword on the right.

Common structural features circled

Given that the theory feels intuitive and sound and that my quick mockup proof of concept seems to have the same structural features as the lamp in the video… this seems like it would work.

If this quick mockup works, then why restrict ourselves to simple boxes?  For a mass produced thing you just want to stamp out, a simple box just makes sense.  You could lasercut the panels, slap them together, and churn them out all day long.  But, the thing that you use to block the light and form the shadow could be any arbitrary shape.  It could be a triangle, star, or something far more complex.  Here’s another quick sketch:

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Obviously, this would be a support structure nightmare.  But, for a one-off project and a cool enough idea, I think it could definitely work!

  1. His work has been stolen and slapped on so many dropshipped things that it was very difficult to find the original artist! []

Inception and Exorcisms

Out!

I have found that if I have an idea, it will keep swirling around my brain unless I get it out in some way.  In a way, I’m exorcising myself to prevent these ideas from plaguing me further.  It’s not so bad having ideas pile up in my brain, it’s just that as long as they’re floating around, I’m not able to adequately devote sufficient brain cycles to other tasks.  I don’t know the reason for this – but my sense is that my brain will keep returning to these ideas, circulating and cycling them, because I don’t want to forget about them – and it can only truly relax once it knows the idea is somewhere it can’t be lost / forgotten.

A while back I had suggested the only good way I had to deal with these recirculating ideas was to either act on them (building / blogging) or killing them (organizing / bookmarking).  This wasn’t exactly true.

But, first, a digression.  Many years ago Bre Pettis and Kio Stark created a “cult of done” manifesto, a short set of ideas about how to consider things “done,” written in 20 minutes since that’s all the time they had to write it.  I think about this manifesto and this one particular poster implementation of it often.

James Provost’s Cult of Done Poster

I’m not sure what appeals to me so much about this manifesto.  I don’t know that I agree with each element – but for something generated in 20 minutes, it’s pretty good.  I guess the reason it comes back to my mind today, of all days, is that I happened to be looking back through my many blog posts with my eldest kiddo and was reminded of all the blogging I did here and at MakerBot.com and was reminded of those earlier, perhaps simpler and sillier, times.

Here’s how I actually exorcise / done-ify things:

  • Build the idea
  • Blog (and publish) the idea
  • Bookmark the page and sort that bookmark
  • Write the idea down in a note app
  • Write it down or sketch it in a notebook / sketchbook
  • Send the idea to someone

Sometimes I can accidentally let years go by without talking to a friend.  It’s not a good quality – but at least I’m able to recognize this personality trait.  My way of keeping in touch with people is that when I see something that reminds me of them, I’ll send it to them.  This isn’t so unusual … but sometimes I do this same thing with a slightly less pure motive.  Sometimes when I have an idea or see something interesting, I don’t just store it in a bookmark or by writing it down… I consciously make an effort to store it in a friend’s brain.

Yes, I’m sharing a thing with a friend as a way to connect, offer something to them that I know they’ll be interested in, perhaps to give us something to talk about, but I admit that I also consciously share it with them in order to further store the same data within their brain and in our communication channels.1 Again, not my finest quality, but it’s not an entirely selfish quality either.2  The hilarious thing about this last way to done-ify something is that you could even store the data in the brain of someone you hated!  Heck, you could rage-tweet it to someone.  And, the stronger your reaction to them, the stronger the connection you would have to the memory of the thing!

Taking all that into consideration, here’s how I probably actually exorcise / done-ify things:

  • Implement: Build the idea
  • Externalize:  Publish the idea
  • Memorialize:  Write down, bookmark, sketch,
  • Incept:  Store the idea in someone else’s brain
  1. Texting, messaging apps []
  2. Though, I suppose “not entirely selfish” isn’t exactly a resounding exoneration. []

[2025] Google Pixel Boot Loop Fixes

In the 7 years since I wrote a blog post about rescuing my Google Pixel from a boot loop people have started reaching out to me desperately looking for a way to fix their phones.  This particularly horrible glitch happens at the worst time – when your phone storage is completely full of pictures and videos.  In my case, we were on vacation and not near wifi when I’d happened to fill up the phone storage and it got stuck in a boot loop.1

Google Support was adamant there was no way to recover my data and my options were to factory wipe the phone myself or send it to them so they could do it.  Of the resources found back in 2018, almost nothing survived Google’s march of “progress” and destruction of their own older resources.  In this case the links to Google’s own Pixel support forums and links to resources no longer work – and there are no working Archive.org / Way Back Machine links.

Anyhow, if you’re stuck in the same situation as I was – without the resources and links I had back then, perhaps if you dig around you can still find a way?

“If you have a problem, if no one else can help, and if you can find them, maybe you can…”

Before you get started – a warning.  I don’t currently have this problem and am trying to piece together how I fixed my problem 7 years ago on an older phone, using current guides that are no longer accessible.  I haven’t verified any of these links and resources, I’m just some rando on the internet who is trying to help you out because some other internet randos helped me out a long time ago.  Google has a nasty habit of deleting their own resources and shuffling things around.  I don’t know the first thing about installing new operating systems on phones and following any of these links or suggestions might permanently damage your systems.  But, as I mentioned before…  I tried this because Google Support was beyond unhelpful and I was completely out of options.

You’ve been warned

The basic framework for the fix was:

  1. Get the phone to “Recovery Mode” so at least isn’t not boot looping, overheating, and chewing up your battery.
    1. If you have an unlocked phone, or a locked phone from Google which you could theoretically unlock over a terminal, you should be able to get the phone “Safe Mode” where it will be able to turn on and access the operating system, but with limited other apps useable.
  2. Find and install the latest Android ADB (Android Debug Bridge) and FastBoot (an Android diagnostic tool)
    1. I say “latest,” but I’m not an expert and am not currently having this problem.  Perhaps it’s best to use the version which most closely matches your phone?  Anyhow, I installed ADB on the root of my PC and then created a path to it with “SET PATH=%PATH%;c:\adb” so the operating system would know it could access those resources.
  3. Try to find a “Rescue OTA” (Android Rescue Over-the-Air update) for your phone model.
    1. This would essentially be the same update that you might get when you let your phone download and install an update over night via WiFi – with the only difference that you’ve downloaded it onto your PC and are going to try to shove it back into the phone over a cable.
  4. Try to “sideload” the OTA update back into the phone using ADB / Fastboot (I don’t remember the specific steps to do this – but since these resources are constantly being worked on, I assume someone has written a guide).

If this post helped you out or you found some resources helpful, please let me know so I can update this post and help others.

Good luck!

  1. It was also overheating – which might have been a contributing factor the boot loop – or caused by the constant booting and looping []

Capstan Drives as alternatives to Planetary Gears?

Sometimes I hate the algorithm and sometimes it shows me cool new robotics / mechanics / gadgets and makersAaed Musa has been working on something called a “Capstan Drive” which is a rope driven alternative to gears.  By removing gears and  teeth and replacing them with rope you cut down on noise, eliminate backlash, high torque, low inertia, and low cost – with the major costs being low range of movement and a vertical path for the rope to travel over.  Aaed’s video is well worth a watch and blog well worth reading.  But… if you want to get a sense of how the Capstan drive works…

Capstan drive in action

The benefit of a planetary gear is that it’s a very vertically compact method for increasing rotational speed at the cost of complexity.  With a Capstan Drive (I don’t know if this is supposed to be capitalized) the rope needs to be wrapped around the thinner shaft several times to prevent slippage.  As Aaed notes:

One question that I had when first exploring this reducer was “why doesn’t the rope slip if it’s just wrapped around the smaller drum?”. The answer to that question lies in the capstan equation. With each turn of rope on a drum, the amount of friction increases exponentially. With 3-5 turns of rope, there is enough friction for slipping to not be an issue.

Aaed indicated he was using Dyneema DM20 cord as it has almost no stretch to it.  I wonder if something like fishing line would work?

DIY Lightsaber Build
  1. TwistSabers
  2. DIY Lightsaber Thoughts
  3. Wait, haven’t I worked on this before?!
  4. Considering the design elements of a DIY light saber
  5. More Musings on Lightsabers, Mechanical Components
  6. Slow Progress…
  7. Capstan Drives as alternatives to Planetary Gears?

Fixing a coiled zipper that won’t close

I have a favorite soft pencil case made from faux leather that I’ve been using for more than 20 years, but the zipper had gotten finicky and started to not close.  It started having a problem zipping closed on just one side, but today it wouldn’t close at all and the slide was just moving back and forth without closing anything at all.

After a quick search, I found a video by UCAN Zipper USA with a solution that fixed it immediately.  The narrator said the problem was the zipper started to “open a little bit” with repeated use.  I suspect the slider on my pencil case opened a little by vigorous use or sometimes by accidentally zipping it over something that had been caught in the zipper teeth.

The solution was quite simple:

  • Inspect the closing side of the zipper to see whether one side is more “open” or riding higher than the other.
  • Using pliers, gently clamp that side down just a little, then try to open/close the zipper.  If it doesn’t quite engage yet, clamp down a little more.
Gently clamp the rear / closing side of the zipper where it appears to be loose / open / ride higher

That’s it!  It worked like a charm for me.  While this worked for a coiled zipper, I suspect it would also work for a molded tooth zipper as well.

Slow Progress…

… is still progress.

I designed a planetary gear assembly, more to see whether parts this small would even turn out than to actually make a working component.  The gears are about 3 mm thick, but half of that is the larger part.  I forgot that you can’t have a two-level gear mesh against another identical gear, so these didn’t move at all.

A test planetary gear assembly

I reprinted the parts, this time increasing the center hole size and also removing the teeth off the larger side.  It kinda works, but it’s very finnicky.  This might be a side effect of these gears being very thin and the teeth very small.  I think it’s probably worth sacrificing gear ratio in favor of larger, more consistent teeth.

Small improvements

The OpenSCAD code is a mess, lots of vestigial code remains, lots of non-working parts are commented out, and it all just needs more comments in general.  I hate looking at it.  But, as one of my favorite memes goes…

I mean, he’s got a point
DIY Lightsaber Build
  1. TwistSabers
  2. DIY Lightsaber Thoughts
  3. Wait, haven’t I worked on this before?!
  4. Considering the design elements of a DIY light saber
  5. More Musings on Lightsabers, Mechanical Components
  6. Slow Progress…
  7. Capstan Drives as alternatives to Planetary Gears?

Thermal QR Code Sticker Success!

I could not be happier with how this little thermal label printer turned out!  The highest use case I had for it was to create small QR codes I could stick in my various maker notebooks so that I could easily connect specific pages in my notebooks back to blog posts, essentially being able to embed unlimited digital resources into a simple page.

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Basically, I arranged the QR codes and text in Inkscape, exported to a flat JPG, saved to my phone, and then printed.

The failed prints you see were printed at Dense, Medium, and then Light, but all came out useless. I realized it was because I had exported the image at 72 DPI, which meant that once the image was exported to either PNG or JPG, the image had gray aliasing between what should have been sharp black and white edges.  This caused the printer to treat the grays as black, which meant the black areas were obscuring the lighter areas, making it harder to scan the images.

I exported at 900 DPI and it printed on “Light” flawlessly. Each QR code sticker is only 12.5mm square, I can fit 8 of them per sticker sheet, and each includes a short label, and can be read by my phone very easily.  Now, I don’t think a 900 DPI image is required to print fine details, but I figured why the hell not give it a shot?

The first website QR code generator I tried was actually a sneaky website.  Rather than creating a QR code for the destination, it ran the URL’s through their own URL shortener, then output that QR code.  I chose that generator since it permits you to select the desired error correction level, but the result was basically useless to me.  If I wanted a QR code pointing to a short-code, I would have pointed it at my own short URL service.  While an unshortened URL will create a larger or more dense QR code, it has the benefit of being somewhat transparent.  When you scan an unshortened URL, your scanning app can show you the destination that would be hidden by a URL shortener.  I ended up using this website to generate the QR codes which allows you to specify the URL, choose from various error correction levels, and then download in a variety of formats.

I was able to pack detailed, unshortened, URLs into just 12.5 mm square plus 4.5 point font labels.  I might be able to print smaller than this, but I don’t have any pressing need to do that.  I’ve seen some suggestions a QR code should be printed at least 10mm square, and this is just above that limit.  However, I suspect those guidelines are for commercial use, whereas these codes are likely to be rarely scanned and don’t need to be optimized for widespread use – just for my own personal benefit.

Thermal Sticker Printer
  1. QR Codes and Avatars
  2. Sticker Printer
  3. Thermal QR Code Sticker Success!

Prelude to Protractors

I was flipping through my smaller notebook and remembered I’d already posted about a credit card sized design for a protractor and ruler.  I decided to connect this to my recent other design and turn it into a short series.  This design predates the one I most recently made and shared on this site, thus the title.

While I posted a writeup to Instagram, for some reason I didn’t put anything here?!  Other websites go away over time and even if mine doesn’t last forever, well, at least it’s still mine.  Thus, here’s the photos:

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And, just in case1 Instagram completely evaporates, here’s the writeup I posted:

A DIY protractor / ruler / template card.

I needed a quick and convenient way to make straight (ish) lines and angles that I could keep in my small notebook.

The little card is about the size of a playing card and acts like a 5mm increment ruler, 10 degree protractor, and can make it easy to draw a grid.

This all started because I was working on an electronics project, needed some resistors and haven’t memorized the color chart, decided to draw a color chart in my notebook, needed a grid / ruler, decided to design my own after seeing a neat metal one on Kickstarter.

OpenSCAD -> Inkscape -> Print -> tape to card -> craft knife -> drawing

Now I have a little template measuring tool that will let me draw circles, angles, lines, grids, and dots. I’m very happy with this. :)

I may try to lasercut one from a thin sheet of plastic

Enjoy!

Small Rulers and Protractors
  1. Inkscape Protractor and Rulers
  2. Prelude to Protractors
  1. God willing []
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