MakerBlock

More prints [Draft 01/04/2010]

Over the last two days I’ve printed a MakerBot coin, two chess pieces (both knights), two replacement Scrabble pieces (one printed vertically, one printed horizontally), two different tries at printing a dummy SD card, and a very loud whistle.

I’ve had difficulty re-printing the whistle once I changed some of my Skeinforge settings. (Dang.) I’ve also ended up with a plank of plastic instead of a Darth Vader head. It was being printed out with these really wild spikey bit sticking straight out of the head – several centimeters beyond where the raft ended. Non-optimal.

Drafts Zero - The Lost Blog Posts

Preparing to print [Draft 12/27/2009]

Unfortunately my MakerBot did not come with a print button. I’m (slowly) going through the MakerBot tutorial on how to print. For those of you with a Windows box, the first time process should be as follows:

Learn!
Get ready!
- Calibrate your MakerBot
  - Check the endstops, axes, plastruder,
  - Test extrusions
- Do you have a 1mm thermistor from MakerBot batch 9?
  - Well, you’re going to have to compensate for the variation in its readings.
Get the software!
- Download and install ReplicatorG
  - You can actually download Skeinforge from the same page
- Download Skeinforge
  - Make sure to install it where no parent directory has a space in its name
- Download and install Python 2.6.X
Get a model!
- The mini-mug from Thingiverse is traditional

Well, I’m still getting the hang of this… I’ve frisbee’d two mini-mugs so far. :)

Drafts Zero - The Lost Blog Posts

UNTITLED [Draft 12/25/2009]

[I have no idea why I jotted down the below. At the time these pages were all easily accessible from the MakerBot website and wiki. These days, you need Archive.org to see what these items are. I think this is a snapshot of what I was doing on Christmas Day 2009?]

http://sanguino.cc/softwareforwindows
http://wiki.makerbot.com/plastruder-mk4
http://wiki.makerbot.com/plastruder-mk4-assembly#toc75
http://wiki.makerbot.com/cupcake-motherboard-firmware-update
http://wiki.makerbot.com/cupcake-calibration

Drafts Zero - The Lost Blog Posts

Plastruder! [Draft 12/25/2009]

Last night I started work on the Plastruder Mark IV. Superglued the dino-bases, bolted those bits together, sourced some bits of wire from an ethernet cable, soldered together the nichrome wire, soldered together the thermisistor, and bolted the plastruder housing together with the motor.

Apparently there are two varieties of thermisistors – one small and one REALLY small. I got the REALLY small one. It was easily the most demanding part. It’s such a tiny part that I was constantly afraid of snapping, crushing, or losing it.

Drafts Zero - The Lost Blog Posts

The Lost Blog Posts

A sign in front of a desolate wasteland says "YOU ARE LOST" — But at least you’re here

I’ve got a lot of unpublished draft blog posts here. Like a lot. At the time I’m writing this post, I’ve got 1,134 published posts and 329 drafts. This isn’t versions of drafts. It’s posts that I’ve started and then didn’t publish for some reason or another. On probably 300 different topics. Some are, admittedly, little more than a collection of links and indecipherable shorthand texts from a madman. However, others are filled with research, links, images, code, and were so close to publishing that I can only imagine that something distracted me before I could… squirrel!

The oldest of these dates back to December 2009 and relates to the cutting edge, new to market, MakerBot Cupcake CNC’s plastic extruder, the “plastruder.” I don’t know that anyone would be interested in this kind of content any more, but I kinda like the idea of “Drafts Zero” and spending about 5-15 minutes dusting off an old draft and just publishing it.1

Let’s see how this goes.

Update:

In just the first few posts, I discovered that I wanted to add some additional comments. Look for these at the top, in italics and in brackets to provide context.

Drafts Zero - The Lost Blog Posts

A take on the “Inbox Zero” productivity / organization strategy [↩]

Goblin Hours, Enabled

I’ve often told my family that if it were not for them, I’d basically work all night, every night, on whatever latest project popped into my brain, and then fall asleep at the workbench/eating plank/soldering station every night/early morning.

The thing is, these tendencies just aren’t very conducive when it comes to trying to live with other people, especially those you’re semi-responsible for.1 It’s especially challenging to work in a professional environment at DayJob™️when I’m working crazy hours. I don’t want my clients or the other people I work with realizing they’re communicating with the functional equivalent of three meth-addled racoons in a trench coat.2 3

I have a few ways of passing for a socially normative respectable professional. Here are some of my coping mechanisms:

I’ve put several buttons into Outlook’s quick access toolbar. The most important are:
- “Delay Delivery” so that I can draft and hit “send” on an email, but not have it go out until a socially acceptable time
- “Signature” so that I can easily send an email with my “mobile” email signature or my full fledged obnoxiously enormous “professional” email signature. Why would I do this, you ask? Well, if I want to get away with a quick reply and not really do a deep dive, I’ll fire off an email as if I were typing from my phone. I’ll even introduce “strategic typos” to really sell the impression. Then again, if I’m typing a really long email into my phone and want to have it appear more impressive, I’ll use the “professional” signature.
- “Work Offline” so that I can work uninterrupted for even a little while. Being able to shut off the firehose that is my daily work email inbox is incredibly helpful.
I addressed strategic typos earlier, but it’s really genuinely a real coping mechanism aside from just an email signature. Adding typos makes it more likely someone will focus on appreciating your responsiveness and less likely they’ll get nitpicky about the content.
My old cell phone using Google Voice as my “personal cell phone” number. I don’t want to talk to people, but it’s basically unavoidable. Then again, a quick text from the phone can handle many situations. Even better, clients feel like they really have access to me. It’s also nice that I can keep Google Voice open on my desktop and be able to “text” from my computer and using my keyboard. In reality, I just leave this secondary phone and just … walk away from it. No one outside my family needs that much access to my life.
I’ve spent a lot of time tracking my productivity and know what days I’m the least productive. Unsurprisingly, it’s Mondays and very especially Fridays. This means I try to avoid meetings on these days as much as possible so that I can lean into unproductivity if I need to. Why flog myself into working ever harder when I already know that however hard I push myself, it’s just not gonna be a productive day?
I really try to avoid all meetings. Mercifully in person meetings are all but extinct. Video meetings are nearly as bad, but at least I don’t have to wear pants. Whenever I have a video meeting (or phone conference), I will make a special effort to ask for an “agenda.” If you don’t have an agenda, or at least some kind of idea about what you want to accomplish at a meeting you’ll never know if you’ve succeeded at the meeting … or when it should end. And, once I have the agenda, I will send an email with as much detail and cover as many points as possible. Sure, no one will read it… but its’ my way of preparing for the meeting and I can keep referring back to it as necessary. I’d say in roughly 40% of situations that email is enough to torpedo the entire meeting.
Recently I created, with the help of ChatGPT4 I wrote an Outlook macro which will help me automate when I send emails. Whenever the “Work Offline” button is toggled and I hit “send” on an email, it picks a random time between 7:15 AM and 7:59 AM and schedules the email to go out on the next business day. Sure, this means people will get a flood of emails from me first thing on Monday morning. But, it’s that a lot better than getting a stream of emails from me all weekend?
I hate phone calls, so I will dodge as many as I can get away with. And, when I’m on a long phone call, I will play a recording of someone knocking on my door and asking for my attention in increasingly urgent tones, until I can get off the line.

I don’t know – maybe this all adds up to some kind of antisocial behavior or DSM IV diagnosis? What I do know is that with these various tools I’m able to better work with others in a professional setting.

It’s a little after 4AM right now. I’m not sure how to end this post so I’m just going to publish it. :)

In so far as I can be responsible for other humans [↩]
God, wouldn’t that be an amazing Halloween costume?! Me dressed as three racoons dressed as me?!!? [↩]
Where was I? [↩]
Don’t @ me. I don’t care. [↩]

Combining Multiple Video Files

Rather than send me a single set of video files, my client’s vendor sent me… 149 separate MP4 files, ranging from a few seconds to about 11 minutes long. I have no interest in sorting through dozens of video files, cataloging them individually, and then trying to review them in order.

While I would have thought VLC would have been a good drag-n’-drop way to stitch them all together, the version I had and the newest version available both weren’t letting me save multiple files into a single file.

A bit of googling and I stumbled across an old friend – ffmpeg! I hadn’t used this program to transcode video since the early days of DIVX, backing up DVD’s back in the late 1990’s / early aughts.

Here’s the process I settled on for my Windows machine:

Created a batch file to create a list of the video files (which included spaces, commas, and all kinds of nonsense command line tools hate). The entire contents of the batch file was:
- dir *.mp4 /b > list.txt
Since I’m using Notepad++, I used the find/replace function to search / replace on “list.txt”:
- /r/n
- ‘/r/nfile ‘
Even using some find/replace magic, I still needed to adjust the first and last lines, but that wasn’t so bad.
Then, the videos which had been named in semi-logical pattern, were not in strictly alphanumeric order. I re-ordered them in the text list to the order I’d wanted to view them in.
I dropped the FFMPEG executable, downloaded from this mirror, into the folder with the video files and list.txt, then made a new batchfile which contained the following:
- ffmpeg -f concat -safe 0 -i list.txt -c copy combinedfilename.mp4
Now, I could have typed this into the command line, but since I wanted to batch certain files together, it was just easier for my purposes to have the batch file. Plus, now I have the executable and the batch file for future use.

Anyhow, I hope this helps save someone, perhaps even myself, a few minutes of hair pulling and searching. :)

Adventures with a (Cheap) Vinyl Cutter

I don’t have any affiliate links to shill, but I really like Monoprice. They sold cheap re-branded 3D printers, decent office equipment, and sometimes they will have an absolutely ridiculous deal on one of their products. I’d say, overall, the quality is “pretty good” across the board and when you can find a deal on something, it’s an easy decision. I picked up an extra Monoprice Mini Delta 3D printer because it was so cheap, I could use it for parts and not feel bad.1 I’ve been happy with their egg cooker, USB hubs, HDMI cables, various random testers. The other day I saw they had a sale on their “MakerCraft Mini Craft Cutter” for $80, when it’s normally $230, with free shipping and had to buy it. If you missed out, I’d highly recommend signing up for their newsletter. About twice a year they have some deal that’s just bananas.

It’s been sitting off in a corner for nearly two months while I’ve been distracted by Maker Faire preparations and work, but tonight I gave it a shot. I’d say, like most other MonoPrice things, it’s “pretty good.” The included software “Sure Cuts A Lot Pro 5” is not very intuitive, the documentation on the machine and software is pretty lacking, and the tutorials aren’t very helpful either.

Even so, with some futzing around I was able to run a test cut and mostly get another design cut out. Pictures later.

Here are some of the things I learned:

After you drop the blade into the machine, be sure the carriage and move all the way back and forth. It’s very easy to have it protrude upwards very slightly, causing a horrible clacking / grinding noise.
I’m not sure if it’s me, the way I loaded the sticky back cutting mat, or some combination, but the large design I cut out was off the piece of vinyl by about 1″. I would recommend making sure your piece of vinyl is about as big as the 8×10 cutting mat. I am not sure, but I suspect the “vertical” direction has a lot more variability than the “horizontal” direction.

I tried to cut things several times without success. I tried a lot of different ways to get it going, so I don’t know what got me cutting. At first the machine would beep at be intermittently, and then regularly. I have no idea what caused that to happen – or why it stopped.

After the machine registration / cutting mat homing procedure, which sounded about as much as you would expect a small plotter to sound, it was surprisingly quiet. I’ve never used a craft or vinyl cutter before, so I guess I had just built it up in my head.

I’m going to try cutting some more things tomorrow and look forward to posting some more progress.

I’ve cut several medium complexity designs out of HTV and it was incredibly tedious. I tossed a very complicated design into this craft cutter and it quietly ripped it out like a champ. For $80 shipped, I would easily recommend this device to anyone who wanted to experiment with a craft cutter and wasn’t afraid to spend some time tinkering with software and settings.

And, later, I had to! [↩]

Night Before Going to Maker Faire

Annnnnnnnnnnd… my robot which has been working for a solid year is now completely unresponsive.

My wife’s robot is working, Dexter Starfighter’s robot is working, Kim’Dael LightingSlayer’s pendant is working.

And my robot not only doesn’t work, I have spent so much time trying to get it functional that I still don’t have a good way to mount it on my shoulder.

I could cry.

Prepping for Maker Faire Bay Area 2024

It’s always a whirlwind heading into Maker Faire. This year is no exception. This past weekend we got things mostly ready for the Rocklin Maker Faire. All of our robots were functional, which was really great. A quick update to document progress and also act like a to-do list of sorts:

MakerKnit’s companion robot
- My wife has knit her octopus
- I’ve installed the Adafruit QtPy, NeoPixels, and touch sensors connected via BrownDogGadgets conductive thread through the legs
- It’s been programmed to “blink” the two LED eyes randomly plus a small number of light shows for the body
- Designed/3D printed several eyes, settling on a nice design that should make the eye animations look good
Kim’dael LightningSlayer’s Pendant
- The youngest’s project has morphed from an LED arm to a CircuitPlayground in a pendant that just plays some notes when she presses buttons.
- A long extension for the battery pack, using thicker gauge wire wound through the back of stock CircuitPlayground enclosure, is now the “necklace” portion for this project.
Dexter Starfighter’s ED-E
- Has a brand new case, a new NeoPixel ring, mount, LED goggles, and a sweet new set of EVA foam armor.
MakerBlock
- My robot wasn’t quite ready for Maker Faire last year, but “ready enough” to share. Last year the little bot was just sitting in a jar I carried around and not really visible to anyone.
- This year I’ve added feet (entirely cosmetic), changed the battery pack around so it is removeable, swapped out dome diffusers, and am working on new animations/behaviors.
- I realized that my old LED goggles were… janky. This was because I had soldered some buttons to one side and then wired them into the Trinket directly, without any resistors. While it /worked/, it caused some problems whenever I pressed a button. I pulled the Trinket out and swapped in my new favorite board, the QtPy.
  - I really prefer programming / updating via CircuitPython over Arduino since there’s no pre-compile time and fussy Arduino connections.
  - Besides the programming/uploading, I love the built in RGB, up to 6 capacitive touch sensor, and easy serial communication
  - As an added plus, I soldered on the 2MB flash chip so the project as a ton of space. 1
  - And at almost the same price as a Triket ($0.50 more than the original, $0.50 less than the M0 Trinkets), it’s just easier to swap them into any project I would have previously put a Trinket into
Soldering
- I’ve really upgraded my soldering experience and it’s made a world of difference. We moved about a year ago and there’s a space in the house where I can keep a soldering station out and ready to use. Just having it available is such an upgrade. I’ve had several handheld / pen style soldering irons over the years and they’re usually pretty terrible. In fairness, this is also because I’m kinda terrible at soldering. I had a basic garbage soldering iron from the local hardware store, upgrade one that had a little temperature control from Adafruit, and then upon the recommendation of a friend upgraded a few weeks ago to an X-TRONIC soldering station.
- I gave my old soldering iron to my neighbor so he could work on a project for his wife. As I got to finishing up work on the above projects I realized I couldn’t find my pen soldering iron from Adafruit – and that I didn’t want to find it anyhow. It was fine. It worked. But, my soldering iron holder was cheap and flimsy and easy to tip over and the helping hands I had from Adafruit were “okay” for very small projects, but the joints came loose easily and the helping hands kept falling off. Rather than spend $20 on another soldering iron I would hate, I dropped $70 on the X-TRONIC station which has built in helping hands and soldering iron holder. Setting aside that it heats up very quickly, has good temperature control, melts solder quickly, and has great helping hands… it has a way to hold the soldering iron in a way that isn’t constantly anxiety inducing. 2
- Having the soldering station handy has meant I don’t really mind whipping out a quick battery pack extension cable for our projects. I just need to strip some wires, fire it up, drop some solder, and turn it off again.
- I may have ruined the first soldering iron tip kinda quickly. Again, I have no idea what I’m doing. I would add solder, dip the tip in flux, wipe on sponge, and then do it all again. This is a terrible process since all it does it add extra contaminants and gunk to the tip, reducing the ability of it to transfer heat effectively. Instead, after watching a video, I learned I should run it at the lowest temperature appropriate for the solder/joint, just dab the tip in the brass wool to clean it up a little, then maybe wipe on the slightly damp sponge, and absolutely coat the tip in solder before putting it down.

Things left to do!

Things to finish
- I’d really like to finish up the Fallout themed shirt/vest to go with my project
- A way to attach my wife’s octopus to a purse strap
- A better way to wear my robot on my shoulder – may use a similar foam paldron
- A big chunky seat belt looking thing for the strap wearing my robot
- I’ve got designs for a new bag to wear/carry around Maker Faire, but haven’t sewn them up yet – maybe this week!?!!?
Make sure we have
- Enough batteries, battery packs, etc for our projects
- USB chargers for our LiPo batteries in goggles
- Finish my goggles (install battery, update code, possibly change out diffusers
- Bring a few Maker Coins to give out (I bought 100 of the 5,000 minted, probably never to be minted again…)
- Ways to show people links to learn more about our projects – probably via QR codes – though I might also use an RFID tag :)

Okay, back to work on… work… so I can get back to making!

Note to self: It requires a different version of CircuitPython, Haxpress, to make use of the chip storage [↩]
I used to tape the cord of my soldering iron to the table and then place it on the flimsy stand [↩]