shinyhappyrainbows

OK, that was a bit clicky-baity. You can, just not at a Bunnings, Habour Freight, Amazon, etc. What you can buy is some stainless steel capilliary tube of, say, 100mm of OD 5mm x ID 3mm and a 120mm length of 3mm stainless steel rod. Spray a bit of silicone lube down the bore of the tube, slip the tube over the nail you need to drive out then pull and whack the top of the rod with a hammer. Et voila! Exactly the same job done for under AU$15 (what I've just spent) that currently needs a $300 air tool and an equally expensive air compressor! Let me backup and explain. I love pallet wood. You know, pull apart shipping pallets with a jemmy bar, remove the nails and make stuff. That second stage is more PITA than bread! By the time you wrench plank from rail, the nails are bent up and you just know the bastard will bend rather than drive through. You might straighten them with pliers, but they'll still bend when you hit the pointy end. I was just doing this on Wednesday. It's

All you need to know is in the title but, just to make myself abundantly clear, it's not that there wouldn't be a load of paranoia between a half Russian, half American crew of the ISS if WWIII broke out, it's that, from the space agency disasters and near misses I've seen play out in the news in real life since the end of the cold war, the whole world pitches in with all the science likely to help. Sure, the militaries of each nation might order transmissions to take over the station, but I reckon they'd have to do it gang-handed and at gunpoint to get it sent then, once the goons leave, both Kennedy Space Centre and Baikonur would be working hand over fist to get the 'nauts home alive. If both sites had been eradicated, ESA would be on the case. Scientists would consult, they'd use science and engineering to solve the crisis facing the 'nauts, and they'd risk their own safety to safely rescue those stranded. Then there's the "burning l

I never knew such a thing existed until a few nights ago, but there's an open-source housing project called WikiHouse , described as, "Simple, beautiful, zero-carbon building, for everyone." It's not a perfect open source project, the CAD file formats are mostly commercial, online and industrial grade, although there is a FreeCAD tutorial on how to convert wikihouse cad files to the open source FreeCAD application, it's still complex and largely inaccessible to those not trained in industrial design software. Switch house, source WikiHouse.cc As yet, there are no PDFs for those with an electric jigsaw and a pallet load of ply sheets, a truly accessible format, but the WikiHouse is an example of the idea of open source being a way to drive a socialist economy, without a top down management system. The principle of the whole WikiHouse concept, as I see it, is that housing is a human right, not something that is to be exploited by renting out hoarded property to t

A friend's brother was giving away their drill stand, my friend put their hand up with me in mind, I scored. Giving away. No money! It's not perfect, a broken worktable lifting crank, but I can probably print a replacement, probably a crank wheel, rather than a crank handle, for finer control. It may need new belts. This is a proper workshop tool, not a handyman piece of junk. This lifts my capabilities to some basic milling jobs, like slot holes for making adjustable brackets or facing/rebating aluminium bar and rod. The work height range is huge - I'll need a new rolling bench, but I'll be able to build that from a 1200x1200 ply sheet with material spare. Christmas has come early!

Meccano is a Gen X (and older) boyhood right of passage. My innocent days were that cusp of Boomer to X, the latter being how I identify, despite most picking me as a boomer. I remember a toybox under my bed, full of Lego and Meccano. My train set, a Hornby, of course, was for most of its useful life on a table that was hinged to the wall to rest on my bed posts. My dad was ingenious like that. And then we grow up... I never have, by conventional wisdom. I've had lego most of my life, still do. So it was that my 63rd birthday was a haul of Lego and, for the first time since the 70s, Meccano. It's not an English brand, anymore, French, I think, but it's true to its roots, while well modernised and updated. So, seeing as my major public project is a robotic drum kit, and the hardest part of the design and prototyping has been figuring out how to do hi-hat control, my new Meccano's first task was to roughly model the "dual de-clutched" lever mechanism to lift th

Gotta say, I'm pretty chuffed with this project! Yeah, the repo's still a bit messy, I've yet to mount the electronics, even in prototype form, on the drumkit yet, but I have basic hardware test code working and a basic MIDI operated, non-blocking, Arduino-driven, four-piece kit capable C language package ready to run an Uno or Nano board driving 11 channels of percussion via 11 MOSFET buffers to switch the 24v actuator supply. Most are dynamic, ie: they have velocity, using the analogWrite() command, a few are simple digitalWrite() commands. This video shows an initial test run of the simple hardware test code... I have to admit, the MIDI driver code is probably still a bit unreadable, too. I'm trying to work towards flexible CAD models that can be given presets for popular drum kit product lines and Arduino code that can be scaled to a number of compatible boards, both 16 bit and 32 bit, with sufficient analog pins to run multiple beaters per percussion instrument (