Category Archives: Electronics

Finally finished the engraver and got the wiring all how I want it, and moved the whole thing to its final home on one of my shelves.

Still have a few small things to address (limit switches, laser enable/disable, safety lockout, etc.) - but got it actually engraving things last night!

Sean and I messed around with a Makey Makey kit on Sunday. For those who haven't heard of it, it's a little board that plugs into you PC and simulates a keyboard. But the part that makes it neat is that you can clip its leads onto anything even slightly conductive, and use those objects as keyboard buttons. So for example, the first thing Sean and I did was high-five each other in order to pause and resume YouTube videos. The next thing we tried was hooking up four bananas as up/left/down/right keys for a video game on the PC - at one point we were even using a whisk as a jump button!

This past weekend I got the painted laser engraver reassembled. I'm still waiting for a few bits and pieces from Adafruit, and then I can start wiring up the electronics!

Sean and I have started working on a wheeled robot powered by a Raspberry Pi. Last weekend we finally got it to move! On Sunday we got the RPi mounted, and we also 3D printed a bracket to mount a couple of bump switches to. Currently, the Python code Sean wrote to control it will make it move forward until it bumps into something, then move backwards and turn before starting to move forward again. Pretty simple, but we've got to start somewhere!

I ended up breaking the laser engraver body back down so that I could paint it. I've still got some old paint samples my sister gave me when she was figuring out what colors she wanted to paint the rooms in her new house. So I went with a jaunty green for the main body components, and a grey for the two sleds. Once the paint is dry I will put everything back together, put on the end caps I 3D printed in the previous entry, and get ready to start on the electronics!

Got another chunk of time to work on the laser engraver recently. Both the y-axis sled and the x-axis gantry are now built. I also 3D-printed some covers for the holes that the bearing shafts are mounted in, to be sure the shafts can't pull back out of the holes when things are moving. Next up is to mount those covers, and then possibly paint the whole thing (still on the fence about that) before I start trying to wire up the electronics.

I started working on a home-built CNC laser engraver this weekend. I ordered some parts weeks ago - stepper motors, shaft couplers, etc. I've been doodling plans for the machine for the last week, trying to get the dimensions down. This weekend I got over the mental roadblock keeping me from starting, and finally started building. I got the base built, and started the y-axis sled. I need to add the center section that will house the nut for the threaded rod that will move the sled. Then it's on to the gantry!

Finished up the Pandora radio yesterday - I installed a clear plexiglass back, and finished up the software changes I needed to make. Now I just need to find a permanent spot for it down in the shop! I might need to add another shelf somewhere.

Here's a shot of the final hardware configuration of the radio - from a hardware perspective, I'm nearly done! Still to do is to make some retaining pins for the knobs, and to make a clear plexiglass back for the radio - so that anyone interested can get a look inside at all the gadget-y guts! I've still got some software work to do - I need to get the scripts I've written to start at bootup. But I'm also having a slight problem with pianobar - the current tip version of pianobar fails after playing one complete song. If I skip songs before one finishes, it keeps playing fine. But if I let one completely finish, the stream just stalls. Luckily for me pianobar is open source, and not a huge codebase - so hopefully I can figure out what's going wrong on my own.