Floating in the Clouds -

Quick and dirty removing components from trash PCBs

This entry is part 2 of 2 in the series TIL

We are in COVID lockdown in New Zealand so needs must, and I am reduced to ‘recovering’ some components off the trash PCBs I have […]

LoRa 101: Getting JayCar/ Duinotech components XC4394 & XC4392 working

This entry is part 1 of 1 in the series LoRa

I have had a project in mind for a while for a remote sensor (in the sea!) but did not like the idea of having […]

Amp upgrade v2. Hello ESP32.

This entry is part 5 of 5 in the series ESP32

This older post describes my first go at rejuvenating an old Kenwood hi-fi amp – the focus was on automatically switching the thing off & […]

Greek symbols for variables in Javascript

This entry is part 1 of 2 in the series TIL

For my inaugural TIL series… Today I Learnt that you can use Greek symbols for variables in Javascript. This was a feature I really liked […]

HBO style ident

This entry is part 1 of 1 in the series vlog

If I hear the HBO ident I think Game of Thrones. I like it. It is soothing. I wanted my own – I purposely left […]

Blinker: ESP32 library for LED blinking

This entry is part 4 of 5 in the series ESP32

I could not find a library for easily controlling the blink periods for various LEDs for 1-of-10 ESP32 projects I have been working on, so […]

React Tic-Tac-Toe: Function & hooks implementation

I have been trying to do …something… using React and Three.js (via the react-three-fiber project). I kind of jumped straight into it but keep on […]

Plateau–Rayleigh instability: a bit more

See this previous post for some background. Funny how things come back around isn’t it? I had been looking at a Julia CFD implementation called […]

Julia first go (with Waterlily.jl CFD)

This entry is part 1 of 1 in the series Julia lang

I have shown the Github robot a passing interest in CFD-related repos and it now suggests repos I might find interesting. Waterlilly.jl was the latest. […]

flipmeacoin.com

A (very long) while ago a bought the flipmeacoin.com domain. For a bit it allowed you to flip a virtual coin (using Threejs & Physijs). […]

Hackaday podcast shout-out

This entry is part 5 of 5 in the series Ball joint

Do you know what I love to do on Saturday mornings? I like to go out on my lonesome and listen to the weekly hackaday.io […]

Slow WordPress (admin) fix

This blog uses WordPress (hosted with GoDaddy on economy Linux something-or-other). At some point, the admin dashboard became intolerably slow. I had been living with […]

Active Ball Joint. Too hard box, for now

This entry is part 4 of 5 in the series Ball joint

I went all gung-ho (from Chinese 工合 …who knew!) into modelling the cross spherical gear (CSG) and monopole gears (MPG) on the ABENICS system. I […]

Euler angles

This entry is part 3 of 5 in the series Ball joint

I’d never come across Euler angles (or noticed them if I had), but they are an(other) way of describing the rotation of a rigid object […]

Active Ball Mechanism Joint – Monopole gear

This entry is part 2 of 5 in the series Ball joint

In this previous post I modelled the cross spherical gear part of a cool joint I found online – you can see a video of […]

Active ball mechanism joint

This entry is part 1 of 5 in the series Ball joint

Came across the video below. Thought it was cool. Cooler to make one though right?! I found the original paper here, which has some great […]

OctoPi plugin to control relays

This entry is part 7 of 7 in the series RepRap

I started developing a plugin for Octoprint (more specifically Octoprint-on-RPi aka Octopi). It allows you to control relays on a Pi-Plates RELAYplate hat. See here […]

Octopi: If it ain’t broke…

This entry is part 6 of 7 in the series RepRap

In my last Reprap-Revival related post I went on about upgrading to RPi4 & wifi (from RPi3B & LAN) for Octopi. Subsequently, I have found […]

ESPmDNS: An ESP32 secret (to me anyway)

This entry is part 3 of 5 in the series ESP32

ESPmDNS enables (Zeroconf/ Bonjour/) Multicast DNS on your ESP32 (and maybe ESP8266? don’t know) microcontroller. Previously I’d been assigning a static address to ESP32 devices […]

Hello Reprap. My old friend.

This entry is part 5 of 7 in the series RepRap

I watched the video below on DriveTribe and was inspired. The presenter found his first car and has taken it upon himself to revive it […]

Tsunami: Est time of arrival

I live in New Zealand. A while back (March 2021) there were earthquakes in the Pacific which spurred tsunami warnings in NZ. I had vague […]

ESP32 meet Science Journal. Science Journal, meet ESP32

This entry is part 2 of 5 in the series ESP32

I’ve put together PlatformIO library for connecting ESP32 boards to the Arduino* Science Journal App via BLE (Android / iOS). In my case, the boards […]

I bought 10 ESP32 dev boards off AliExpress.

This entry is part 1 of 5 in the series ESP32

And now I need to work out what to do with them. Aliexpress link here. Why? I have been playing around with a board I […]

Plot.ly Dash and MQTT

This entry is part 3 of 3 in the series ploy.ly dash

Plot.ly Dash is an opensource Python framework for building web-apps. Pretty good. Check it out. One gotcha to the way Dash is structured is that […]

RobotDyn UNO+WiFi: SoftwareSerial

The RobotDyn board has some DIP switches on, which allow you to UART to either the ESP8266 or ATmega328p, so you can upload code to […]

RobotDyn UNO + ESP8266: AT Mode

This entry is part 2 of 2 in the series ESP8266

This post should probably have a sub-title: The penny drops After a short-lived feeling of victory in this previous post, I set upon trying to […]

RobotDyn UNO + ESP8266

This entry is part 1 of 2 in the series ESP8266

… oh, and USB-TTL CH340G which does the USB communicating with ESP8266. I think you otherwise need to wire something up using one of these […]

Roof survey and Topaz Sharpen AI

When the wind blows in a certain direction our house’s roof groans. Quite unsettling. I thought it was something loose on the roof, which is […]

Corona Bottle Top

My brother used some COVID-time to superpower his garage, finding his DIY inner-zen in the process. To celebrate its completion, I thought I’d make him […]

New life to an old amp

Hopefully, this post will save a few old amps from landfill. There is life in them yet. I bought a Kenwood 3020SE amp when I […]

Drafting Table

I draw (drew) quite a lot at work – facade details and wotnot. My office continually strives for a paperless state so working with pen-and-paper […]

DIY CNC COVID-Recommission

This entry is part 9 of 9 in the series DIY CNC Machine

A COVID-project: putting together the out-of-scrap CNC which has sat dismantled in the garage since we moved house. No real hardware upgrades, just making do […]

Why I like open-source

This entry is part 2 of 3 in the series ploy.ly dash

I bit ago I posted about 3d viewer I had written from Plotly Dash. Github user three3 added support for colours on vertices. Legend.

Adobe Premiere Pro: Final Cut

(And a bit of After Effects) See here for the first-cut post. That video was a little rough around the edges so tidied it up […]

Adobe Premiere Pro: First Cut

First-cut of my learning to use Premiere Pro below. I have dabbled with Premiere before, but always kind of danced around getting into it because […]

Autonomous Mapping with Quadcopter: HiveMapper

This entry is part 6 of 6 in the series Quadcopter

I have played around with Autodesk’s photogrammetry tool, Recap Photo, in the past (here, here & here). These have been object scans with me walking […]

New Quadcopter

I have dropped my case for renaming to Tessacopter. Quadcopter will do. Zoe got me a DIY race quad, aka THE UNTETHERED a couple of […]

Hard and Slow: Drilling Stainless Steel

I’ve been to Pick-a-Part, to scavenge some replacement wing mirrors for my Subaru Legacy. 100% success on that front. Also grabbed some more VW seat […]

Amazing Spaces Special: An Aircraft Carrier

I started a previous post saying I was not buying a warship. I used a warship (the ill-fated USS Indianapolis) as a head-shot and got […]

Pressure transducer: nervous

I bought a pressure transducer which measures up to 6000psi. The plan is (was?) to fit this to my bottle jack which I reckoned produced […]

The pressure transducer I bought

I bought one of these off AliExpress (the thing in the photo below, not the warship). I thought it would be fun to have a […]

Autodesk Recap

This entry is part 1 of 1 in the series House model

I think I have gone on about Recap before, when making busts of my dog’s head and working out much concrete I needed for a […]

Rayleigh-Plateau Instability: Revisiting my A-Level Physics

To those of you unfamiliar with the UK education system (pre-1998! I think a little different now), A-levels were what you did between the ages […]

Look away, squeamish

Feeling festive pre-Christmas, I decided some olive branches and some pohutukawa logs could become a Rudolph the red-nosed reindeer head Christmas decoration. All was going […]

Website of the week: Dubaifont.com

Website of the day…week…year…or this case Monday evening. Doesn’t matter. Its dubaifont.com My Back story (less interesting) At work, I use Bluebeam Revu a fair […]