jon makes stuff

lambretta speedometer

It’s been a few days since my last post because I’ve been elbow-deep in painting a spare bedroom and designing a top secret project for my Lambretta.

These are drawings of the faceplate and the printed circuit board for a digital speedometer for Series 3 Lambrettas. It will show speed, distance, RPM, and exhaust gas temperature. It also has a backlight, an ambient light sensor, a temperature sensor for compensating the readings from the thermocouple, and a big red LED for when something very bad is going on in your engine. For the display, I’m using one of the awesome surplus Nokia 3310 LCDs. They really make me happy.

Doing this design took a lot of work, mostly tedious things like looking up part numbers and drawing packages for parts that aren’t in an existing library, but on the whole it turned out to be much easier than I’d expected. I was afraid of having to get plastic parts fabricated for the housing, but the Lambretta speedometer design is so damned modular that I think I’ll be able to get away with just the PCB and a flat 1/8″ piece of laser cut acrylic for the faceplate. In fact, the whole thing turned out so cheap and simple that I don’t think it’s out of the question to make a limited production run of these things and still be able to sell them for a reasonable price.

Assuming it actually works, of course.

Posted in electronics, mechanical, scooters | 2 Comments »

Improvised Air Purifier

Now that the weather is warming up, it’s probably a good time to post this.

I hate air purifiers. They’re shoddy excuses to sell you replacement filters. They die quickly and they don’t move much air. I got tired of throwing them out and decided to improvise my own based on much cheaper and more widely available furnace filters. I’ve been using one of these for about six months and it works way better than any of the purpose-built air purifiers I’ve ever owned.

This is the easiest project in the world. It’s cheap, too: about $30 up front, plus $10/ea. for filters every 3 months or so, depending on what kind you get. All of the parts and filters are easy to find at a hardware store.

Tools required: scissors

Materials:

• 20″ box fan
• 8 foot vinyl corner bead (ask for drywall corner bead)
• small zip ties

and I’m pretty happy with these filters:

• 3m filtrete 1000 allergen filter (anything 20″x20″x1″ will work)

Steps:

1. Bend the corner bead into a square, 20″ on each side. If you get the kind of corner bead made for curved edges, it has notches on one side every 1″, so just count off 20 and bend. If you don’t have notches, use the scissors to cut some so that the inside edges can overlap without folding. With an 8 foot piece of corner bead, you should have 8″ of overlap on the last side of the square.
2. Use the zip ties to secure the square of bead to the back grill of the fan. The corners of the bead will stick out past the rounded corners of the fan. This is fine. Make sure the square stays square and doesn’t get distorted; you need to be able to fit a square filter in there when it’s done. Use the scissors to trim the ends of the zip ties.
3. Fit in your 20″x20″x1″ furnace filter. Secure the corners with 4 more zip ties as shown in the picture above. Just cut these out and replace them with new ties when you replace your filter.

How well does it work? Well, in 6 months of use, I’ve never seen any dust accumulation on my fan blades. (Normally, they get all nasty and full of cat hair.) I’ve turned two filters from white to dark gray, which you might have noticed in the pictures. Subjectively speaking, it does a pretty good job of moving air and eliminating the stink from a stinky room. The filter doesn’t seem to impact the airflow of the fan very much at all. I don’t know how much of the benefits of air purifiers are just placebo effect, but even if so, this is a cheaper and more effective placebo than anything else I’ve used.

Energy usage is 60W on low, 75W on medium, and 90W on high, measured with the filter installed.

Posted in howto, mechanical | 2 Comments »

monsters on a shoe!

How do I love thee, internet? Let me count the ways.

Posted in art, merchandise, monsters, pixelated | No Comments »

gaze upon me

It took most of the evening, but I dusted off my AVR development tools and claimed this Nokia 3310 LCD in the name of Pinky.

The simplicity of this LCD is incredible. Nothing weird about the interface, just simple serial commands over simple connections, and fast enough to have no visible refresh artifacts or flickering. At ten bucks, you can’t really go wrong. I can think of like a million things I want to do with these.

I swear, the hardest part of this project was converting that stupid image to black and white. It doesn’t help that I chose this week to dump Photoshop and learn the GIMP.

Posted in art, electronics, pinky | No Comments »

merchandising

I have a store. Now you can buy t-shirts with monsters on them!

Posted in administrative, art, merchandise, monsters, pixelated | No Comments »

more pixel art

These are renderings of some doodles that the Strumpet made on the whiteboard.

PUNK ROCKS

The original drawing shows the littlest guy in the stack saying “Being the smallest rocks”. According to Ms. Toaster, that’s a complete sentence, as in “Being the smallest ROCKS!”, although in my head it has always been the incomplete beginning of an important declaration: “Being the smallest rocks, …”

Posted in art, monsters, pixelated | 1 Comment »

16 pixel monsters

Not wanting to get off to a slow start, but not having much time or inspiration, I made some 16×16 pixel monsters. Beware their (tiny) wrath.

Zoomed in 4x:

Posted in art, monsters, pixelated | 1 Comment »

because the world needs another blog

Specifically, what the world needs is another blog about me. I wanted to have a place to document and share all my random little projects… so, here it is.

Posted in administrative | No Comments »