Projects

3D Printing

I finally caved and bought a 3D printer earlier this year. I love having the ability to model a part, leave it printing and come back a few hours later to a completed idea. Here are a few examples of projects I've done with the 3D printer:

Record Player Hinges

Driver Bit Holder

Lego London Skyline

After receiving a Lego London Skyline kit for Christmas, I realised I could add LEDs to the London Eye. Many months later, I received some 5050 LEDs. It turns out these are 0.2mm bigger than the hole in the bottom of Lego. This allowed me to use a knife to enlargen the holes in the 16 pod pieces (sorry Lego fans) and then press fit the LEDs in.

The LEDs require 5v, GND and data in and out. This lead me to opt to create a 5v and a GND rail to attach to each of the hoops of the Eye. This means only 1 wire needs to go between the LEDs.

The rest of the electronics are rather simple - an ESP8266 Arduino and a USB type B plug for power. The software running on this board is designed exactly for controlling 5050s over WiFi (WLED).

To really polish the project off, I created a wooden base from lime wood, which I squared off, rounded over, split into two pieces and routed out an electronics pocket. I then sanded the heads of a couple of screws to the same size as the Lego pegs so I could screw through a piece of Lego to secure the whole thing.

To enable voice commands with Google Assistant, I created 2 IFTTT rules - 1 to toggle the light and 1 to change brightness. These rules then post a webhooks request to a non standard port of one of my subdomains which points to the DynamicDNS IP address of my home address. This is then forwarded on the router to the ESP8266.

VR Wall

I found myself with the problem of storing and charging an array of devices (namely an HTC Vive, with accompanying controllers; a smartwatch and active noise cancelling headphones). This project aimed to solve this.

I simply took some live edge wood, cut, glued and sanded it together into a few pieces - a large backboard, headphone and VR hangers and a shelf. After attaching these and some dowel and an allen key together, I added danish oil and hung it with a french cleat.