After plenty of playing, especially one or two of the levels in the star world in the background here, I finally int "100%" in New Super Mario Bros. U, having beaten all the levels, plus collected all three star coins from each. Phew!
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I recently discovered (via the awesomely named YouTube channel I Like To Make Stuff) of a board game called Quarto. It's got simple rules and it's pretty easy to make a set yourself. I'm visiting my Mom in New Jersey, and that means access to some tools I couldn't keep in the city.
I picked some already-one-inch-square scrap available, it seems to be PVC. I rounded off the corners on the router table, then cut out eight short pieces and eight tall pieces, half of each from the rounded over section and half from some raw square section. Then half of the pieces got holes drilled in the top, and half got spray painted black.
The board is another scrap piece, of wood that was already finished. A grid of shallow lines, again with the router table, formed the play spaces. I chamfered the edges and with the paint dry, it was done!
This was a quick and dirty project. The grid lines were not routed the best, and the spray paint leaves a lot to be desired. But they're definitely good enough to play with. So I'll give that a try, and then decide if it's worth trying again, with perhaps better materials and more care.
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For a party I went to yesterday, I made some cookies. I specifically looked around for a "decadent" recipe, and I totally found one. These are Nutella-Stuffed Brown Butter + Sea Salt Chocolate Chip Cookies.
I'd never heard of brown butter before, at least that I can recall. Definitely never used it as an ingredient. It's simple, but so amazing. Its smell alone, during preparation, left me sure these would be amazing cookies. In the final product, I think the Nutella overpowers the rest of the cookie, so I might try again without that. The brown butter also didn't cream like I'm used to, but the dough started to come together in a familiar manner once the eggs were added.
I probably slightly under-baked most of these. The process of stuffing the cookies left them each bigger than I'd normally make, plus the Nutella itself added some thermal mass, but they still all came out scrumptious!
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I've hardly posted about it, besides the tapper buttons I made last year, but since early 2016 I've been spending a lot of time playing an arcade game called Killer Queen. It's played by ten people at once, in two teams of five. The social aspect of working with your team to outplay the other one turns a fantastic game into an addictive one. At left and right here are two pictures of one of the key parts of the game: these yellow flowers are scattered around the play area. They start, like at left, full of six berries and often end up like at right, plucked clean. The berries are central to play, being a direct path to one of the win conditions and also the means by which players upgrade themselves to pursue the others.
One of the very dedicated players that I know thanks to this game is pregnant, with her baby due in just a few weeks. A coworker and fellow player had the wonderful idea to give a Killer Queen themed baby gift, and one was a plush berry flower toy. I was excited from the moment I heard the idea. I finished making it, and gifted it, this week. Here's a photo gallery plus some explanation of the build process.
First was gathering materials. There's some yellow felt here for the flower, and some fuzzy pom-poms of just the right color to stand in for the berries. I had to make two orders of these. At first I just got six, because that's how many there are in game. Once I saw them in person though, I realized I'd need to make a pyramid in three dimensions for this to make sense as a physical object.
I found what seemed like a reasonable petal shape and drew it out on the computer, then printed it out on paper for templates. These were traced onto yellow felt which was sewed and trimmed into the final outer shape. It took two tries to get the size right. This worked out great: though I wanted the profile of the smaller size, using the larger size ended up being just the right amount of extra material to wrap around the depth I wanted. So I sewed and cut the outer shape of all four petals. Each was one sheet of felt, cut in half and stitched together into a pocket.
With all four separate petals prepared, the next step was to start sewing them together into one flower. This involved pinning the remaining flaps in place, stitching from the outer corner of two petals down to the middle, and repeating three more times. When done one side of the flower was sewed up, with flaps remaining on the other side.
The plan is to flip the felt flower inside out around a piece of upholstery foam, leaving it stuffed and plush, with the seams hidden inside. This was tested first, and the fit was fine. So the foam came back out and two of the four remaining seams were done by machine, again on what would be the inside. With a smaller open hole left, the flower was stuffed again, leaving just a few loose flaps.
The remaining two seams were stitched by hand. This leaves a raised seam, but they'll be hidden shortly.
I had hardly noticed despite playing the game for over a year, until I looked closely for this project: There's a green structure that holds the berries. I'm choosing to call this the pistil (a discrete organ in the center of a flower capable of receiving pollen and producing a fruit). So I made a simple cone out of green felt and stuffed with a bit more foam, with the intent that it holds up the higher layers of berries without crushing the lower ones. I laid the bottom layer of berries in an arrangement that would mostly cover the raised seams, and leave room for the pistil in the middle. Then stitched the pistil in place, again by hand.
Next I added the vein pattern onto the top of the flowers. I found a reasonable image online, then traced out the main structure and stretched and tweaked it to fit my exact petal shape. I printed this out onto paper and cut out the shape to form a stencil, which was drawn over with a marker. With that done, the first layer of berries were stitched onto the petals in a triangle shape, around the pistil.
All that remained was to attach the final four berries. These went onto the pistil, using its structure to help with the shape. Which did not end up perfect. There was more slack than I hoped for, but I'm still very happy with the final result!
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When you wake up late on the weekend and your first meal is at noon, is it breakfast or lunch? Who cares when it's pancakes!
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A while ago I came up with an idea which I finally brought to fruition this weekend. I've got a lot of cables, mostly USB cables. They generally sit in messy piles and are difficult to find. This is a system to hang the cables on the wall so they remain out of the way, but also easily found.
There are two locations with plenty of wall space in my apartment which are also very out of the way, and they now both hold one of these three foot long organizers, for a total of just over sixty spaces to hold cables. Most of which are full!
It started with some very cheap mini clothespin style clips. Then a one-by-two board with a small groove routed into it. The clips are glued into that groove, then the board is screwed to the wall with a couple drywall anchors. That's it!
One (pictured left) holds mostly micro USB and mini USB cables, with a couple USB extensions and full size USB cables. The other (pictured right) holds mostly charging adapters for various portable game systems, but also some wall adapters, earbud headphones and a couple USB C cables as well.
Now I just need to come up with a way to straighten all those cables, so that it looks neater!
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Following my two previous such posts, EasyEDA reached out to me requesting a review of their service. Disclaimers up front: First, they offered a $50 coupon so I paid only the shipping for these boards, but this article remains my own unvarnished opinion. Second: I did not use their design tools, I already know KiCad and can't spend the time to learn a new one. This is review is about only the PCB fab service, so point one is that they support both modes (use their design tools, or upload your own produced separately).
To the right is a comparison of three revisions of the same board. The green board on the right is the back and front of the board made by EasyEDA, with a PCB ruler showing centimeters besides that. Click to embiggen, open in a new tab to go even bigger.
The quality of the boards I received was very consistent. And quite good overall. There was the occasional light scratch, and a semi-consistent sort of wrinkle in the solder mask, but they are only evident under close inspection, never deep enough to cut through the solder mask. The silkscreen is bold and legible, even under a microscope it's consistent and solid. Compare especially the line around U4 to the rev B board in the middle, whose silkscreen is spotty and hard to read. Routing of the internal cutouts is also quite good (although I intentionally rounded as many corners as I could in this version, after experiencing this in rev B). The square corner cutouts around U3 show the worst, still minor, issue here: one corner has a bit of over-cutting.
There's a fair deal of dust, especially visible along the right side of M1 on the front-up board at far right. Easy enough to wipe off before assembly. Then of course those darn added part numbers! I specifically put instructions to place the number inside the outline of M1. That will be covered by a part once assembled, becoming invisible. Instead they put it right smack along the edge of the front layer. There's hardly a more visible spot.
Cost was very good. I also got a stencil, which due to size/weight forced express shipping. So I'll do a separate cost comparison, for this 99x33mm board, cheapest options including shipping:
| Quantity | EasyEDA | Seeed Fusion 1 | Elecrow 2 | Dirty PCBs |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| 10 | $17.51 $1.75/ea | $16.21 $1.62/ea | $13.76 $1.38/ea | $23.00 $2.30/ea |
| 20 | $24.57 $1.22/ea | $28.94 $1.45/ea | $24.34 $1.22/ea | $25.00 $1.25/ea |
| 50 | $55.48 $1.11/ea | $67.84 $1.36/ea | $56.08 $1.12/ea | $49.00 $0.98/ea |
1 Seeed had a (temporary?) $5 off shipping special, in these prices.
2 Always the "special two layer, 10qty" service. Edit to multiple quantity of that in the cart for 20/50 total quantity.
When I first put this chart together, EasyEDA had the best price after shipping at anything but quantity 10, for this board. I then had the idea to use multiples of Elecrow's "special" service, which brought them down to the same price range. It's worth noting that pcbshopper.com isn't clever enough to try this. If you're cost sensitive, invest a little time into exploring all the options offered from several fabs.
I've got a different larger board that I'm working on (149x68mm) and I only need one of it. In this case five from EasyEDA is easily the least expensive among several fabs (coming in about 25% cheaper than the next lowest option). Once again it's worth checking several sources, and even designing to fit into a particular envelope which is efficiently priced if you can. For this larger board, it has to be that size.
These boards are perfectly good, and also very inexpensive. They match or beat the quality of the previous revisions from other fabs, for similar or lower costs. I'm very happy with this service. That said, when I'm not getting the service for free I'll probably pay the premium to not get extra part numbers added to hardly-controllable usually-too-visible parts of my boards.
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I posted once recently about the prototype of this project, but as of today I've finished the first real one. The name Remapcro is a portmanteau of remap and macro, because that's what it does. It's an array of extra keys onto which macros can be stored, and then replayed at a touch. It works by sitting between your keyboard and computer. Normally key presses are passed straight through, but when recording a macro they are stored and then later replayed.
I made a handful of small errors along the way, but none were fatal. The worst is in the picture on the right, above. There are two PCBs to hold the electronics. On top one holds the key switches and the diodes which help make the keyboard matrix easy to read and error free. Then a second smaller one, holding the "smarts". There are a couple connections between the two of them, and the cross-wise one (top to bottom, at the edge of the smaller board) is off by one space. I ended up mounting the smaller board "upside down" and even though I thought I had the connector perfectly centered, it was off by a tenth of an inch. Thanks to the size of the key caps, there was already some extra room in the case I designed, and cutting a bit of the corner off the smaller board helped squeeze everything in anyway.
There's also one LED tucked into the top-left key (bottom left in the left picture above). It's actually three LEDs (red, green, and blue). And specially designed to fit exactly into these key caps. I could only find it in a lot of 50 from China, and I was too impatient to wait for it to arrive (and carefully check my design against it) before I ordered the PCBs. I ended up needing to put it in backwards, trim off a bit of the bulge that now sticks out rather than into the slot it's designed for, and re-wire the connections a bit.
The case the boards fit into was a challenge both to design and to produce with my 3D printer. But (perhaps aside from the screaming orange color, that's what was easily on hand for this first test run) I'm quite happy with it. A couple pieces slot together at the front, then a screw holds the back on, wedging everything together. The only problem was getting the back piece sized correctly, especially with all those holes. It's still not perfect, but it's functional. And if you were curious about the shape and arrangement of keys:
Of course, it's designed to look like it belongs, sitting next to a standard PC keyboard. I hope to re-design the case, ideally with more rounded corners and tweaking the alignment of a few things. Plus, supporting the insides better: right now it's only supported at the extreme front and back edge. This is mostly fine, but it can flex when pressing the keys towards the middle, which would be nice to avoid. I'd really like to fit everything onto a single board. That little space between the top and second rows could probably just fit all the electronics, but the problem is the connectors. With all the keys poking holes everywhere, not much room is left to mount the USB in and out ports. Who knows, maybe I'll come up with a brainstorm.
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Back in October I finally decided to get a 3D printer. I got a low cost kit, and one of the glaring issues is the power supply. As shipped, there were loose wires between the plug, the switch, and the supply. No bare conductors, but still not awesome. The switch would just flap in the breeze. I saw some similar designs already made online but none of them really satisfied me. I decided to design my own. It took some time before I could successfully print it, but it's finally done, much safer now not to mention easier to use!
I've shared the design files on Thingiverse. The set of hexagon holes were designed partially to save material, but mostly to try to reduce curling. They weren't sufficient, which is why I only now finally got it printed successfully. I had to get my bed leveled very well plus use a brim, to get this successful print in ABS. The PEI print surface was probably also required; it helped at least.
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