Arantius.com

The Bedsofa

2019-04-21 13:07 - Making

I posted about this project just over two months (!) ago, around when I was getting started in earnest. That was starting the cushions, which were the "scariest" part, where I've got the least relevant experience. Since then in my weekends and evenings (on and off), with some time for shipping delays and generally enjoying myself otherwise, I've completed the rest.

This post is the story version of how that all went! It will be a little bit out of order so that the story goes well. If you're truly curious, look at the un-adjusted file names in all the images, the dates and times are burned in there and generally represent when the pictured step happened.

Plans

I just wanted to call out this original paper sketch that I did at the very beginning of the project. I've changed a few things, and it's not to scale, but most of the idea was there from the very beginning.

Cushions

As previously mentioned, I started by experimenting just a bit with the piping. When I was happy that would work, I did them for real: four long single sections to go around the edges. (Here was one of my first big mistakes: they weren't quite long enough. Three of them got extended; one was already stitched in when I realized, so I've got a small gap. Thankfully at the bottom where it doesn't show much.) Next up was the zipper panels. I'm not sure what exactly I did wrong, but they came out very uneven. Not so much of a mistake as an "apprentice mark", here. You can also see the extreme degree of raveling at the edges of the zipper panel, which plagued the sewing part of this project.

As hinted in the piping failure, the next step was stitching up the shells for the cushions. This went almost completely as intended. A couple pieces were a bit small, not really enough spare material to hem. I think this is because (or, worse because) upholstery fabric is stronger, with thicker threads. Which don't weave so tightly as a result, and unravel easily. The second issue was sewing up the corners: with that quarter-inch-thick piping in the way, those were very difficult stitches to make. More apprentice marks here: a few corners are perfect, but most are uneven in random directions, just a bit.

Due to the unraveling, I took the time to (order, and) sew in binding tape around all the seams inside the cushions. Things would probably be fine without this extra layer, but it adds peace of mind at least. And another mistake: when stitching them in, I got a bit of the side panel across the top of one cushion. So it's a little narrower, and has an extra unnecessary stitch visible. Ah, well.

With only spare material for this project and "junk drawer" items, I put together this hot wire cutter jig. You can see the very rough edge that I hacked out of the foam with a knife, just to get close to the proper size -- my wire cutter has only a few inches of throat. Then, the wire-cut edge: perfectly straight and smooth. With the foam cut out to just the right shape and size, stuffing the cushion shells went very well! Except for one ripped seam I had to repair, a raveled edge which caused a weak stitch. This was repaired with some "fusible bonding web" because I didn't want to re-make the whole thing! You can see one piece of binding material in the corner of this picture, where I knew the edge (and thus stitch) was weak. Apparently I needed a bit more! I ripped out most of this seam, bonded the extra material to it, then re-stitched it.

Structure

With the cushion shells completed, I was confident that I could make this project really work. So I bought a bunch of two-by-fours. These were cut up at the workshop in the office -- a great perk. And then bunched up to roll home by hand cart. Since they were smaller in their cut-up form, this was easier than rolling the raw stock from the store to the office -- thankfully that was only a few blocks.

I was overconfident. The complex angled pieces did not come out right in that first batch of cuts, going only by measurements. I got lucky here in that I planned for eight foot boards, but ended up with ten footers. Each had just enough extra slack that I got my four main five-foot-long boards cut out of only two of them. This left an extra unused board, just enough material to re-cut these pieces.

For this second try, instead of cutting the piece to fixed measurements, I clamped up the rest of the pieces in place and scribed out the exact shape I needed, then cut from that template. These didn't end up perfect, but A) good enough and B) that's a small theme of this project.

At home, the structure is all screwed together. Pocket holes are used liberally where possible, and some simple butt joints as well. The back was assembled first, then pieces were screwed into that. Then the shorter front section onto that. This was the main shape that was templated above, so the angled sections, support for the back rest, were added and the main structure was complete!

With the main structure complete, the next task was to attach the seat backs. These were rough cut from plywood, then marked and clamped in place. The cuts were scribed to the actual structure: nothing came out perfectly square or perfectly to plan, but this let me get the pieces cut to match! The top and bottom cut are angled to match the recline, so they end up with "flat" edges relative to everything else, which is nice.

On recommendation of a coworker that I've been chatting with about the project, especially the sewing bits, I got some batting to wrap the cushion foam in. The smallest unit was quite large. I had been considering some sort of foam layer to soften the edges of the structure with. All that spare batting took the role! In hindsight, I should have chamfered a few of the wooden corners before this, but it's worked out well enough overall.

Upholstery

The upholstery step was also a new skill to execute. It's done with the same exact fabric as the cushions. My original idea was a solid color, to make both the cushions and the upholstery easier: no opportunity for mistakes laying out the pattern. I ended up with a pattern. It went almost completely fine. The entire lower section, beneath the seats, is one wide piece. This went well, except that the sides stretched a bit unevenly, leaving some warp to the pattern there. There's also a little spare material wrapped around the spots I expected to be tricky: in case I completely miss something, this lower layer (rather than the white batting) is what will peek through.

Next was the seat backs. They went quite well overall, except due to the recline angle, the pattern is angled next to them. That's fine. The bottom edge is tacked in with a cardboard strip which keeps that edge nice and straight. Some metal tack strips bridge the empty space front to back over a gap where there's no wood structure, holding a clean edge. The material is folded up over that, then wrapped around the structure and stapled from the back, leaving a nice surface on the front and sides.

Clean. The last piece to upholster is the bridge across the top. I took two tries at this, not pictured. The first was only tacked at the bottom and wrapped around, a bit too loose. So I took the folding metal clamps from my upholstery tack set: with the inside tacked across the bottom, this holds the left and right edges in place by being tacked in underneath, folding the material over, then bending the metal down to hold it all in place. With the remaining edge tacked again from the bottom.

The back will be slightly visible, as the wall it will be resting against is only partial, with the sleeping loft looking out from above on both sides. So the back (and bottom) is being covered in a black cambric dust cover fabric. It's got a small corner folded back, for the electrical cord (read ahead!) to stick out of. Like the rest of this project, it's got small issues. Not very visible in the far side of this low-lighting picture is a fair deal of bunching (at the left side when looking at the back). Which of course ended up being the more visible side. I might go back and re-touch that.

Shelves

With the main upholstery done, the shelves were the only significant remaining piece. Like with the seat backs, nothing is perfectly square here. I used "story sticks" to measure the front and back widths, they were a sixteenth to an eighth of an inch different. Then I cut out blanks, with the front edge angled again to match the recline, too deep on purpose. Once they generally fit, with the front edge lined up nicely, the back edge was marked to match the structure and cut square.

Both shelves are held in place with half-wide two by four pieces screwed into the main structure, which they're also screwed into from below. The top shelf was cut a little wide, so I used some scraps of wood to stretch the opening a bit. This made it easier to insert the shelf without stretching the fabric too much. For the bottom and top, it was a tricky operation of putting the shelf in the right place, so the support pieces could be clamped in place. With those clamps holding, verify the placement is good with a level. Then screw in the support pieces, and screw the shelf to the supports from underneath.

The lower shelf is flush with the main structure so its bottom side and supports are invisible. The upper shelf of course is visible from all sides, as are its support pieces. So when finishing, the top shelf was finished on all sides, as were its support pieces to match. Both the two by fours and the plywood were near paper white, which didn't look super nice next to the relatively dark blue fabric. I used some Minwax "Polyshades" which I already had from a project a few years ago. This is a stain and (polyurethane) finish in one. I probably would have done separate if I was buying specific for this project, but this worked out pretty well. I couldn't choose the color, because I was using the spare I already had: "Mission Oak", which is quite dark.

I'd change one thing if I could go back, though: I did the smaller top shelf first, and I brushed on the finish (like the instructions said to!). This gave a very thick and dark coat. For the second shelf, I wiped the finish on on with a rag. This gave much thinner and finer coats, and a lighter color I would have likely preferred. It took eight hours for each coat to dry, but I ended up putting four coats on the lower shelf, to get it to a depth of color to match the already finished top shelf. I'd have done only two or three wiped-on coats on both, if I knew how that would end up ahead of time.

Electrical

This is going up in my sleeping loft. There's only two sides of this loft which have walls this can rest against (for support), and both of them have electrical outlets. Whichever one this goes in front of I'd like to use: I plug in various eBook readers, tablets, game systems, etc. to charge. In my first apartment, I had a nice table/hutch in the kitchen: It had a small shelf above and more importantly an electrical outlet built into the surface, with a cord to plug into the wall. It made a convenient place to plug in a mixer or other appliance, while cooking. Above you can see a crowded/messy picture from when I was near packed up to move out, and a closer in picture of the outlet in the surface. I decided to do something similar to that for this project.

The bedsofa will block my outlet, but it will have its own replacement outlet built in. I splurged here and I got an outlet with USB ports also built-in, and a switch to control things. The electrical box I got was designed (as far as I can tell) to fit through half inch drywall, but I'm putting it through three quarter inch plywood, so I made up some shims from some old quarter inch wood stock to fill the gap, which helped everything screw down tightly and line up nicely.

I made a small accident here: I've got a two-gang box. The first gang is a switch/single outlet, while the second gang is two outlets plus two USB charging ports. I wired it up with the intention to have the switch disable everything (and any possible vampire power). But what I actually did is just switch the second outlet. The single outlet with the switch is permanently on. It wasn't intentional, but this is nice and flexible, so I'm keeping it.

The Glamour

Here it is, completely in place. When it was being assembled on my coffee table, err...work bench, I realized it wasn't quite square, it would wobble a bit. I got adjustable screw in feet, to make it possible to leave it perfectly stable and flat. In addition, there's two of these feet sticking out the back of the top. These rest against the wall, so that it remains stable and upright when I sit back on it.

Cost

Look at this as either a passion project or explanation of why furniture is expensive. Or both. Some of this, especially the wood, is down to Manhattan prices. I've rounded things to the nearest dollar after tax, just to make the accounting easier. Either way, I spent:

For a grand total of $389, $423 if you include the tools that I bought specifically for this project. Phew.

I did a lot more impulse buying and splurging than I normally would, while working on this. But not only is it a useful durable piece of furniture that I'll keep, it was also essentially entertainment budget: I got to flex several old and new making skills.

I used most of the screws. Several of the upholstery pieces were mostly used. The zipper was just barely, as was the welt cord. In both cases, these were the most economical choices, anyway. I used only a tiny bit of the batting (around the foam, in the cushions). I've also got almost half of the baltic birch plywood left, which should easily turn into some new project in the future!

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Quick T-Bevel

2019-04-02 18:52 - Making

My bed sofa project is progressing nicely. I expect to put together a detailed post, once it's complete. Over the weekend I picked up some nice plywood, for the seat backs and center shelves. Cutting those pieces right is challenging. I've got the main frame assembled, at home. I've got tools, at the shop at work. I want to transport as little as possible. And I also have some angles to cut, and hopefully get just right.

I've seen one of these before, probably on This Old House, and that's the article I found when I went looking for the name of the thing. I decided to make one quickly today. Laser cut a shape that allows me to match angles like the commercial equivalents. Tighten the nut to just lock it down, then push it into the angle to squeeze it perfectly flush. Then just scribe the same line onto the real material. (After tracing it onto a piece of paper, to measure more easily, it seems I'm at about 22.5°. I was aiming for 20°, but shifted some of my measurements around. And some of the cuts were probably not perfectly to plan!)

In this case, I'm trying to cut the top and bottom of the seat back, which is an angled piece. So that the cuts are level, flush with the neighboring pieces of the frame. I've got a jig saw at home, which I've used to divide the pieces down to the smallest possible size, for transport. The band saw in the shop has a tilting table. I can match that table to this angle, and get exactly the cut I want. The only challenge will be getting the right height, after cutting this tiny bit off.

I could have spent about ten bucks to buy one of these, but it was much nicer to make it! This was all spare materials except $0.33 for the thumb screw at a local hardware store on the way home! Access to a laser cutter really helped.

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The Bed Sofa Begins

2019-02-13 22:39 - Making

I've got nice high ceilings in my apartment. And at one end a raised sleeping loft. There's only three or four feet up there, but it's plenty of room to lie down in. Except the bed is actually just a mattress on the "floor". I've made it work so far.

But, technically, it's just a mattress on the floor. There isn't the height for a "real" bed. I've got a chair next to the bed, but I don't end up using it much. I'd rather sit up in bed. I thought about it for a while, and I had an idea.

It's not at all unusual to take a sofa, add a mattress, and call it a sofa bed. So why can't I take a mattress, add a sofa (back) and call it a bed sofa? I can build in a couple cushions at a gentle recline, a shelf to hold an alarm clock and a few books, and sit up comfortably in bed! Read a book, under the covers, then just lie down when I'm ready to sleep. This would make me happy. And it's a nice project with some opportunity for design (done), carpentry (I can handle that), and upholstery (oooh, new skill to learn!).

The construction is primarily two-by-fours. The seat backs might be plywood, but might be zig zag springs. Which are normally used for seats, but I wonder if I'd like that bit of give to the back. Some plywood or wide solid boards will make the shelves, and the whole surface (except the shelves, I think) will be covered in upholstery fabric. Then I make some custom cushions, with the same fabric over foam. Voila!

It's the cushions that are the exciting bit. I can sew. I think. This will be a special new challenge. I want the edges to have piping like real upholstery, so I need to figure out how to do that. Time for experimentation!

My bed sheets and cover are dark blue. I was looking for some fabric that would go well. Expecting a solid color (because the sewing would be easier, with no pattern to worry about lining up). And clearly from the design I was thinking grey might go well, but I found this blue fabric with a geometric pattern that really appealed to me. So I got several yards of it. Plus some "welt cord". The idea is to sew a tight loop of fabric around the cord, then you've got a matching "pipe" shape to sew into the corner seams, and it looks nice. So I gave it a shot. This was a quick and dirty first attempt, which turned out quite well except for not getting a very straight seam.

Then I sewed that up into a seam. I got one of the pieces inside out, but for this simple test that's fine! This is sub-optimal in a few small ways, and I think I know how to improve it. Can't ask for much more! Hung over the edge of the table to roughly approximate the real shape, it's even serviceably straight, despite putting almost no effort in there at all. A couple more practice runs and I should be ready to try my hand on a real cushion. If that goes well, it's time to buy foam and two by fours!

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Retro Duo Portable Repair

2019-02-05 22:58 - Making

The Retro Duo Portable is the portable version of Retro-Bit's clone consoles, which play original game cartridges. A while back I rescued one from the trash. It didn't (quite) work. It could play games, but the screen constantly flickered. I had plenty of early ideas, and for the past few weeks I've spent an hour here and there on evenings and weekends trying to repair it.

One of the first things I did was just open it, to try to see what was going on inside. I don't remember specifically what I tried first, but it was minor. I tested the system again before fully re-assembling, and voila! It worked great! So I reassembled it and ... it wasn't working again. After a couple experiments, I found that if I pushed on the front, between the face buttons and the screen, with modest pressure (in fact, pushing the buttons themselves could trigger the failure as well) then the screen would start flickering. One of the screws that holds the thing together would, itself, apply this same pressure.

With it "working" (and open) I could confirm that really what's happening is a constant trigger of the "contrast" (brightness, really) button's control. In fact, if you hold that button down, it stops. Inside, there is a weak pull-up resistor on a signal line, and pressing the button closes a switch which (strongly) shorts that line to ground. The system triggers on the change of the signal, and somehow only when being pressed, some other signal line was leaking into the brightness control, causing constant and repeated changes of value, which it interpreted as constant pushes of the contrast button.

The first thing I tried was liberal application of tape (kapton and "electrical") to prevent shorts. In the close up picture you can still see a few pieces, which weren't worth removing now that they're in place. I tried all sorts of clever things with the electronics to try to isolate exactly where the failure is coming from, and eliminate it. None of these attempts helped at all. Somewhat in desperation, with no reason to believe it would help — but I was hoping for some sort of structural, rather than electrical, support — I stuck a bit of card inside. Especially in the second close up picture, you can see that there's one spot that it's pinched enough to leave marks on the card. (And the same thing in a second spot, after trimming and rotating the card to fit better, without blocking any of the screws.) Some thin kapton tape (and, I think, a layer of electrical tape on the other side during one try) just wasn't enough. But this card in this location separates or supports something in the right way, and it's all working again! Perhaps with use it will wear down? For now, it's nice to be repaired.

I could buy one of these brand new for around $80. But now, it will always be that one I rescued from the trash, and fixed up.

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WiiMote Charger Repair

2019-01-29 00:36 - Making

I've had a Wii at my Mom's for several years. It's still fun to break out Bowling or Dr. Mario once in a while when visiting. This one came used, with rechargeable batteries for the WiiMotes, and a cradle to charge them. Last visit, the cradle stopped charging correctly. It wouldn't get power as expected. Wiggling the plug could help a bit, but not reliably. So I brought it home with me to take a look, which I finally did this weekend. (Delayed writing this post a bit for no good reason.

This little pictured board is one of two inside. This just holds the power connector and switch, and routes some wires out: to the other board which handles battery charging, and to some LEDs which indicate that the thing is switched on. From the symptoms, I suspected a bad power connection. First thing I tried was re-flowing the three pins on the barrel jack. Didn't help. The second thing I tried was wicking the solder away from the pads. I got lucky, the first one I tried was the problem. Look very closely and you might be able to see a bit of curling near the top and bottom (as pictured) of the bare pad near the middle. It's lifted away from the trace, so it doesn't conduct the power to where it needs to go.

It took a bit of investigation to hit this "lucky" find. When my first attempt didn't work, I started figuring out what all the connections do. There's more connections (five) on the power switch than it would seem to need (two!), and more wires leading off than seemed strictly necessary. Eventually I found that this pin of the barrel jack did not have a connection over to any of the other places that it should have.

Here's a view of everything else. There's a second (pair of, pass-through) power connector(s). And the fix: an extra wire added in, to carry the power that the PCB trace isn't carrying anymore. I didn't bring the batteries with me to confirm, but the power indicator LEDs light up reliably now. I re-assembled everything with gobs of hot glue for both insulation and hopefully some more mechanical support of the power connector, so such a failure is a bit less likely to re-occur.

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My Custom Power Supply (is complete!)

2018-10-18 18:29 - Making

You might not truly be an electronics nerd until you build your own power supply. Either way, I've finally passed that threshold. As I've mentioned previously (and previouslier), I've been working on mine — very slowly, off and on — for most of a year. The bare start came with a guide posted to Hackaday about using nichrome wire to heat and bend acrylic plastic in straight lines, to make cases.

I previously failed to bend the top correctly, and broke it in the process. I took more time, and made sure the folds-to-be were more thoroughly melted before pushing this time, and it came out almost perfect. There's one line in the top left where I melted the plastic enough to make a visible mark in the non-bent bit. (This is a fold down of the side. The holes on the top attach the side piece through this small folded piece.) I might have been able to avoid this, but it's only a small cosmetic issue, and more visible in pictures than in person.

The bottom needed work. I trimmed off bits of the sides to get the front lip to fold in, and later I ended up needing to cut off most of that lip. Some detail didn't go quite right in the planning and design. Worse, I got it left-right backwards. I chose plastic with a matte finish, but it is matte only on one side. I put the wrong side up (out) when cutting, so to get the matte surface on the outside, everything was flipped. This worked out mostly okay, but the (perhaps unnecessary) fan is blocked more than I would have hoped, and I had to extend some wires inside to make everything reach where it's supposed to.

The worst issue with the case is that I had barely experimented with the plastic folding, so I had to guess in a few places and didn't get what I'd have really liked. Some of the parts are located too close to the edge, causing a fold to warp or stretch inelegantly. I had to mostly guess about where the various surfaces would end up relative to each other to get things like screw holes to align. On the inner half, I made the screw holes elongated to cope with this, which ended up helping a lot later on!

The custom circuitry is really just this rectifier board. The diodes are tacked on the back — their leads are too thick to fit through the holes. The other side is stuffed full of capacitors, and another rectifier for the lower voltage half of the circuit, hooked to (I think) the transformer's center tap. That transformer was salvaged from a failed UPS. It's supposed to handle 1200 watts, so although I don't know its precise specs, I'm comfortable with what use I'm putting it to, here.

Things are getting more assembled here. The transformer is in place, and the rectifier board is nestled right next to it. On this side, it's brimming with capacitors (and one inductor) to smooth out the rectified AC voltage. There's hot melt glue everywhere. The fan is tucked behind the transformer, and at the left you can see the back of the plug/switch/fuse. I've been careful to heat shrink and/or hot glue exposed conductors. The bottom has slots for air intake, and you can see the extra cuts I've made, where things didn't fit quite as planned. After this point there was a significant delay as I decided to pause, to get black nylon (non conductive!) screws to assemble with. Then did it again when, only after receiving them, I realized the ones I ordered were too short to work for this.

The left picture above is near the final stage of assembly. In addition to two main front end units, I've also got a USB supply in here. It and the fan are driven from the lower voltage middle tap of the transformer. I tried my best to plan the mounting holes (on the top) and connector holes (on the side), but I was way off. At least one layer of plastic moved around in late design tweaks. So I ended up with these four little 3D printed brackets. Each is screwed into the USB supply board, dropping it quite a bit lower and moving it back a smidge, and those get screwed into the top of the case. This unit displays the voltage (not so useful unless you're drawing so much current it sags?) and the current being drawn. And it constantly flips back and forth. I was concerned that the blinking would be annoying. I tried to address that by sandwiching in a smoke-colored only-mostly-transparent piece of acrylic between it and the world. Due to these brackets, it ends up only being visible from just the right angle, so the blinking display will not be an issue!

Here's the final product. There's two RD Tech 5005 (50 volt, 5 amp max) units on front. Each is wired to a pair of both binding posts and banana jacks, so I can hook pretty much anything up. The fan exhausts out the back, next to the power plug, with switch and fuse integrated. On the right side are the USB connectors which took those brackets to line up, here a fan is plugged into one of the two ports. If you look down from the top, you can see the USB supply's display, in this case showing half an amp being drawn by the fan.

The top clearly doesn't line up perfectly with something else, so it's bowed a bit. Assembling the case, and getting all the screws to line up and mate with the nuts inside was very difficult, so I'm not going to open it up and try to fix this unless something worse than cosmetics goes wrong. Look closely around the power plug, and you can see that I bent the edge out from beside it, because the hole was too close to the edge being bent. A bunch of extra hot melt glue helps the plug stay put, as a result. The same sort of (unavoidable, in this case) thing happened at the front: the supplies each have a USB connector beside them, which can be used to log data and set settings via a computer. The hole for the connector must be right next to the mounting screw holes, and so each of them ended up puckered along the folded edge.

I'm really happy with the angled front, which makes the displays very readable from a normal sitting position. And I'm extremely happy that I've finally taken this project through to completion! Learning how to melt and fold acrylic opens up all sorts of opportunities.

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Power Supply Hurdles

2018-09-01 16:29 - Making

My last post was about a successful step in a long delayed project. I've continued making progress, but mostly progress towards hurdles I haven't quite passed yet. I did cut out my case designs in acrylic plastic:

My case design involves a bottom part, which is also the back (after a bend). Plus the front part, which is also the sides and top after a few more bends. I didn't quite think about making all these bends, when doing the design. I folded the sides in first, and that went pretty well. Except at the left side, near those big openings in the middle. Acrylic is brittle, and I put some hairline cracks in the very narrow part across the middle and the slightly wider part near the bottom. Mostly cosmetic, so that's okay. Except that left folding the top down, which went even worse.

In addition to adding weak points, all these holes leave fewer places to hold on. I ended up shattering this larger front piece of the case completely, while making that last bend. Quite the bummer, but at least it leaves me the opportunity to double check a few measurements. I've got one spare piece of plastic to use for a second try. And I know to be careful when I attempt the (simpler) back piece as well.

With that physical part of the project on hold, I returned to the electrical part. There's power in, which goes through a (huge) transformer, salvaged from a bad UPS. This drops line voltage to around fifty volts, which is rectified by a circuit also cobbled together with parts from that bad UPS and some old bad computer power supplies. This goes into a pair of RDTech DPS modules, which handle voltage and current limiting for the adjustable outputs. The transformer has another tap, which produces around 18 volts. I'm going to separately use that to power a fan and a USB supply module (which was visible in the corner of the fresh-cut before-bending case front picture).

Here's all the key parts of that set up on the bench as a test. The good news is that it works. The bad news is it doesn't work very well.

The full bridge rectifier has just a pair of 66µF capacitors smoothing it out. At first that seemed okay enough. Since I did some very early tests I've gotten an electronic load, at bottom right of the first picture above, which I can use to do more thorough testing. In that picture, it's drawing twelve volts at two amps, well below the 50V / 5A theoretical upper limits (of the DPS modules). But even at this low power level, it's causing around nine volts of ripple at the rectifier output. Far too much! I know that adding an inductor can create a much more stable rectified output. It drops the maximum voltage level, but this much ripple will too, so I'm going to experiment with inductors I can salvage, for the more reliable of the two lower voltage options. (I don't really need that whole 50 volt output range, anyway.)

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Plastic Bending

2018-08-21 21:03 - Making

I've had a power supply project in the works for a good while. When I saw a post about bending acrylic plastic to make custom cases for electronics, I knew I'd use that technique. I didn't want to build such a big contraption though, and I delayed quite a bit. I had the system pictured above assembled some time ago, but never operated it.

More recently, I tried harder. I doubled up the length of wire, to half the resistance and thus double the power (at the same voltage). I ended up hooking a laptop power brick to the unit that will be the heart of the supply I'm building, and I finally got the bending system working! Note the spring at the far end. Over the twelve inches or so that I'm heating (in the working set-up), there's a noticeable expansion of the hot wire. The spring helps take up that slack, and keep the wire strung in a nice straight line, near the plastic to be heated.

I added some L aluminum brackets to (maybe) better contain and focus the heat, and (definitely) help me hold the plastic in place correctly. I'm only energizing a short piece of the wire I've got in place. I didn't know at all what sort of voltage or current would be necessary when I started. I correctly figured that I could always connect less of it, if I put too much.

In this shot you can see the successful fruits of my tests. If I hold the plastic still above the orange hot wire, after a little while it heats to the point of becoming quite malleable. Quickly and carefully bend at that point, and the plastic will quickly cool back to being solid. I got three ninety degree bends in the test piece. I'll do a few more tests to figure out how the inside/outside ends up: what's the radius of the bend? If I try to make a box, where do I need to put the bends to know what the outside dimension will be (so it lines up with the other half of the box!)?

Either way, it feels good to have this long delayed part of the project behind me!

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Moviepass is dead? (And I killed it?)

2018-08-06 23:20 - General

I found out about MoviePass mid/late last year. I probably saw an average of one movie per year until then. In general I'm patient, so I'm in no rush to see a movie in the theater, and the ticket price is more than I'm willing to pay for little benefit (from my perspective). But MoviePass allowed me to see effectively all the movies I could ever want, in the theater, for ten bucks a month. So I used it. A lot.

Usage

^* These were E-Tickets, which MoviePass seems to get a discount on.

^** These were matinees. Why did MoviePass never encourage users to go to the much cheaper matinees?

These are the ticket stubs I have lying around. I might have missed one here or there. But the long and short of it is that for these three months, while I paid MoviePass $29.85 ($9.95 × 3) they paid several local movie theaters $379.16. This is so obviously a losing proposition for them.

Death of MoviePass?

Early last month, MoviePass introduced surge pricing. With little predictability, some movies would not be included but instead come with an extra charge around $4. When this happened, I felt like I might be canceling soon. You can see an extra strong focus on the (one) local theater with E-ticketing in my watching habits over July — they are immune to surge pricing.

Then in late July MoviePass ran out of money and had a service interruption. Somewhere in there, they started forcing users to tacke pictures of their ticket stubs. (To enforce the one-viewing-per-movie rule that they added in April.) Now they've introduced more, stricter limits: from "unlimited" (one per day) to three movies per month. And very unpredictable availability (black-outs). This already started a bit. Rumors seem to be perhaps that A) every showing before 5PM (why?) and B) basically every showing of every major movie (at least for the first few weeks) will simply be unavailable. Rumors also abound about availability disappearing in the time it takes to travel to the theater.

Canceling?

I'm not happy. Honestly, I expected MoviePass to be short lived when I first subscribed. But that was just over nine months ago. It's survived this long, but the writing is clearly on the wall now. I'll probably keep it and extract what value I can. I'm probably getting $10/mo from it.

On the other hand, this past year has re-introduced me to the theater experience. Given a theater full of them, you're guaranteed to run into strangers that have no problem talking, turning on their bright phone screens, and generally making the theater experience less than it could be. Worst is the fixed time slots. You can see a heavy focus on weekend viewings above. I find it's quite rare for a weekday showing to both not be overlapping work hours, and also not force an uncomfortably early or late dinner. So many weekday movies start at right around six o'clock. Eating early enough to finish and then get to the theater is far too early. Eating after forces a nearly 9PM meal — I don't want to be stuck in the theater with hunger distracting me from the movie!

So I feel very lukewarm now. If I walk to a theater and then can't get into the movie; if I find I can't get a seat from limited availability after black-outs; if I just get tired investing my time in finding a compatible showing time — I won't be too sad if MoviePass ends up in my past.

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