In case that awkward title doesn’t paint a perfect mental picture for you, here’s a little more context: When we bought our split-level house, we didn’t really think much about baby proofing it. Now that the little guy is mobile, it feels like we spend about 98% of our waking hours making sure he doesn’t go tumbling down the stairs. We had a baby gate that could conceivably keep him out of harms way, but there was no obvious way to mount it at the top of the stairs. The solution I came up with was to design some 3D-printed Continue Reading
Woodworking
Kubb
A couple years ago we got into a yard game called Kubb (rhymes with tube). Since then it’s grown quite a bit in popularity, at least around here. If you haven’t heard of it, the basic idea is for each team to take turns trying to knock down the short wooden blocks (called Kubbs) by throwing the long skinny wooden blocks (batons) at them from the other side of the yard (called a pitch) without hitting the extra large wooden block (the King) in the middle (until the end of the game). Sounds thrilling, I know! The full rules are Continue Reading
Battery pack spot welder
This one might have to be filed under the fail column – at least for now. While throwing around some ideas for the next incarnation of DJ Big Gulp, I decided I needed to figure out how to make my own lithium ion battery packs. I bought a couple of INR18650s, some battery protection boards, and some nickel strips to connect them together. All I needed was the welder… The showstopper I thought it might be safer to try this rig out on some alkaline batteries before diving straight into the lithium ion. At first the welds seemed to be Continue Reading
Flashing My Cornhole: Building a Shot Sensing, Light Up Bean Bag Toss Set
A while ago I got my hands on some scrap photoelectric sensors from work. The defects were only cosmetic, so I mounted a pair of them to a flimsy bean bag toss (aka cornhole) set I had made a couple months before. I drilled 12 small holes in a circle around the main hole and filled them with LEDs. I added a little box with some batteries and a couple 555 timer circuits so that the LEDs would flash for a few seconds whenever a bag went through the hole. The effect was kinda cool considering it was mostly just Continue Reading