Designing a 3D printed electronics enclosure

This will be a quick post about the design and 3D printing of a custom enclosure for a temperature logger (see full writeup here) – a project which has been sitting on my table 90% finished for about a year now. I always find the enclosure to be the most time consuming and least interesting part of any project. As such an unfortunately high number of them stall at this final stage. 3D printing a custom enclosure is a much more interesting and attractive alternative to my usual approach of attacking a jiffy box with a drill and hacksaw.

Sichuan Saison: Mark II

So I’ve been going through a nostalgia period with my brewing, and this week it was time to make another go of my Sichuan Saison. Last time, I’d used a White Labs yeast (no. 565). This time round I decided to keep it simple with a Wyeast Belle Saison packet. There were a few other changes I decided to make, here and there. One was the addition of Candy sugar, to make it have a little more kick. Another was the use of a Light malt, rather than a pilsener malt extract, lending it a little more body.

Servo Motor Control with Mojo FPGA board

This post is part of my series on building a kinetic sculpture with the Mojo FPGA development board. (Part1 Part2).

A light sour for summer…

A few months ago, I found myself with some old light malt extract, about 200g worth, and some sour yeast I had been gradually building up from the first sour in a conical flask on my desk. I also had a Growler courtesy of Dave, who had brought back a nice DIPA from Aeronaut brewing in the USA. Naturally, all these came together in the for of a sour beer, which turned out to be deliciously light and refreshing. Unfortunately, I didn’t bother to write down any real details of the light sour recipe, rather it existed as an ephemeral idea in the back of my head; low on hops, high on bugs, sufficiently light to quench your thirst on long hot Sydney summer.

Printrbot 3D Printer

After returning from a trip to the maker faire in San Francisco last year I felt like I needed to get involved and buy myself a 3D printer. After some research I settled on the printrbot simple metal. It seems like a solid mid-entry level printer which is easy to get started with and with fairly good support. I went with the kit form with the heated stage option which costs US$749. All up including shipping it ended up costing me about $1100AUD delivered.

The tower of sour!

Having had a few weeks in the bucket to ferment, my dearly beloved hard as fuck IPA was ready for a few more weeks without the copious hop dregs sitting at the bottom. All looked well, with a delicious hoppy aroma when I cracked the top of the fermenter. All that remained was to move said IPA to the glass demijohns where my sour had been quietly turning delicious. This proved to be an opportunity for both the bottling of the Sour, and the second stage of fermentation for the IPA. All of this reminded me that I hadn’t provided a post for our successful souring, so I’ll go over that first.

Mojo FPGA development board

This post is part of my series on building a kinetic sculpture with the Mojo FPGA development board. (Part1 Part2).

Bench power supply build – part I

This is the first post on my power supply build. Also see part II and the Circuitmaker project page

Starting out with CAD & Autodesk Fusion 360

This post is going to cover my first impressions of using Autodesk’s Fusion 360 CAD program from the point of view of someone who is completely new to CAD. Several months ago I bought myself a 3D printer (a Printrbot Simple – hopefully I’ll do a post on this in the future) partly as an impulse buy, partly because I’ve always been curious about them, and partly as an excuse/reason to learn how to use CAD to design parts.

Brass etchings – attempt 1

Cleaning out the garage I found/rediscovered some brass sheets which have been sitting there for quite a while, so my first thought was to attempt etching them to make some art. A quick internet search revealed two options, chemical acid etching or electrochemical etching. I decided on the electrochemical route because it seems safer (no nasty acids) and cooler (who doesn’t love a battery with wires running to electrodes in a bath of blue water?). I’ll start with a teaser photo of the results of this first attempt, and then go into some details.