2021
Building a wooden cabinet
This cabinet was designed for the living room to hold our modem/router and NAS on the lower shelf, covered by a door and with a drawer above. The back is open to allow cables to enter and for airflow, but apart from this slighly unsual feature it could be used as a general side cabinet or bedside table.
2020
Setting up an STM32F4 as an SPI device with FreeRTOS and STM32MXCube
In this post I’ll go over my steps to get an STM32F4xx microcontroller running FreeRTOS as an SPI peripheral/device/slave using DMA so it can run in the background while the main task is running. There are a lot of examples online of setting up STM32 SPI controllers, but very few where it is used in slave mode, especially with DMA and integrating this with FreeRTOS. In particular, the main problem I found is that by default, all the interrupt handlers have the highest possible priority (priority 0), which means that you can’t call FreeRTOS API functions from inside them. This means, for example, that you can’t send a notification to wake a thread from the interrupt handler. The solution is to reduce the priority of the DMA interrupt handler to below the level the FreeRTOS handler is running, as described below.
More fences! And a new arrival.
We finished off the final section of the “long flat” paddock fence, which means we’ve now got a fully finished large paddock where we can keep the bull and breeding cows separate from the rest.
Gate installation details
This time we have a close-up of installing a gate. This one is halfway along one of the sides of the long-flat paddock from the last post. We’d already installed one of the posts which the gate is swung from before starting the video, so it picks up after that.
Installing some gates on the “long flat”
Today’s timelapse shows us installing a couple of gates at the entrance to the “long flat” paddock. The previous gate posts were all wooden and were destroyed in the fires. The new layout is identical to the old one - all the gates survived and are being re-used.
Stockyard cleanup – timelapse
The old upper stockyard near the house was all wood and was damaged in the fires. This is the stockyard which is used to move the cattle on to the truck for transport - you can see the metal ramp on the right of the image above. This needs to be repaired before any cattle can be sold, which should hopefully be happening soon, so there is a timeline to get it finished.
We’re farmers now?
The latest project is helping out on the farm, repairing and rebuilding after the fires at the start of the year. First job, building fences!
2017
Wedding beer and super sour
So I recently just completed a series of brews for a wedding - the light sour - which ended up going down a blast. As a result of brewing the beer many many times, I now have the recipe pretty much perfect. The only problem with posting it for everyone to brew, is that all were fermented completely open, and the yeast has been going for so long now if probably isn’t the same. My best guess would be to start with the Amalgamation Brett blend, that I used for my first sour beer, and this should be pretty similar.
2016
Bench Power Supply Build - Part II
This is the second post on my power supply build – also see part I and the Circuitmaker project page. The aim of this project is to design and build a linear bench power supply with adjustable current and voltage and up to 2.5A output from 0-30V.
Temperature Logger
I have finally finished my temperature monitor and logging module, originally designed to monitor beer temperature as it is fermenting (beer, fridge and ambient temperatures). It is an Arduino-based device which measures and displays temperatures from multiple attached temperature probes and logs them to an SD card. This is an old project from last year sometime which has been sitting 95% complete, just waiting on an enclosure and some finishing touches to the code.
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
2015
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.
Making water harden the fuck up!
Gypsum, for those who are not in the know, is CaSO4 – calcium sulfate (we can thank dear Lavoisier for his nice nomenclature). It’s in your water, to varying degrees, depending on where you live. Locations with ‘hard water’ typically have much higher concentrations of it that Sydney, which has quite soft water.
Sichuan Saison
Having caught the Brewing bug, I decided that the sour simply wasn’t enough brewing for this month, and figured I’d add another beer to ferment. An added bonus was the potential for there being even more deliciousness to drink. Of course, this left a pressing question – what should I brew? Not one to be restricted by my own lack of experience, I decided it, like the sour beer, had to be a little strange.
Sour Power!
Feeling a little sorry for our demijohns, now empty of their meady goodness, we decided we should fill them with something else. Naturally, it couldn’t be anything normal, but rather something novel and untried. We ended up settling on favourite of ours - sour beer! For those who don’t know, sour beer is a style of beer that is (as the name suggests) sour. Some examples of this are Lambics, Gueze, and what the Yanks call ‘Wild Ales’. For an added bit of funkiness, we decided that we’d also use a Saison-ish yeast, which should add some additional funky flavours.
Meady Update!
Having endured the long, difficult, indeed tormenting wait we finally reached the stage where our mead could be released from its glassy confines… and placed in new glassy confines. That’s right – its bottling day. Of course, no bottling would be complete without a surreptitious tasting of the wares. Or for that matter, without delicious food, good company, and a new beer to fill up the glassware that the mead was liberated from. So we set aside a Saturday of the long weekend, I brought the mead out of storage, and we went through the slow process of bottling.
2014
Happy Meading
After several months of planning and a trip to Cape York and the US getting in the way, we finally got around to making our first mead.
Danger From Deer is Live!
Danger From Deer is back with new hosting and new wordpress install! Hopefully we’ll have some content soon…