DIY mini vacuum former

I've been meaning to make one of these for years and in amongst everything else I found a bit of time to do it the other week. It's a simple build of a box with a very holey lid - it's ace owning a small CNC as this is precisely the kind of job it's worth its weight in gold for. A quick measure of my cheap shop vacuum nozzle diameter (an Argos special that has lasted years despite abuse) and the CNC cut the side sections to match. I'm experimenting with recycling milk bottles at the moment and using a hand held heat gun. It works well and pulls a strong seal around objects. I fancy trying to make some lightweight small nosecones next to see how they compare in weight to the very thin walled 3d printed ones I have made. 

FOSDEM 2019

A snowy welcome on the saturday!

 The huuuge keynote by mad dog. Amazing sight!

I was incredibly lucky to go out to FOSDEM as part of the Libre Space Foundation (LSF) team the other week and despite lots of snow and travel disruption had a great time hanging out and working over in Brussels. It was my first time at FOSDEM and I was blown away by the worlds largest conference. It was fabulous to be able to move around and see and meet the teams behind some of the most prevalent open source software, debian, opensuse, grafana, gitlab, nextcloud and so many more. As currently I am freelancing mainly as a writer I made sure to have a little chat and express my thanks to the Libre Office team, whilst it might not be the most exciting platform in the world it does provide me with the basic tooling to earn my living!

Above, the Gitlab team who have been great supporters of LSF. 

LSF/SatNOGS contributors meet the Grafana team (and inform them of an Influx db bug they found!!)

Going out early the LSF set up camp in a large apartment (The Mansion) and LSF contributors poured in from all over europe staying a while to have meetings, hack on code and discuss development face to face. Its astonishing, humbling and exciting to see these volunteers pour their considerable skills into LSF project. As a more mechanical guy it was hard to follow much of the development but everyone was incredibly kind and patient and willing to teach others. Very affirming. (Although there was some discussion around rocketry hardware which funnily made me boot my tiny laptop to show how my ematch ignitor circuit works!)

Team... looking tired on the Saturday night!

Flying Ryan air means taking the worlds tiniest laptop!

A busy booth

FOSDEM was incredibly busy and I spent some time each day helping on the LSF booth, speaking to a constant flow of people from all over the planet about our missions to democratise space and provide open hardware and software to enable people to get involved. Hopefully it results in more people supporting what we do but also I feel sure that certainly a few more people are interested in moving towards setting up their own SatNOGS groundstations on the global network.

General picture dump..

Loved this!

So many LSF people! All in to see Alex Csete talk about our SDR makerspace project