New Stuff on Tindie and more in the pipeline!

 

It's been a while since I restocked Tindie, and I only used to have a couple of products but a few things I've been making and building recently others said they would find useful so a few new items have made it to the store. First up is a remake of my popular Rocketry Screw Switches. The originals I used to CNC rout here in my lair, but finding time to run the machine was a faff, so I re-span the design to be able to get them produced by OSHpark meaning that I can restock them a little easier if they sell out. I won't waffle too much detail here but if you want a rugged set of switches that survive high g violence then these could be just the ticket whether that for a rocket or a combat robot or anything else!

Next up and new at the zoo is a kit of parts to make a Pull Pin style switch, excellent for remove before flight arming or there are options and features that make this attractive for low friction " Drop a payload with the pin staying on the vehicle" type systems!

Finally completing the trio of bits is a little assembled PCB which acts as a polarity protector, these are small enough to be soldered inline in a cable and covered with a little heatshrink, they can work at any voltage up to 20V DC and with a max current of 4.3A. If ever the power is connected backwards no current can flow through the board and both the board and the attached project will be undamaged. Connected correctly the little board draws less than a milliamp with no step down in voltage. Neat and can save your expensive experiment/avionics/altimeter etc on the other side! Check out the whole store here.

New Pin Switch Video and Tindie store previews!

Been working on a few small projects and amongst them I've ended up designing, or redesigning some components that I think might be of interest for others, so over the next couple of weeks I'm going to get put some of these up on my, long neglected,  Tindie store. In the above video I'm doing a show and tell of some new pull pin switch assemblies which can be used as rocketry arming switches but also can be of use for payload drop mechanisms or other pull pin applications.  

I've also remade a version of my rocketry screw switches (although these are useful for any system that needs rugged violence proof power switching.. combat robots etc) I used to make these CNC routing them in my lair but that took a lot of time and I never got around to doing it so re-spinning the design means I can get the PCB fabricated by OSHpark. This means I should be able to produce stock quicker with less hassle for me, I plan to sell these in packs of 2 for $7.95, roughly £6.50.

Finally, I've also revisited my polarity protector board. These little boards only allow power through if they are connected the right way and therefore protect attached projects from reversed polarity. They draw a tiny amount of power (I don't even have anything capable of accurately measuring such small draw!) and can handle up to 20V input up to a continuous 4.3A. They are tiny and can be soldered into a wiring loom and covered in some heatshrink, or you can use them with pin headers, you could even attach the output to a breadboard. I'll put more details up on the Tindie listing when I get some stock built!

Manjaro, Rocketry tools agogo!

 

I've been a long time Linux user with my first distro back in the day being Pure:Dyne followed by Dyne:Bolic. In more recent times I've tended to lazily reach for Ubuntu as it's mostly worked and I've spent a bit of time around variants like Kubuntu, Lubuntu and Xubuntu. However, I've started getting a bit disgruntled with the Ubuntu experience, I've not been a fan of snap which has been more and more intrusive and generally it's not been the easy, hassle free experience I want. 

So Manjaro, I'd actually played with this on the pinephone as a phone OS and found it nicely designed and quite refined so have been trying it a bit on and off and then finally this week got around to doing a full install of Manjaro Xfce on one of my laptops. Install is really straightforward and everything has worked driver wise. I made the bootable pendrive a couple of months back using 21.3.7 and there were a few updates on first install and everything went smoothly. A notification that there was a newer kernel led me to quickly use the Manjaro Settings Manager gui to really simply update the kernel to the latest stable and again, everything was plain sailing with this. 

So, my go to tools that get set up on all my machines are Libreoffice, FreeCAD, Inkscape and Openrocket. The graphical user interface for package installation is called Pacman and it's simple to install Libreoffice, FreeCAD and Inkscape directly there and all of them are nicely up to date with the latest stables from each of those projects, many thanks package managers! Moving into FreeCAD vers 0.20.2 my first port of call is to install the excellent rocket workbench here I had a small problem. When iswitching to the rocket workbench it failed with a "libQt5Charts.so.5:cannot open shared object file", reading around the freecad error messages It was a missing dependency Qt5_charts. Sometimes, before diving into a terminal it's worth exploring the package manager GUI and sure enough searching Pacman found Qt5_charts and installed it readily. With a reboot of FreeCAD the rocket workbench is up and running perfectly. 

Inkscape installed perfectly well and I'm slowly adding and checking the range of extensions I use to drive various machines or draw or generate various geometries etc. So that left OpenRocket. A search of Pacman revealed no Openrocket, so just taking a punt, I opened a terminal and used the very handy: 

pamac search openrocket

which returned that indeed the latest Openrocket package (22.02-1) was available on the AUR (Arch User Repository) so then issuing a simple:

pamac build openrocket

Installed the package. However, veteran OpenRocketeers may recall there is sometimes some shenanigans that manifest when the incorrect Java Runtime environment is being used by the system and Openrocket want's a particular one and indeed Openrocket wouldn't run.  A quick search revealed the very useful "status" command so "archlinux-java status" showed originally that Java 17 and 19 were installed with 19 set as default. Open rocket wants 8 or 11 and so a package search led me to install Java 11 runtime and then we can us "sudo archlinux-java set-11-openjdk" to set the Java 11 runtime as the default. Then Openrocket is working flawlessly. 

So hey presto, we are all setup in a nice modern feeling distro that seems quite intuitive and seems consistent in the way things work. I look forward to setting up more tools and using it more fully over the coming weeks. 

Pasting Table Mods, a Temporary Autonomous Workspace!

I've been working on lots of larger lightweight projects of late. You might have seen the hot air balloons I'm designing and building from large tissue paper panels but I'm also working on some larger cloth wing designs and more. I often don't have the length I require for the work on my shed workbench or regular bench in the house. So I went and bought a wallpaper pasting table. They are CHEAP! But with cheapness comes lightness and some lack of rigidity. However, for lightweight tissue paper or cloth work they are perfect in many ways and create a great Temporary Autonomous Workspace (been reading a lot of anarchic stuff lately and this name has stuck in my mind!)

There's one problem for me though, they are built way too low! Even doing light work standing at one of these for half an hour causes my lower back to start to grumble, I needed to raise the table, but equally I needed the mod to not stop the table folding away. 

So off to FreeCAD! (ICYMI here is a free to DL book I wrote on FreeCAD) The solution is pretty simple, there's enough room to add an adaptor to the 20mm square-ish legs and still allow the legs to fold away inside the table. I quickly CAD'ed an adaptor which had a square hole for the original leg on one side and then had a circular hole to receive some 25mm diameter dowel I had knocking around in the shed.  Once printed up in some PETG filament I epoxied the adaptors to the table side and then they live permanently attached and fold away with the legs. 

I then chopped a few dowels to length to bring the table up to where I need it. The 3D printed adaptors are a press fit on the dowel side which means I can insert the leg extending dowels and turn the table onto it's feet without them falling out. In turn the dowels can sit inside the table when folded, I should probably create some kind of storage strap or mount to stop them clattering about inside the table, but it certainly does the job. Available widely for around £15-20 this is a really handy tool hack for me!

Nextool Vanguard; a £32 Multitool Review

 

A while back in issue 58 of Hackspace magazine I reviewed a small folding scalpel the "3 Coil crane" and it's a fabulous tiny tool. I ordered that scalpel from a company I've used a fair bit over the years, Heinnie Haynes, who are based down in South Wales. Heinnie sell lots of outdoor equipment, clothing, shelters, packs etc, but they specialise in bladed tools and have a huge range including multitools, bushcraft knives and more. 

I sent them the link to the Hackspace article and they told me to mention anything I saw that I thought might be good for a review, that might be of interest to makers. Recently they've started stocking some interesting multi tools that sit at the budget end of their multi tool offers. The Nextool range is pretty affordable and one in particular stood out, the Nextool Vanguard as it has a built in adjustable spanner. I wanted to take a look and Heinnie were kind enough to send one out to me. It's been in circulation for a few duties over the last couple of weeks and I've put together this little video review. Hope you enjoy the video and do check out Heinnie Haynes, they've always given great service over the years and I'd genuinely recommend them, 

2022 project favourites roundup, and here's to 2023!

 

I don't think I've ever done a "round up" post before but it's new years eve and I have a cold so thought I might take the opportunity! 2022 has been a fab year in which I've had chance to work on lots of interesting projects. First mention is for my free to download FreeCAD book "FreeCAD for Makers" which was released this year, has been downloaded many many thousands of times and has been met with great appreciation and enthusiasm. I'm currently amassing projects for another book which I hope to make some progress on in 2023. It's got the tentative working title of "Concretedog's Flight Lab"! 

Another project I enjoyed working on was the "EXO-S Experimental swing wing glider". Basically a rocket propelled transformer that moves from a rocket shape to an unfurled glider at apogee rather than releasing a parachute. It was fun to work on the mechanisms and I plan not only to revisit and revise the swing wing glider concept for better performance in 2023 but I also have plans for other folding and deployed air vehicles... stay tuned! I put together a short video on the swing wing glider over on my youtube channel.

There's stacks of other flying projects that happened in 2022, including the Flat Pack rockets I designed, and there are a few that haven't yet appeared in print, at the risk of 2023 spoilers there's some interesting ones coming up including compressed air rocketry, supercapacitor free flight planes and an interesting take on paper aeroplanes! Keep an eye out on future issues!

In some ways my favourite flying project has been the tissue paper hot air balloon designs. These are great fun and super cheap to make. I released 3 designs alongside the Hackspace Magazine article on them and there is also a small video with some test flight footage and some instruction on assembly above. I've just built a much larger design which I am hoping to test fly very soon and I have some plans to hopefully fly these at some maker events in 2023 and a cunning plan for a safe, no fire (hopefully!) and no litter way of flying these outdoors. 

Finally, I couldn't do a round up of 2022 without mentioning the watch assembly and repair projects I've undertaken this year. The visible tip of this iceberg is the watch I assembled around an NH35a movement for Hackspace Magazine, but I've also carried out numerous other builds and repairs and generally upped my game in this area. I know have a couple of mechanical watches I've built in regular circulation on my wrist! There's been a lovely reaction to these projects and it's been great to see a few followers on social media get involved in watch fettling! If you are interested in downloading and reading any of my projects in Hackspace Magazine I tend to keep this post up to date with what I have in each issue with links.

There's LOADS more I could cram in but those have been the highlights maker project wise. I'm really looking forward to 2023 and if any of this peaks your interest do feel free to follow along! I'm posting a lot on Mastodon these days and you can follow there at @concretedog@mastodon.social . I'd love it if you gave me a follow on my Youtube Channel which I'm planning to use more in 2023 and you can still find me on twitter but it's a bit bonkers on there these days to say the least! However you connect I'd love to hear comments and suggestions on any of my projects and I thank you for your interest! I wish you and yours a happy and safe 2023, full of whatever projects may take your fancy!  Jo. 

Multiple Projects, the Makerspace of the Mind!

Until pretty recently North Wales didn't really have any Makerspaces, Fablabs, Hackspaces or whatever you might want to call some kind of creative communal workshop. Apart from travelling out to events it's probably still fair to say most of my maker experience has been on my own. This isn't a cry for help or a complaint but it is interesting sometimes to reflect on how that can impact on you as a maker. 

For me one of the essences of Maker culture is the cross pollination of ideas and techniques from one person to another. When we opened the first Ffiws makerspace, pre Covid I ran a regular evening as "maker night" where anyone could attend without booking and perhaps play with a machine or bring in a project to tinker with on the desks in company. Once we got up to maybe 8-12 people rocking up you instantly start to get those fabulous moments where some aspect of somebodies work is intriguing, inspiring or just plain old useful to someone else. Often this is conceptual, the "oooh" of someone seeing a lasercut living hinge for the first time or someone seeing a vinyl cutter cutting an unexpected material. Often it's direct, "wow that's cool, show me how that works". Sometimes it's permissive "OK watching you do CAD modelling makes me think it might not be impossible". Another area that's ripe for creating new connections is discovering a new tool in someone else's project. So how do you get all these lovely benefits when you are largely on your own? 

Well, in this youtube/peertube/vimeo era of loads of video content, this works for many. For some though its more a consumable rather than actual inspiration or knowledge growth if its an entirely passive activity. For example, I often binge woodworking videos but I suck at woodwork really, I watch them as I find them satisfying and often very sophorific and chilled to watch, but I'm not actively applying what I am seeing to my ongoing projects nor am I actually practising the observed skills that then might have created a moment of cross pollination.

For me I've come to the conclusion that I need to prompt myself to work on projects in new areas, be it new materials or new techniques. Having a less comfortable project area pushes me to explore new knowledge and skills and it's often within this process that the moments of cross pollination occur. 

As a really tangible example, recently I had one of these moments that linked sewing and airplane design and construction!  I only really sew due to making parachutes for rocketry,  but that has led me to actively look at lots of sewing content and techniques and has led to me stitching up a few wider than rocketry type projects. I was recently discussing a large airplane/drone construction project with a maker and they were lamenting not having a rivet spacer tool as they were too expensive as aerospace tools often are. I didn't really know what one was and enquired. It's a kind of expanding rack that allows you to fill any space with evenly spaced marks for rivets. It also often gets used for other tasks, for example it can be used to mark equidistant points for wing ribs when making a smaller aircraft or drone. On hearing these tools can be £100 plus and having looked them up online, CROSS POLLINATION, they are astonishingly similar to button hole spacers used to mark button hole locations on garments and these cost perhaps £10 to £20 pounds!

So whats the point of this ramble. Well, it's a reminder to perhaps force yourself to pick up a project in a totally unrelated area than which you have worked before. Whilst it might not be a lifelong area you explore, the cross pollination benefits are often worth the trial!