My apologies...

I need to apologize for not yet publishing Part II of "DIY Hack: A Better Marquee." It's not that I haven't wanted to finish it and get it out there. It's not even that I don't have the content for it. The problem is that I've been struggling mightily with the tools.

Blogger's online tools are adequate, in my opinion, for posts that are either all or mostly text. Or for posts with a lot of pictures where the location of the pictures within the text isn't critical. But Part II is a "How-To" post where the pictures and text go hand-in-hand, and the tools just aren't cutting it; there's not enough control over text and picture placement. Blogger kinda pretends to have a WYSIWYG interface, but it really doesn't.

I've resigned myself to buying an application to do the job right. Initially, I hated the idea of paying for it, since the free, online tools should be better, but at this point, I've wasted so much time trying to bend them to my will that I don't even care anymore. I'll pay, I'll pay, just do what I want!!!

I've tried and discarded one app already. I've started learning another, and I hope it will finally let me pull Part II together and publish it soon(ish). In the meantime, I've got a couple of other small items I could throw together in a post. I just don't want to delay Part II much longer, especially since there's going to be a Part III to follow, and I don't want folks to forget how it all started...

DIY Toys: Charlie I

A little while back, I wrote a post about a toy my Uncle Steve made for me when I was little (DIY Toys: Uncle Steve's Gift). Well, I never actually told my Uncle how much that little gadget meant to me until a few years ago, when I wrote him a letter explaining it all, and also included my own, slightly updated version of the toy.

 

The picture at the top of this post is just a graphic representation of it, made in Microsoft Word, using surprisingly versatile drawing tools. If only it had been as easy to export the picture as it was to draw it, I might actually come to like Microsoft. But I digress.

 

You might ask why I didn't just post a picture of it. Well, if I had known that I'd be blogging about it years later, I would have done exactly that. But, alas, I wasn't looking that far into the future!

 

Anyway, my updated version of the gadget was largely identical to the original: switch-controlled lamps, with a few small differences:

• there are now three switches and lamps instead of one.
• the enclosure is plastic; the cover is removable.
• the batteries are replaceable (2 ‘C’ cells).
• the lamps are LEDs (red, yellow, and green).
• the LEDs are still controlled by toggle switches, but I added red, yellow, and green safety covers to indicate which switch controlled which LED (and to increase the ‘cool’ factor, of course!).

As you might expect, there's really nothing to it, electrically - just batteries, switches, LEDs, and current-limiting resistors.

 

The LEDs are T-1 3/4, diffused, and nothing special - they came out of my spare parts bin. The resistors are 1/4W and appropriately sized for the LEDs I used. You may want a different value depending on the types you use, and possibly even different values for each color, since an LED's forward voltage if often color-dependent. I opted for simplicity, using the same value for all of the LEDs, while making sure the current through each LED was below 20mA.

The switches are all standard-size toggles that mount in a 1/2" hole. I got the toggle safety covers from Marlin P. Jones & Associates (www.mpja.com). Until recently, the covers were available in a rainbow of colors: red, yellow, green, blue, purple, clear, black, and chrome. As of this writing, it looks like they've cut it down to red, yellow, clear, and black. That makes me sad. I haven't found an alternate source, but I'll pass it on if I do!

When I showed the finished product to my wife, Tammy, she thought it was cool (she’s nice like that) and asked what it did. Well, it doesn’t do anything; that’s not the point. My son Nick, ever the button-pusher, understood immediately. As soon as I handed it to him, he just started flipping switches. I don’t know the rated number of operations for those toggles, but he probably reduced the useful lifetime of the gadget long before my Uncle ever got it!

 

I had no idea what my Uncle might actually do with it. It was a solid paperweight, for sure. Maybe he could leave it on the counter in his shop, and see if the customers played with it. Never trust anyone who doesn’t know how to play! Or maybe it would keep their kids amused while the adults did business. As it turned out, there was a much better use for it.

 

My Uncle Steve and Aunt Joyce have two kids, my cousins, Andy and Libby. Both are married; Libby and her husband Dean have two kids, Charlotte and Grace, but at the time I made it, there was only Charlotte. Well, as I understand it, Charlotte was over visiting one day, and my Uncle gave her the gadget to play with. She loved it! Charlotte "adopted" the toy I made, and she and her little friends have put a lot of miles on it since.

Libby sent me this picture of Charlotte playing with it. I've started calling the gadget Charlie I for three reasons:

• Charlotte turned out to be the ultimate end-user, not my Uncle Steve.
• I hardly ever call her Charlotte; she's Charlie to me.
• There's a Charlie II in the works - actually almost complete - and I hope to be writing about it soon. If she likes it half as much as the original, I'll consider it a success!

Who knows? Maybe someday I'll get a letter from Charlotte telling me how much she loved her toy. And maybe she'll even make her own version of it for me in return. But if not, that's ok - just seeing her play is plenty good enough for me!



Two Indispensable & Inexpensive Tools

Tools can be expensive, but here's no getting around the fact that you've really got to have the right tool for the right job. The trick, sometimes, is knowing where to look, because sometimes you can find the right tools in unexpected places.

There are a couple of tools that I use all the time, and I didn't find them in an electronics shop. I found both of them in my wife's stash of scrapbooking tools & supplies (this stash being approximately the size of our dining room...and three-season porch...and a bit of the basement). You can find them in any half decent hobby or craft store, or in any of a thousand places online. Locally, our craft stores include Michael's, A.C. Moore, and Hobby Lobby and all of them carry these items.

Before I start talking about these tools, let me first tell you a little story...

Way back in the day (1988, if you must know), my first job after graduating from RPI with an Electrical Engineering degree was at the Alcohol and Drug Abuse Research Center at McLean Hospital, in Belmont, MA. I was the sole engineer in the department, and, truth be told, they didn't really know they wanted an engineer at the time - they just wanted to replace a departed technician. But Dr. Scott Lukas saw the potential of having an imaginative engineer on staff in an environment where you frequently had to invent the gadgets needed to do the work, so he took a chance on me. And being fresh out of school, I was working for peanuts - at least at first.

So I got to do it all - hardware, software, mechanical design & fabrication. It really was a dream job, and the perfect vehicle for me to try my hand at a variety of disciplines. Embedded systems as we know them now were in their infancy. We had banks of Apple IIgs computers in one room controlling experiments in another, connected by bundles of 30 conductor cables and a series of connectors, all of which I had to wire up by hand.

 During my years there, I advanced the level of technology considerably, but there was infrastructure in place (like the cables and connectors) that I just had to deal with. So my work also included a fair bit of troubleshooting and repair, especially at the beginning. So when it came time to design upgrades and replacements, I tried to roll in all the lessons I learned up to that point.

 One of the first things I learned was that heat-shrink tubing is worth its weight in gold. My predecessor didn't believe in strain-relieving cables or insulating connections, and so much of my early troubleshooting led me to find short circuits and broken connector pins - and inside of a 30-pin connector housing, not only was that annoying, it also did damage to other, more expensive equipment.

Heat Gun
One of my first purchases, once I got sick of fixing short circuits, was a heat gun, like this one but actually a bit simpler:

It worked great, and - relatively speaking - didn't cost too much. I say "relatively speaking" because, at the time, it cost about $75. That's really not horrible, even today. I checked out Digikey as I was working on this post, and found heat guns in the range of about $50 - $900, with my needs well-addressed at the low end of that scale. Still, I hate to part with that much money for something that's, let's face it, just a glorified hair dryer. At this point, my wife reminds me that, having little hair remaining myself, I have no clue how much hair dryers can cost these days. Fair point.

I love heat shrink tubing, for a variety of tasks. There's the obvious one, insulating connections and wire splices and such. I also use it to color code cables & connections, and lately I've even been using it when framing photos - I cover the twisted ends of the hanging wire with it, to make it more secure. The search was on for an affordable heat gun, but to no avail, at least not in the usual places.

And then I found the solution right under my nose. Well, sitting at the dining room table anyway. As I've explained before, my wife is an avid scrapbooker, card maker, and a talented, creative, crafty person in general. She uses a lot of rubber stamps, and let me tell you, there's a lot more to that than I'd have ever expected!

One cool thing you can do with rubber stamps is create an embossed effect. You do this with embossing powder, which comes in about a million different colors. You stamp a design on paper (or whatever) and, while the ink is still wet, sprinkle embossing powder over it. You then shake off the excess powder and heat what remains to melt the powder into a raised design. Pretty cool! And guess what? The heat gun works great on heat shrink tubing and is pretty inexpensive. My wife's cost a whopping $20, and I've seen them as low as $15. Perfect!

I wish I could claim this as a unique flash of brilliance, but the last time I was at You-Do-It Electronics (Needham, MA - check 'em out here), they had an assortment of these very same inexpensive tools alongside the expensive ones in their heat-shrink department (I'm not kidding, they have a huge selection of heat shrink everything).

This craft heat gun has done everything I've needed it to do, and it's so inexpensive as to be almost disposable. And that's good, because I had to get my wife a new one, since hers found its way into my toolbox!

Heated knife kit

One thing I'm especially bad at is cutting holes that aren't round. I'm not a machinist, I'm not a whiz with a router, so if you can't do it with a drill, I struggle a bit with it. For that very reason, I avoid  slide switches, rockers, or any panel-mount component that requires a rectangular cutout.

One tool I've found that at least helps with this dilemma is the hot knife. I found this tool in my wife's hands one day, using it to cut foam core for a project. Basically, it's the perfect union of an X-Acto knife with a soldering iron.

She has a hot knife kit that came with an assortment of tips for a different projects:

• Letters
• Symbols
• Chisel / stylus
• Pointed (like a soldering tip)

This tool is great for foam core and styrofoam, but also works very well on thermoplastics, like the stuff of which many project boxes are made. I've never tried soldering with it, but it does come with a couple of tips that look right for the job.

It takes a while for the hot knife to heat up enough to cut plastic, so don't be impatient. It's worth the wait! And also, you obviously need to hold this like you'd hold a soldering iron, not as you'd hold an X-Acto knife, at least if you value your fingertips. In that sense, it's a little awkward to use for cutting plastic, but you get used to it quickly enough.

Get into the habit of cleaning the plastic off the blade as soon as you're done using it. I don't know if it hurts the blade at all, but it gums up the works and you'll have to clean it next time you use it anyway.

There you have it, a couple of useful tools from unlikely places. If you have anything to add, either about these tools or others that you've found, please leave a comment!

DIY Toys: Uncle Steve's Gift

A long time ago, my Uncle Steve made me a birthday present. When I say a long time, I mean maybe 40 years ago. I was little, maybe 5, maybe 8, I’m not sure. And I assume it was a birthday present because I remember playing with it outside in warm weather, and my birthday is in the middle of July.


The present was handmade, and simple enough: a pair of ‘D’ batteries, soldered together; a toggle switch; and an incandescent lamp with a cylindrical amber lens. These three items were wired together so the switch turned the lamp on and off. The whole thing was enclosed in a small cardboard box wrapped in black electrical tape. It couldn't have been simpler.

Today, I suppose you’d call such a thing a "Busy Box" or a “Do Nothing” box. That’s no insult; it's a class of gadgets whose primary purpose it to entertain and stimulate the imagination.

That it did.

That little box was anything I wanted it to be. It was a communicator from Star Trek, a walkie-talkie, a remote control for a rocket or a robot or whatever else I could imagine – and I could imagine a lot. It was a homing device, and a treasure detector, and a night light, too. Quite honestly, it was one of my favorite toys of all time. I was heartbroken when the batteries finally died, but I (clearly) never forgot it.

I have no idea where that most wonderful of toys ended up - probably in a landfill somewhere. What you see in the pictures is a replica I made just for this blog. There are a couple of differences:

• Though still wrapped in electrical tape, the enclosure is a plastic project box, not cardboard.
• The batteries are in a battery holder, not soldered together.
• The incandescent lamp has been replaced by a warm white LED (but I still managed to find an amber lamp holder, thanks to You-Do-It Electronics in Needham, MA!).

I decided to make a slightly updated version of the same toy, as a gift for Uncle Steve, but that's a whole different post. Stay tuned! In the meantime,

Beam me up, Scotty!!

About Uncle Steve

For as long as I can remember, my Uncle Steve has operated an Office Machine shop. When I was little, that meant typewriters and cash registers and a never-ending supply of gears and levers and other little mechanical bits and pieces. Then word processors began to move in, sometime in the 80s, I think, and not long thereafter, computers and printers.

My Uncle has had to stay abreast of technology as it pertained to office machines, just so he could stay in business and support his family. He's the guy that turned me on to Nuts & Volts magazine, for example. He also let me borrow his Heathkit Electronics Training Course materials & hardware way back before I could ever afford such a thing on my own.

As one of the only technically-inclined members of the family, he always encouraged me in my own geeky interests, and is one of the only adults I could talk to about such things that actually understood what I was talking about. For that, Uncle, I am eternally grateful!

Side-Effects of Finally Buying a New Computer

Some months ago (well, last November, if you must know), I finally broke down and bought myself a new computer. I resisted for a good, long time, because my old (emphasis on old) computer works perfectly. By "works perfectly," I mean that it's not broken....

It was never top-of-the-line (I couldn't afford that), but it was a good, solid, middle-of-the-road model. It was a dual Power Mac G5,  2.0 GHz (I think), with 1 GB RAM and a 250 GB hard drive. I added a 2nd internal 250GB hard drive. It had a 20" Apple Cinema Display and ran OS X version 10.5, which was the last version to support PowerPC processors.

 Of course, mere months after I bought it, Apple announced the transition to Intel processors. So, years later, the computer still works just fine, but doesn't have the horsepower to do what I need it to do anymore. There's no new software that will run on it, I can't upgrade the OS any further, and even my favorite browser, Firefox, is letting me down. I can't upgrade it any further, either, and more and more websites require a more recent version.

I finally pulled the trigger and bought an almost-top-of-the-line new computer: a 27" iMac with a Retina 5K display, 4GHz quad core Intel Core i7, 32GB RAM, 3TB Fusion Drive, and a few other bells and whistles. With my luck, it will be obsoleted in a month and a half, but I hope this lasts me just as long as my previous computers....

 

First problem: I need a new desk. My old desk has served me very well - it's a fairly inexpensive Sauder computer desk I bought almost 25 years ago. It's actually outlasted 3 or 4 computers, so was worth every penny, but it's at the end of its useful life. It's starting to fall apart now anyway, and it's getting tougher to repair (the bottom is falling out of the drawer, and top is held in place with a few sheet rock screws, ...)

Even if my old desk were in perfect condition, my new computer just doesn't fit. The old desk is proportioned for a good old fashioned 4:3 CRT. I could fit the Apple Cinema Display in it, but nothing bigger. The 27" iMac would have to sit far forward on the desk, leaving hardly any space for the keyboard, let alone anything else. Nope, definitely needed something different.

As long as I was going to get a new desk, I wanted something better than what I had, and something that (hopefully) would last just as long. The old desk was a bit small - 42" wide x 24" deep. It had a single small drawer, but a decent hutch with an 18" wide bookshelf for manuals and things. I was hoping to find something wider and deeper. with a hutch and more drawers.

I looked all over the place, but couldn't find quite what I wanted - either the size wasn't right, or the price was too steep, whatever. I finally found something that met most of my needs at a used office furniture store. It was a brand new desk, mind you, sold alongside some *ahem* well-used bits of corporate flotsam. It was the perfect size, 48" wide x 30" deep, with 2 small drawers and a file drawer, and was available in a variety of finishes. I picked the American Dark Cherry, because it had the most steampunkish look to it. The only downside - no hutch or shelves.

A quick look around the store and online led me to conclude that there was no equally perfect, reasonably priced, matching hutch commercially available. Like any good engineer, I decided to make my own. Don't get me wrong, I'm no Bob Vila. I've never built anything out of wood that you'd want to show off in the dining room, but I figured that I could probably make something worthy of the man cave. And as long as I'm building it myself, I can go for a steampunk/industrial look, and make exactly what I want.

Well, almost exactly. I couldn't find an American Dark Cherry stain to quite match the desk, so I went with a Mission Oak stain/poly combo finish. It's not a color match, but looks mighty nice just the same.

While wandering through Home Depot on my way to the lumber department, I ran across a vast stack of wooden crates that were on display in the middle of the floor. They were 18" wide x 12.5" high x 9.5" deep. Perfect. I did a quick mental calculation, and decided  I could fit four of them between the desktop and the ceiling.

 

 I figured that I'd have a stack of four crates mounted at the right rear of the desk, and my computer at the left rear. Mounted about halfway up the stack of crates would be a 10" deep shelf extending all the way to the left edge of the desk, to hold a paper organizer I have. Nice!

So I bought four crates, a quart of stain, some brushes, and some hardware to hold all the bits together. The crates came out really nice, but took 3 coats before I was satisfied with the finish.

 

 One thing about these crates - the boards from which they're made are only sanded on one side, the outside, and are pretty rough on the inside of the crate. That's fine if you're going to use them for storage, but not if you're going to use them for books. I didn't need a glass-smooth finish, but I did sand down the interiors of the crates quite a bit. 

 

 

I figured I'd start with a stack of two crates, just to see how they looked and fit. I decided to use ordinary aluminum mending plates to hold them together, but silver doesn't really fit into the color palette I was working with.

 

A can of flat black spray paint took care of that problem. I used two mending plates on each side. If you look closely at the picture below, you'll see that the manufacturing tolerances of the crates is a bit loose. In fact, no two are quite the same! I only put hardware on the sides of the crates because the wood is about 3/4" thick there. The slats on the back, top, and bottom are only about 1/4" thick.
 

 

Here's the finished stack of two crates. Notice the missing slat from the back of the bottom crate. I removed it so I could easily run cords into the bottom crate. I plan on putting my telephone and a power strip there.

 



 

Had all the crates actually conformed to the given measurements, a stack of four would have fit between my desktop and ceiling with a fraction of an inch to spare. As it turned out, the stack was about 1/2" too tall. Drat! Compounding the problem was an epiphany I had about the shelf I wanted to add. Rather than attach the shelf to the side of the stack of crates with L brackets or some such hardware, I realized that it would be much sturdier to sandwich the shelf between the 2nd and 3rd crates. This added an additional 3/4" to the stack height.

The only real option I had, short of eliminating one of the crates from the stack, was to cut one of them down. I cut down the bottom crate by 1-1/2", about the height of one of the slats, so it actually looks like it was built that way on purpose. The result was pretty darn good, if I do say so myself.

Here's the finished unit, without the big paper organizer in place. The tan-colored bits you see on the shelf are felt pads like you use on the feet of furniture. They keep the organizer from scratching up the shelf - or vice-versa.

One thing you can't really see in that photo is how I supported the left edge of the shelf. I used two 3/4" diameter lengths of steel pipe and threaded flanges on each end, screwed into the shelf and desktop. The cool thing about using threaded flanges is that I could use them to level the shelf before screwing them down.

Here's the finished unit with the paper organizer in place. I'm very happy with it! Please note, my desk is about as clean as it will ever be, at least until it's time for a new computer....

Here's a closer look at the pipes supporting the left end of the shelf. I bought 3/4" diameter x 24" long steel nipples, which come threaded on both ends. Unfortunately, they were just a little too long - by about the same amount I had to cut down the bottom crate - so I was faced with the problem of cutting (easy) and threading (not so easy) the pipe. I was going to rent a thread cutter from Home Depot, but a very helpful employee told me that they'd cut & thread the pipe for me for free in plumbing department. Oh, happy day!

Like I said, I'm no Bob Vila, but I was very happy with how this project turned out. Bit by bit, I hope to continue to Steampunk-ify my man cave as time and budget permits.

A Glowing Display!

A while ago, I took my kids to a Mineral Show. We can't really claim to be serious mineral collectors or anything, but we like cool rocks and fossils, and it sounded like fun. It was, and I even found a couple of things that I couldn't resist buying. One was a fantastic fossilized fish (how's that for alliteration - my English teachers would be so proud!). The only fossils I ever found were ferns and other plants. Cool, but not as cool as a fish! It's not very big, about 4" wide x 2.5" high.

I also got a fluorescent rock that glowed red & green under UV light. It looked like granite. I was very disappointed when I got home and put it under a black light, though. It didn't glow anything like it did at the show. Drat!

I found  a nice little shadow box display frame, as you'll see in a moment. It has one big section that would accommodate the fossil just fine, and three smaller sections below. I wasn't sure what I'd put in those. Unfortunately, that decision was slow in coming. Time passed, and the fossil and display frame got buried under the stratified layers of stuff surrounding my desk in the man cave, out of sight and out of mind for maybe a year.

As luck would have it, I ended up buying a new computer, which necessitated buying a new desk, which necessitated a cleanup - nay, excavation - of my cave. There, under the accumulated detritus of human activity, did I find my treasure. And, I knew exactly what I wanted to put in those pesky little sections on the bottom!

When I was a kid, one of the favorite displays in Boston's Museum of Science was a glass case containing a bunch of fluorescent mineral samples. On a timer, the display case lighting would alternate between white light and a black light (or so I thought), and some of the specimens were absolutely dazzling. Here's a photo of such a display, though this isn't the one from the Museum of Science.

I decided to try to find some rocks that fluoresce under black light. Well, it took some digging, but Google didn't let me down. I eventually made my way to geology.com and learned a few things. First of all, I found out that what we call "black light" is longwave ultraviolet, UV-A, with a wavelength in the neighborhood of 365nm. There are minerals that fluoresce at that wavelength, but there are more that fluoresce under shortwave ultraviolet, UV-C, with a wavelength in the neighborhood of 254nm.

You can't get shortwave UV lamps in the party store, but you can at geology.com. I actually got one with a switch to select between shortwave and longwave UV. And equally good, their online store carries a Fluorescent Mineral Collection for a reasonable price! Apparently, I'm not the only one that likes this stuff!

I was like a kid on Christmas morning the day the package arrived. I opened up the mineral collection, put the batteries in the lamp, put on the safety glasses of course (UV-A is bad for your eyes & skin), and had a look at the rocks I bought. I tried the longwave UV first, and was disappointed because only a couple samples fluoresced. I expected that, but plain old blacklight would make displaying my treasures easier, since I could buy UV LEDs or a black light bulb or something.

Under short-wave ultraviolet light, though, two of the specimens fluoresced beautifully. And they were a perfect fit for the display frame, so I mounted them immediately. Those are the two in the middle & left spaces. The third one, on the right, fluoresces a little bit, a deep red, but is disappointing compared to the others. That one didn't come from the mineral collection I bought, though. It came from a bag of tumbled rocks I bought for my son at the Polar Caves on vacation a while back.

The specimen on the left is Opalite, from New Mexico, and  glows a nice green. The little bit of glowing blue that you see is actually a number label that I couldn't manage to remove. The middle is Willemite-Calcite from New Jersey, and glows red and green. I'm not sure which is which, but it looks great. I've no idea what the specimen on the right is.

Oh, and that other rock I bought at the mineral show, the one that didn't glow under ordinary black light? It fluoresces a brilliant red & green under shortwave UV, so I suspect it's another sample of Willemite-Calcite.

Having finished securing everything in the display frame, I now needed a way to mount it. I figured it would look nice hanging on a wall, and didn't really want to use a boring picture hanger. I'm a huge fan of Steampunk, so I started casting about for a way to Steampunk-ify my handiwork. I did it by making a leather hanging strap for the frame, attached to it by brass buckles.

I bought a strip of black leather from a craft shop, and cut it to size. The buckles actually came from the scrapbooking section of the same store. Apparently, folks use them as embellishments on their pages. I've no idea how they'd to that (my wife would - she's an amazing scrapbooker), but I like the way it came out.

Here's the finished product, hanging on my wall. Don't mind the cords and things; my workspace is definitely a work in progress!

How Geeks Scrapbook...

OK, so I can't speak for all geeks, only myself! My wife is an incredible scrapbooker, and I wish I were nearly as creative as she is. It's not just about putting pictures on pages; it's about weaving an entire story, and telling that story not only with the pictures, but also with the words, papers, textures, and other embellishments that bring her pages to life. Yeah, I can't do that.

It's not that I have nothing to scrapbook, though, because I do. And I recently had an idea that's, well, if not uniquely mine, then at least uniquely geeky.

Specifically, I'm an embedded systems geek, both hardware and software. Not only is that my day job, but it also weaves its way into my hobbies. My hobbies take me in various directions, be it Steampunk, model rocketry, Halloween gadgetry, toys for my little cousins, whatever.

One of the side-effects of working with embedded systems is that I sometimes design printed circuit boards to help bring some of my creations to life. One important rule that I learned early on is to always have spares handy. My inner Boy Scout agrees, and likes to be prepared. It's a terrible thing when things go south, as they sometimes do, and have a project grind to a halt because you have to wait for replacement parts, boards, etc.

Of course, things don't always go south, with the side effect that the spares tend to accumulate over time. Not a big deal with parts - I can always find a use for extra LEDs, Arduinos, and what-not. Spare circuit boards, though, that's another issue. Mostly, my spare boards sat on a shelf gathering dust.

And that's where my wife inspired me (it's a pity she doesn't read my blog; I could get a few brownie points here). Years and years ago, she bought me a cool little 3-ring binder made out of recycled circuit boards.

The trouble was, I didn't have anything really worthy to put in it. It sat empty for a long time. Then I realized, hey, why can't I scrapbook circuit boards the way she does pictures? And so I did.

I use top-loading page protectors to hold my scrapbook pages, rather than just punching holes in the pages themselves. It makes the pages a little wider than my binder, but it keeps the PCB edges from snagging on things, and should (hopefully) catch any boards that separate from the pages.

Instead of buying paper from a craft or scrapbooking store, I use Google Images to find pictures of cool circuit boards that I then print (borderless) on matte brochure paper.

I avoid water-marked images, which typically mean they're from a stock image vendor and ought to be paid for. There are plenty out there that aren't, usually from other folks' personal projects.

I use double-sided tape to mount the really small boards, and foam mounting tape for the bigger ones. Sometimes I'll keep it simple and just mount the boards with the briefest description of what they are.

 

Sometimes I'll get more creative, especially if the boards are small, or are part of an exceptionally cool project.

 



I'm not going to claim that my scrapbook is anything as awesome as the ones my wife can make, but I'm pretty happy with the way it's coming together. And I've got plenty more space in that binder!