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!



Peace for Brussels

One again we mourn the victims of yet another brutal attack. Once again the innocent suffer. And once again, I must restrain myself from going on a rant about senseless violence and the cowards that perpetrate it.

I offer my deepest condolences to the people of Brussels, Belgium, for your pain and suffering and loss.

I'm no poet; I'm just a geeky engineer. But I love this particular piece of poetry, which is supremely appropriate right now:

The Law of the Jungle
(From The Jungle Book)
by Rudyard Kipling

Now this is the Law of the Jungle --
as old and as true as the sky;
And the Wolf that shall keep it may prosper,
but the Wolf that shall break it must die.

As the creeper that girdles the tree-trunk
the Law runneth forward and back --
For the strength of the Pack is the Wolf,
and the strength of the Wolf is the Pack.

 There's much more to the poem, but these first two verses I've committed to memory. The emphasis on the last two lines is my own. Most folks think that "The Law of the Jungle" means "survival of the fittest" or "every man for himself." Maybe that's true in the jungle, but not here. Maybe it's true of solitary creatures, but humans aren't solitary- well, we're not meant to be, anyway. No, for (most) humans, "The Law of the Jungle" was phrased more succinctly by Alexandre Dumas in "The Three Musketeers":

All for One, and One for All

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!

The Steampunk Christmas Tree: Methuen Festival of Trees 2014

 

I recently blogged about our TARDIS Christmas Tree, our entry into the 2015 Methuen Festival of Trees. Last year, our entry was a Steampunk-themed tree, and I wanted to share some pictures and a video of that.

 

You might not be able to tell from the picture above, but the tree didn't start out as a tree at all. I made it out of a 4" x 4" x 4' fence post, with a base made of crossed 2" x 4" x 24" studs. Compared to other trees we've done, it was small but very sturdy (and heavy!).

 

The "branches" were a combination bits of hardware, from plant hangers to shelf brackets, like these:

  

We got them in different lengths, so the tree would have the expected tapered shape. We even found some wall decorations shaped like old-fashioned keys, which were long enough that we used them as bottom branches. I don't have a picture of just them, but maybe you can make them out in one of the other pictures.

For a tree topper, my daughter found a matched set of cast iron compass roses at an antique barn we like in Newburyport, MA. To add a little pizzazz, and color, to the tree topper, I added 8 neoPixels to each compass rose (with the wiring and controller sandwiched between them). I controlled them with a 5V/16MHz Arduino Pro Mini running a slightly modified version of the strandtest sketch.

 

 

 

The tree had a couple of strands of "regular" multicolor Christmas lights, too - and my wife is SO much better at stringing lights than I am! My last lighting contribution to the tree was a number of vacuum tubes, mounted at the ends of several branches, to which I cemented color-changing LEDs. It made the vacuum tubes look really cool, and blended in with the other lights quite naturally.

 

 

While I was handling the lightning and the structural components of the project, my wife and her best friend Karen were going to town on ornaments and other decorations. These few photos don't really do them justice; I'll post some of the photos my wife took when I get a chance. There were gears and keys and chains and vintage bits of hardware. In the 2nd photo below, you can see one of my favorites, a snowman ornament my wife made out of gears and clock hands!

 

We named our tree "Steampunk Celebrations." While we were setting up the tree, a lot of people asked us what Steampunk was and what it was all about. We ended up printing out a brief explanation, framing it, and displaying it with the tree.

 

I loved Steampunk long before I ever knew it had a name. As it turns out, a lot of other folks were just the same, and we got a fair share of "ah-ha" moments when we explained it to them. For the first time ever, we also won First Place, in the Most Unique / Creative category! It certainly helps that none of the judges (or other Festival folks) had ever seen anything quite like it before.

We have no idea who won our tree in the raffle, but I hope they enjoy it as much as we enjoyed making it.

 

Merry Christmas & Happy New Year!