Too many hobbies
The problem with having a lot of hobbies is that it's almost impossible to find time to enjoy them all. Anyway, they've been keeping me busy… so busy in fact that I haven't even written about any of the things I've been up to.
Energy Monitoring
In my What I've done this year post last year, I mentioned that I've been working on Energy Monitoring at the hackspace. At that point, we'd installed the cabinets and the meters, but not hooked them up to something to retrieve the data. I had been waiting for my PCBs to arrive from Aisler, and then there was a bit of case design needed by Steve. They're all up and running now, and the data is showing up on our grafana dashboard. The only annoying part of this project was accidentally purchasing Atmega 328p-MU chips (as opposed to the non "MU" chips). These do not support full swing crystal oscillators, and I hadn't designed the boards to use a different kind of clock source. I got there in the end though with a combination of fuse settings and a build time variable.
Air Quality Monitoring
A couple of years ago we did a pledge drive to install Air Quality Monitoring at the hackspace. Due to some unforeseen delays, this took way longer than expected, so I ended up designing the monitors myself. We have seven of these installed now, and still two more to install. All of them have CO2 and VOC monitoring, and a few have PMSA003 particle sensors too. If we want to add more particle sensors, they can just be plugged in without needing to change the configuration. Like with the energy monitoring, Steve designed the case, and they all work pretty nicely! This is also going to our grafana now.
nh-tools and WiFi nh-tools
Induction tools can be quite problematic in the hackspace, but especially so when they don't have card readers (yet). Our delay with getting these installed has been primarily due to a shortage of boards, and trying to motivate the original designer to sort out some more. I ended up redesigning them quickly in KiCAD to get some made, and they've been getting installed in various places around the space.
One of these boards was also reused to switch on the air filtration in our Dusty Area. This happens when the air quality is poor, or when the lights are on. It has massively improved the air quality in there, and there's noticeably less surface dust accumulating.
With our metalworking area moving downstairs, we had a rethink about our welders. Since these are very high current tools, we have always had some kind of interlock to avoid multiple welders being used simultaneously. We're integrating that a bit more with our nh-tools setup now, which is needed for controlling our induction welders, but also useful in terms of collecting tool usage data. A standard nh-tools in its wooden enclosure would not be appropriate due to interference, so I started fitting one into an aluminium Hammond enclosure. The front was spray painted black and laser engraved. Quite stylish!
My initial testing suggested that the aluminium enclosure would not cause enough of a problem to prevent the cards from being read, but when fully assembled, that turned out not to be the case. Fortunately, various manufacturers make special ferrous sheets. A small rectangle of this was more than enough to get the card reader working reliably.
My last bit of work with nh-tools lately was for our jointer and thicknesser in the dusty area. These are tools on wheels, which makes having them tied to a fixed card reader slightly problematic. We decided it was finally time to do a WiFi version, so I designed something around the Pi Pico W. Steve is working on the firmware for this, and I had a go at designing the case. The two boards make connection when the enclosure assembled.
The Traffic Light
Traffic Lights are pretty cool and I've wanted one for quite a while. I decided to buy one off eBay for around £50, which unsurprisingly now lives in the hackspace. We're using it to display the dust levels of the dusty area. A small poem was collaboratively written to mark the occasion:
Traffic Light
If it's green the air is clean,
If amber it shows, cover your nose,
If it's red, your lungs are dead.
Network Cabling
A lot of the networking at the hackspace was installed kind of organically, as needed and… not very well, especially in the workshop. I spent a bit of time bending conduit and pulling cables to clean up one section of the workshop. Always more to do…
Ice Hockey
I've been doing ice skating lessons for a few months now, but what I really want to be doing is playing ice hockey. I recently asked to switch from normal skate lessons to the hockey skate lessons, which they are happy with, so I had to very quickly buy lots of hockey things. Handy to have a "hockey dad" (Jon) in the shop with me to get me to actually try things on. I'd probably have made some bad purchasing decisions otherwise.
The lessons are on Wednesday evenings which sort of conflicts with the open hack night a bit, but it's only half an hour so not too bad. I don't work on Wednesdays so usually cycle in to the hackspace with various tools and projects… getting all the hockey stuff onto my bike as well is a bit concerning, and may not work out. I've ordered Bauer a hockey backpack which can take my skates, gloves and helmet. Still need to figure out how to attach a hockey stick to me or the bike.
Anyway, that's everything.
Related posts:
Wanting to leave a comment?
Comments and feedback are welcome by email (aaron@nospam-aaronsplace.co.uk).