Look what happens when I mock. Now there is a case of PLUM (Pork Loving Urban Mexican) disease right at my back-door. A school has been shut down a scant 1 mile away from our house. I hope I have enough ammo to kill the zombies.

I don’t know about you, but I’m really not worried about the swine flu. I believe that my years of eating pork products have paid off and that I’ve built a natural immunity.  :-) 

All kidding aside, I think we need to take a step back from the edge of hysteria. I wake up this morning to see OMG FIRST US DEATH DUE TO SWINE FLU. Except that it was a baby from Mexico who was brought into the US through Brownsville. Gotta love the media.

To put a little perspective on things:

… even during the worst ravages of the 1918 flu, 97.5 per cent of those infected survived and recovered. Or that 72 per cent of the population — even in the absence of the sophisticated public health planning and infrastructure that Canada and the U.S. have since built — was not infected during the pandemic. So, even if we had a repeat of the 1918 flu, the chances were seven out of 10 that you wouldn’t catch it and if you did, the odds were better than nine out of 10 that you’d survive.

And let us not forget that something like 30,000 to 50,000 people die of the plain old flu — in the United States — every year. But that’s boring news.

So, put away your face masks (which are useless against virusus) and look at the numbers for a minute. You are more likely to die on the ride to work than die from this flu, even if it became a full scale epidemic.

For now, I’m going to keep eating my bacon.

My brother was nice enough to take a hammer to a malfunctioning scanner. While the bits of plastic were destroyed, I was able to scavange the (near unbreakable) glass platen, a stepper motor, and some assorted parts.

I tried cutting the glass for another project, but no luck. This stuff is amazingly tough! It did find a perfect home, on the top of our Mystery Tower:

The Mystery Tower

So, what kind of tower would need a glass top? A very sturdy glass top.

Here’s a photo of our workbench #2, where we have the power tools. The drill press is on the left, the scroll saw on the right. The small lathe (on lower right shelf) can be placed in the space in between. It’s on a piece of MDF, so the whole thing moves quite easily. I’m also going to mount the press on MDF to give it more support (and noise dampening, though it is very quiet).

Power Tools Workbench

To the left on the floor is a rolling shop vac, which is always ready to go. Lower shelves hold drill bits, measuring tools, small power tools, etc. Forgive the darkness in the photos. I should have opened the garage door for more light.

Here is a close up of the new drill press. Pretty inexpensive ($180) but includes some nice features like easy speed settings, LED speed display, rotating table, etc.

Our New Drillpress

Old t-shirt not included. It’s a pretty heavy beast, around 95 pounds. Be sure to place it on a strong bench!

Finally, here is a very boring piece of equipment that every garage shop needs, a cord reel:

Cord Reel

The above is from Northern Tool (part #162443) and holds 30 feet of 16/3 cord with three outlets. Mount it on a wall or ceiling. Extremely useful. They also sell better gauges, if you need to handle more amps. For our little shop, the lightweight 16 gauge was enough (and cheaper–$45). We have the shop vac always tied into it, and it’s also handy for shop lights. Reels like this are very handy if you have an older garage shop that doesn’t have much in the way of outlets.

(If you do get that cord reel note that it does NOT come with mounting bolts. You need to get some jumbo lag bolts to attach it to a joist [we are lucky to have a double-width 2x8 right above the bench area]. It’s a bit of a hassle to install, probably a two person job, but well worth it. Again, make sure you secure it down with BIG lag bolts.)

Here are two photos of the Chispito Wind Generator hub & blade assembly. That black ruler is 12″ long, for reference.

Chispito Hub And Blades

Chispito Hub

It’s been a busy April. Lots going on at work. New servers. New database clusters. New software. New file systems. Pretty much a death march. Last weekend was especially long, with an overnight stint Friday night-Saturday morning, that dragged through the whole weekend.

I get a chuckle when the young (and not so young) pups get excited about working overnight. “It’s so kewl! Let’s do it.” Sorry, kids, this is adulthood, not Junior year in college. Working 24 hours straight is silly and the result of poor execution, not something you should strive for. I guess the novelty wore off for me during Y2K when I was in “the bunker” working a 120 hour work week. No thanks. Been there. Done that. Not fun.

Anyhow, after a solid week of re-writing reporting database extracts (shoot me), I was able to put aside work and putz around the house for a change.

Our garage has been a bit of a disaster area, as Evelyn has been documenting our old computers for possible loan to a local computer museum. On Saturday, while she was out of a Girls Day of Antique Hunting, I stayed home and organized the garage.

I managed to get all of the old computers either racked in shelves, or put in big bigs for donation/loan. That made a huge difference in cleaning up floor space. Also went though and broke down boxes, consolidated, and so on. Pretty boring stuff, but important. A dirty shop is a dangerous shop, and it’s best to have everything well laid out and clean.

I wanted to get things cleaned up because we had just purchased a new drill press (a Ryobi DP121L). A lot of our work requires accurate drilling, something you can only really get on a press (free-hand is way too sloppy, and next to impossible when working with metal). It’s a nice 12″ bench-top model, not too huge, but strong enough to handle what we’ll throw at it.

The first project on the new press was drilling a flywheel for our Windmill project. We’re making one of these Chispito Wind Generators. I actually bought the parts to the kit while we were in Puerto Rico, so that gives you an idea on how long this project has been “on hold”! I needed to drill 6 holes into the face of the cast iron wheel, to which the 3 blades will be attached. I didn’t have a drill press at the time, so the project sat.

There are two features of the press that I really like, one of which I originally felt was too much of a gimmick. First is the LED RPM display. This is very handy to have on a press, as long as it’s accurate. You get a nice up-front reading of the speed, which is critical when working with certain materials (you go slow with stuff like cast iron).

The second is the laser crosshair, which I was skeptical about. The lasers on a lot of equipment just aren’t accurate, or they make you pay more attention to the red beam than your workpiece–this can be very dangerous. I found this machine’s laser (which can be easily turning on/off from the front panel) to be helpful during setup. Sometimes you need to shift the table left/right from the primary axis. When you do that you start to lose track where the bit will land, and the laser crosshair is very handy for helping with this, as you can instantly see the general vicinity of where the bit will fall. It prevented me from drilling though the table.

In the end, I got my six holes drilled, and tapped them to accept 1/4-20 bolts. After a little bit of work I now have the blades attached to the flywheel assembly. Next step, try and find (garbage pick) a 1″ square steel tube for the “boom” assembly. I also need to find a piece of metal for the tail–maybe the sheet metal from an old PC?

I have a reponse for the next moron who tells me that I’m not a “team player”:

I’m a team player. You’re just on the wrong team. 

I was up in Chicago for the first part of this week, leaving on Monday morning and coming back on Wednesday evening.

Remind me the never fly after Easter again. The airport was the busiest I’ve seen it in a long while. I was surprised about how many non-business people were flying. The economy may be in the toilet, but people are still moving around. Even leaving on Wednesday out of Midway was a lot busier than normal, with everyone in front of me going to Vegas. How odd.

Flight back was okay, at least I had room around me. On the down side, there were about 5 pre-schoolers on the flight who all decided to start screaming at the same time. From the gate to 10,000 feet — screaming. All of descent — screaming. Scream scream scream. You’d think their organs were getting ripped out by a pair of pliers. Maybe their ears wouldn’t hurt so fucking much if they stopped screaming for a minute and swallowed.

Austin was mostly cloudy yesterday, and rainy today. Very dark. On the bright side, we desperately need rain down here (so many areas outside of town have been declared drought disaster areas). It’s pouring like Puerto Rico right now, so maybe we’ll get a good soak.

Evelyn has been pulling out more boxes from storage and working on projects. Last week she made a “on the phone” flashing light for Mike. He can switch it on at his desk and the flashing light tells others that he’s busy. Kind of like a single-color version of my office status light. Personally, I think that everone needs a status light for their desk. It would prevent a lot of unnecessary and annoying interupptions. This week she is working on a “Northern Lights” project which should be quite cool.

UPDATE:
Here’s the photo of the “on the phone” flashing light I made for Mike. ~Evelyn

On the phone flash

On Monday we received our newest kit, the rCube Talking Clock from Rival Electronics. I had seen a New Product listing in the latest Nuts & Volts, and after checking out there site, thought it was a neat project and got it. We’re going to be taking photos during the build and we’ll start with the unboxing.

The kit came carefully packing in bubble wrap and is bundled in a nice black box. The presentation is quite nice:

The assembly manual is provided on a CD-ROM, so you can either view it on your computer during the build, or print it out (preferred). Most kit manufacturers are following this route to save costs, but it’s a bit of a hassle–you really do need a printout for checking off items as you solder them in.

There are quite a few parts in this kit, and it requires some mechanical assembly, as you can see below:

The kit was well packed, though there are a LOT of parts stuff in that one parts bag. When we get to putting the kit together we’ll use one of our “bug boxes” (trays for small parts, often ICs) to organize everything (you can use an egg carton).

Here is a close up on one of the parts bags. As you can see the “water clear” LEDs are carefully packed in their own bags. That’s a nice touch, and important for this kit.

After looking through the manual, this appears to be a 2-3 evening build. Day 1: Board 1 electronics. Day 2: Board 1 mechanical, Board 2 electronics. Day 3: Final testing and assembly.

There are two versions of this kit available. The Standard does not come with Board 2 — so it does NOT have an LED alphanumeric display. It will only “talk” and light up. I highly recommend getting the Premium kit, which includes the LED display and a temperature sensor. I like my clocks to have a display, so wanted the upgrade.

A couple of thoughts so far:

• The kit is very nicely packaged. It’s obvious that a lot of time and energy went into producing it.
• The programming of the clock is quite novel. You hold up the clock to a PC speaker and a series of tones program it! This is an interesting method of wirelessly programming the device. Note that you can set the time and alarm via a series of button presses on the clock.
• The clock is a bit smaller than I expected, about 4″ square. The display is also quite small. This is not a problem, but something to keep in mind.
• The rendered images on the web site make the cover appear to be frosted. It is NOT — it’s clear. On the plus side, this gives you options for decorating. However, It was a surprise to me when I opened the kit.
• The case is custom and is very well done. It’s not a generic project box. I can only imagine the time and expense it took to do the custom plastic work.
• Again, I’m very impressed by the work done. This is not just another “solder it together and put it in a generic box” kit. It looks to be something you’ll be very proud to show off, and a benefit of the clear cover is that friends can see your hard work!

I find software boring.

This might seem a bit odd, coming from a guy who’s been writing software since 1984, and who has spent a good deal of his career coding. Perhaps it’s because software is just so intangible. Here today, gone tomorrow, like so many modern gadgets.

And this isn’t Grumpy Old Ron speaking. As I look back, the things I’ve built I’m most proud of have all been physical things. Go-carts. Work benches. And our growing collection of Home Brew gizmos, like the Time Travel Radio. Those tangible things are so much more rewarding to me than writing a couple thousand lines of code.

These thoughts were prompted when I saw this recently on one of the gadget blogs:

It’s a Sega game. But not a video game, but a mechanical one. Seeing it brought back memories of childhood, where my parents would take us to a place that was packed with player pianos, mechnical games, and early video games. I can’t dig up the name–something like “Savotas”? The place was like a Steam Punk version of Dave & Busters. At the time, video games were cool, so the mechanical stuff was mostly ignored. Too bad. With hindsight, I should have spent more time looking at the mechanical stuff. Even then (25+ years ago) the place seemed to be on the downward spiral, and I’m sure it’s long gone.

I’m really glad that this device popped up, because it would make an outstanding project for young Makers and Inventors. I love it because it can combine electronics with software with electromechanical with art with construction. These sort of cross-dicipline projects are exactly what we are missing in our traditional education (see my previous rants on how most software developers have no idea how the hardware components, which run their code, work).

If you are looking for an idea for a next-project, consider an electromechanical game, upgraded to use 2009 technology, but keeping the mechanical aspects. Maybe a gunfight game, except the guys use lasers? And maybe a fog/mist machine in there, so the laser beams can be seen? There are all sorts of possibilities.

If you want to read more about this particular machine, check out this site: Sega Gun Fight

And if you are around Detroit, this looks to be a very interesting museum: Marvin’s Marvelous Mechanical Museum