Today I’m featuring an electrician’s Leatherman, the E4 Squirt, and a Modern Times (beer brewer/coffee roaster from San Diego) Black House coffee brewed in a Bialetti moka pot my mom gave me. (I think it was from my Zia Wanda’s kitchen in Cassino, Italy.)
I really like the E4 because it’s got a good set of wire strippers/cutters on it, and the Philips screwdriver is a pretty nice one. I keep it in my jeans coin pocket.
I harvested sheet metal from an old fluorescent light fixture, and spot welded strips together to make a little tool tray.
I have this great little welding cart I got from a picker. The size was almost — but not quite — perfect to hold my little MIG welder underneath. I got 10′ of 1/2″ 16 gauge steel square tubing for $2.06 at Industrial Metal Supply’s remainders bin and cut two lengths down to size to fit the footprint of the welder. I welded them to the cart and now it’s all neatly contained.
I love Arduino! But the boards are so tiny that they can be difficult to hug. And not so easy to see, either, if you’re a student sitting at the back of a classroom. So why not solve both problems by building a really huge, fully-functioning Arduino that’s six times larger than real life?
By popular demand, I finally put together a tutorial for building your own not-so-micro microcontroller:
https://www.instructables.com/id/Arduino-GRANDE-the-Huge-Microcontroller/?ALLSTEPS
Here’s a handy playlist of my Adafruit project video series:
I built this photo lightbox using foamcore, wooden cubes, hot glue, and magnets.
I designed it to set up and break down easily for storage when not in use.
I’m building an Overwatch prop gun — Lucio’s blaster — from scratch. Here are my videos for the first two parts of four(?) that I’m planning.
I built this turntable for my Ultimaker 2 3D printer. Why? Because each time I changed the material on it I needed to go from using the interface on the front to dealing with the spool and filament on the back of the machine three times. Minor annoyance, I know, but I had had enough!
You can’t wing this too much or things won’t line up, so I did some careful measurements and aligned things well enough that when I blind screwed in the bottom it worked. There are strategies for doing this with large holes predrilled at a 45 degree offset from square so you can screw them in and see what you’re actually doing, but where’s the sport in that?
Now I’m already regretting not making the top piece a circle or gear pattern so I can motorize this for stylish stop motion photography of timelapse printing, but I think I can add that feature later.
I recently refined the design of my gigantic demonstration handcuff. I was contacted by lock and security expert Deviant Ollam who has an upcoming event that required the use of a huge demo cuff. I was able to fix up my design to standardize the hardware and he’s going to have a set made. I plan to upload these files under creative commons soon for general use.
John Park’s Happy Chewbacca Mask is a new guide in the Adafruit learning system
Chewbacca is a lovable Wookie with a distinctive voice, but here’s how to give him a voice transplant and add your own fun sounds to this talking mask.
This guide will show you how to swap out the original sound board for an Audio FX Sound Board loaded up with lots of your favorite sounds. You’ll need a specific mask to follow along exactly, but these principles can be applied to nearly any toy designed to trigger a sound effect. Or, add a speaker and switch to the mix to give a voice to any prop or costume.
Here’s the full video for your viewing pleasure.
John Park 