Playing darts is fun! Patching drywall behind and around a dartboard is not fun.
To protect the wall around our dartboard, I wanted to build a cool, framed something-er-other that would safely catch stray darts, hold darts that weren’t being used, catch falling darts that might not hang onto the dartboard or the backstop (using a shelf or a net or something) and maybe have a scoreboard. I also wanted the style of the backstop to match our pool table, which is an ornate, ebony-kinda-finish with red felt.
I was sitting at my desk designing the new main circuit board for the Office Chairiot Mark II when my mind wandered to something else: What makes me a maker? Why do some people make and some are content to not create? Then I thought, “I should put a survey together and let it run for a while and see if I can get some interesting data on that.”
Great. Another thing to distract me from things I really should be doing. Meh.
I just can’t get motivated to diagram the circuits in the Office Chairiot Mark II. I’ve drawn a number of rough functional block diagrams of the systems and I’ve even drawn the printed circuit boards in Adobe Illustrator (because that’s how I make my PCBs). But, I just haven’t gotten up the energy to recreate the schematics for them so that I could eventually make more boards of higher quality through a PCB fab house.
Then, this past Saturday, while working on optimizing the LCD menu string storage code for the control panel (more on that coming in a blog post soon), I glanced over at a circuit diagram I’d taped to the cabinet above my electronics workbench a couple of years ago. That moment is when I realized the genius comic artist over at xkcd.com had already done it for me…
Get you some small, powerful and efficient AC-DC switching “power bricks” for easy-peasy-lemon-squeezy 3.3 volts and 5 volts DC power on your breadboard projects. These little guys provide up to 2.4A of current, 12W of power. Plug an AC power cord into one end and get clean breadboard-friendly DC power out the other end. Check out the MPM-12EPB line of cute little switching regulators from MicroPower Direct.
A few of my fellow meltmedians and good friends have a private little bourbon paradise speakeasy we’ve established near the office. We call it, “Halcyon.” If you visit, you can even get a shirt. It’s a quaint little place with fine furnishings, a stock of bourbon that approaches my own and a dozen or more flickering LED candles. Therein lies the problem: Light.
I decided to build a gift to Halcyon and its members. We needed a little more light in there at times (specifically, while preparing drinks before the very important conversations started). The candles were nice, but quite dim. We’d need a hundred to make it a well-lighted place. 😉 My gift? A dimmable, Bluetooth-controlled, battery-operated, custom-built bourbon bottle chandelier.
The control panel for the Office Chairiot Mark II is coming together quickly. It’s pretty much the most complicated piece of the the entire project AND probably the most complicated electronics project I’ve built to date.
Read all about the latest updates to the circuit board designs and the power routing and all that in this article. You can also find out similar (nearly identical) information on the official Office Chairiot Mark II website.
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For a luau-themed software launch party at meltmedia, we wanted to be able to play Cornhole. I don’t know that Cornhole is a regular game played at traditional luaus, but at meltmedia luaus it is. As I am the Chief Tinkerer (see proof on Instagram) at meltmedia, I volunteered to build the game parts for the festivities. If you’re not familiar with Cornhole, it’s a very simple game: Toss little corn-feed-filled cloth bags at a 6″ hole in 24″ x 48″ board that’s about 30′ away from you. For all the official rules, go to (I’m not kidding, here) the Official Cornhole Rules page at the American Cornhole Association website. It’s hard not to giggle.
If you have even the most basic of woodworking skills and tools, you can do this.
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