It was pretty easy to build a large wood frame shed or mini workshop, actually. Used wood framing that is 24-inch-on-center, salt box roof design, and a cool storage unit type of steel roll-up door.

Starting the next generation Fitbit Cheat-O-Matic, but changing the name, switching to proper high-end bearings, and make a sturdier base and cam follower mechanism. Should be slick if everything fits nicely and plays nicely.

The last two FitBit competitions at the office didn’t work out for me as far as timing. I was injured both times, so I build a machine to run the heck out of my FitBit! This time around, however, I’m healthy and kicking butt! This article is just my thoughts on our FitBit competitions and FitBit cheating.

We’re moving! Not real far, but we’re moving. My commute to the office is about 30 minutes, which isn’t horrible, but in a 5.7-liter V8 truck, it’s not as cheap as it could be, either. My wife’s commute is an hour, poor thing. BUT, we happened upon a great house sitting on 0.8 acres of land centrally located in the metro Phoenix area only ten minutes away from my office and 15 minutes away from my wife’s.

I highlighted the 0.8 acres of land because… DETACHED WORKSHOP!!!

I was watching old engineering videos from 1939 on YouTube one day and saw a cool demonstration of a cam and follower in a machine of unknown purpose. I realized then that I could make a very simple contraption using 3D printing and a geared DC motor to shake a Fitbit up and down very easily. It could be super-simple to assemble, cheap to print all the parts but the motor and probably run off a simple 12V wall wart power supply.

I have always engineered my projects by the seat of my pants. I will get an idea and I just start plugging things together in the workshop or man cave. At best, I will breadboard parts of a larger electronics project to make sure the ideas work, but mostly, I just build on-the-fly. Grab a piece of wood and throw it on the bandsaw, try the fit, trim it there, sand it there and then glue and screw. Quick and easy. Just me, the material and the tools.

Certain projects I’m working on are getting closer to possible products or kits. That means I’ll need a more well-defined plan that others can work with in helping to produce these things. That means CAD!

A while back I wrote an article for MAKE’s blog about Charlieplexing LEDs with an AVR or Arduino. I just wanted to drop this quick update on how to ‘plex 20 LEDs. I’ve now had TWO different people ask about doing more than 12 LEDs.

I created a Gist on GitHub to control the LEDs and a matching and labeled schematic to demonstrate 20 Charlieplexed LEDs, but I’ve not actually tested the setup or the code (FYI).

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…