The Communication Cube


  • The Pyra (like a pandora but better in every way) is now a serious project.
  • Craig has vanished in a cloud of bad feeling
  • Pandoras are about to go out of production due to parts being EOL
  • The repo is doing awesomely
  • The iCP2 came and went in a cloud of confusion
 
  • The Pyra (like a pandora but better in every way) is now a serious project.
  • Craig has vanished in a cloud of bad feeling
  • Pandoras are about to go out of production due to parts being EOL
  • The repo is doing awesomely
  • The iCP2 came and went in a cloud of confusion
Wow.

I've been checking out the Pyra, it looks pretty cool!
 
Hooray! My Pullip Hatsune Miku doll action figure has finally dispatched, now all I have to do is wait 3 weeks for it to turn up. :mellow:

Picture somewhat related.

1324558677920_f.jpg
 
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My CNC mill will soon be operational again. :)

Had it disassembled for a upgrades for a while (by now it only vaguely looks like a ShapeOko, though that's what it was), now I'm finally working on actually /doing/ the upgrade.

I know, stupid to disassemble it way before actually doing the work. I planned to do it right away. But then I was missing parts. And I hate shopping. :-D

But today I bought some lovely steel sheets and started drilling the right holes into them. Only five to go. But four of them are difficult to do accurately and for one of them I don't have an appropriate drilling bit, so let's see... But I think I'll be able to do it without buying something else, so I guess I'll do it tomorrow (it's about 00:00 here, so that's not just a lazy excuse).

Then I've thought of something else which would get me maybe 1cm more working space while sacrificing nothing - but for that I need four screws which I definitely don't have. Hmm.

And I've been working on building a case for a Theremin kit (actually not a kit, but I ordered the most complicated part as an almost finished PCB, sooo - lazy) which has been lying around for a while. I guess I can finish it soon (er or later), then just some fairly easy soldering to go and I've gotten myself a nice digital Theremin for about $80 if I remember parts cost right.
 
And I've been working on building a case for a Theremin kit (actually not a kit, but I ordered the most complicated part as an almost finished PCB, sooo - lazy) which has been lying around for a while. I guess I can finish it soon (er or later), then just some fairly easy soldering to go and I've gotten myself a nice digital Theremin for about $80 if I remember parts cost right.
Very good, I'd like to hear your progress in playing it later on. :)
 
And I've been working on building a case for a Theremin kit (actually not a kit, but I ordered the most complicated part as an almost finished PCB, sooo - lazy) which has been lying around for a while. I guess I can finish it soon (er or later), then just some fairly easy soldering to go and I've gotten myself a nice digital Theremin for about $80 if I remember parts cost right.
 Very good, I'd like to hear your progress in playing it later on. :)
I'll report progress. :)
Actually playing it will probably be much more difficult than building it, but I'll try my best. :)
 
The Steam sale's here. Anybody get anything good yet?
Nope, I've got plenty of DRM-free stuff from the GoG summer sale, which is still on for 18 hours although the awesome bundles are through now.

Screw Steam. :p
 
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The Steam sale's here. Anybody get anything good yet?
 Nope, I've got plenty of DRM-free stuff from the GoG summer sale, which is still on for 18 hours although the awesome bundles are through now.

Screw Steam. :p
You are wrong. Steam is great: I've never, ever bought a game from them and they still are nice enough to host online multiplayer servers, a savegame cloud and all the game data for me, provide me with automatic updates and a decent game launcher for about a hundred games, many of them on Linux. :p

(yes, I got the keys via humblebundles. Yes, I'm pretty sure they don't make a cent from those humblebundle games, because they are selling keys which the developers get for free)

Edit: Oh, and the Theremin case is almost finished. Okay, maybe only 2/3. Anyway, it's starting to look acceptable (I make it from wood and my wood working skills aren't great at all, so you have to take that into account. But considering that, it's okay).
 
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Yes, Linux is the important thing for me were Gog is still behind, but they said that they are working on it.

PS: What kind of wood?
 
PS: What kind of wood?
I'll post a picture of it tomorrow and you tell me. :-D (that's what I mean when I say my wood working skills are bad)Various pieces (left overs) I had lying around. <looking up some words instead of using the German ones which we would both understand :) >

So, two pieces of the same plywood with quite a lot of layers (absolutely overkill for the job, but whatever :-D It's part of the "design"). I think it's hardwood, at least harder than some of the softer ones (that sentence... *g*).

Two other pieces are probably spruce or something similar, soft and cheap. About a third one I could say the same, but I don't know for sure it is the same. :)

I'm aiming for a kind of a block-y design with different woods.

My first idea was to take massive block of wood, somehow make a hole in it for the circuit board and then carve it into a nice form with a surface like the border of the thing: http://homesale24.eu/PIEB/PICS/HolzschaleHandarbeit2.JPG

Thought it would be a nice contrast of the case and the electronical/modern/digital aspect of the instrument itself.

I even found a matching piece of wood (a piece of log of ~10cm in diameter). But when I took it inside it got cracks pretty fast (within hours). That's when I decided I shouldn't be doing anything with massive wood while I don't know how to keep it from cracking (I mean, it's temperature and humidity, I know the rough basics of the theory. But would it have been enough to change temperature and humidity more slowly? Does it stay so sensitive or was that just because it was relatively new wood? All those questions...).

(I could have done the carving, I think. It would have taken lots of time, but I think I know enough of the basics to start learning by doing and my father has the tools)
 
If you're buying wood with the bark still on, you've got to be concerned that it's not been dried yet. Working green (un-dried) wood will expose damp parts of the wood and cause them to dry faster than the rest of the wood, making them tend to fracture off as they shrink. Much better to dry the wood as a whole before working it, although drying wood with the bark still on can be difficult - most commonly wood is prepped before being baked to dry it rapidly and safely.
 
If you're buying wood with the bark still on, you've got to be concerned that it's not been dried yet. Working green (un-dried) wood will expose damp parts of the wood and cause them to dry faster than the rest of the wood, making them tend to fracture off as they shrink. Much better to dry the wood as a whole before working it, although drying wood with the bark still on can be difficult - most commonly wood is prepped before being baked to dry it rapidly and safely.
Oh, I didn't buy it, that log was once part of some tree around our house.So certainly not dried like it should have been, but it had probably been lying around outside but protected from rain for at least a few months or maybe a year, don't know exactly anymore.

So based on what you write when we want to use a log for something else than firewood we should take off the bark somehow before letting it dry?

Edit: And how does baking not make it crack even more? Just wondering... Maybe I should look it up myself, probably the internet has something about it. :)
 
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