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REConnector PCB

This is definitely the smallest and simplest PCB I’ve ever designed. It’s 14.6mm x 7.9mm. That’s it.

But why!? Well, if you saw the last post about the Pin Bender, this is the second part… once those pins are straightened out, we put the lil PCB on there.

These rotary encoders come with right angle headers, and they work great in a breadboard, but I often have to solder wires to the rotary encoder PCB. I used to solder wires directly to the pins, and then heat shrink them on. That was terrible!

After that I desoldered the pins to get to the holes to solder on wires. That was also terrible!

I need to solder wires onto these things often enough that designing a Pin Bender and getting some PCBs fabricated totally made sense from a cost & time perspective. The PCBs are super cheap because they are so small. They serve a specific purpose, and that’s great.

Each board comes out just under 9 cents. (Not including shipping which was almost double that cost, but I ordered three different PCBs in one order.) It’s worth 9 cents on a BOM to me for the time it saves, so I consider it a win.

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Pin Bender (or Unbender)

I often use these rotary encoders that come with right angle pin headers, but I don’t want right angle pin headers, I want straight pin headers. So I designed a small tool to fix that.

The Pin Bender (or Unbender) is useful for straightening (or “unbending”) header pins. Got some 90 degree pins you wish were 0 degree pins? We gotcha covered.

Slide the Pin Bender onto the pins, and then unbend! (Or straighten. I don’t know… you choose the terminology you like best.)

Now bend it… like somebody who bends things. (Bender!?) Now you got some straight pins. Or zero degree pins. Whatever.

Pretty cool, right? Did I mention it’s parametric? Well, it is. You want to edit the OpenSCAD file to make one for 8 pins? Go for it. 6 Pins? Okay. 13 pins. I guess so. All yours.

You can get the STL files and .scad file from Printables.com – Pin Bender. Print ’em if you need ’em!

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The (In Progress) Tool Holder

It’s been a while since I posted about The (Old) Tool Holder but I did make some progress… Twice! I worked on the holders for wire cutters and wire strippers and made some progress.

I was mostly pleased with the wire stripper holder, though I can see a few improvements to do next time…

I do like that I can reorder the tools if needed. That was one of the main ideas of using the dovetail connections…

This version lasted about a day or two. I got annoyed by the holder for the wire cutters and made a change to the model…

And then I printed another one. Oh, yeah, I did end up changing the filament so we get a nice Prusa golden color this time!

The small modification help keep the wire cutters closed and they sit better in the holder. With the old wooden version I just sort of hacked at the wood so I could jam the cutters in and they would hold in place and hold shut. With modeling something it’s a bit different, but we’re getting there!

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Why are you sharing things online?

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It’s 2023, and I think it’s a fair question… Why are you sharing things online?

If I look back to when I started sharing things online, which was probably around 1995 or so, it was because I was learning a lot from the Internet. I remember printing out this file at work that was probably 25 pages which was some Perl documentation. (Remember, this is before people had laptops or phones that could access the Internet.) I read those Perl docs when I was “offline” and when I would get back to a computer I would try things out. This is how I learned Perl, and I learned it because people were willing to write up documentation and post it online. Because others shared, I was able to learn, and from that point on I felt that sharing information and knowledge was something I wanted to do.

Of course this blog started in 1997, but I had been sharing a bit before that. A weblog (or “blog” as it was later named) seemed a perfect fit for me. I entered the publishing world as a hobby around 1986, and professionally in 1994. Moving from zines and magazines to electronic publishing seemed like the thing to do at the time. I also ended up working in book publishing for a bit, and the reason I got those gigs was due to publishing my work electronically on the Internet.

So for me, those two aspects; wanting to share what I learned so other could learn, and being involved in (and enjoying) publishing for most of my life… are the reasons I share.

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DotBot (Another Mastodon Bot)

Well, it’s been two weeks since I wrote about the @WeShouldBuild bot on Mastodon and somehow I created another bot. This one is called @DotBot and it creates a new piece of dot-based art once per day. (You can see an example above.)

I once again used Mastodon.py for this (GitHub and Docs) and there are twice as many lines of code for this one, which is still less than 50 lines. This one generates an image, saves it to disk, then posts that along with a small amount of text. A cron job kicks things off at 8:30am CST every day.

As for these dots? I realized it’s something I’ve been toying with for over a decade!

The image above was generated with a Processing sketch in April 2011. At that point I had probably been using Processing for less than a year. I had a lot of fun exploring creating images with code.

Here’s some fun I had with the images being projected onto a large while wall and taking photos of myself in front of it.

I found a folder dated September 2017 that had a bunch of generated images which I think I may have compiled into a video with each image being a frame. (I’ve done this other times, I just can’t find an output file for these. I probably did them last minute for the Maker Faire Milwaukee Dark Room and never got a chance to document them!)

I did find these images in the folder though… Not sure what I was doing, but I like it. If I had to dig up some related things I’d pick annular (more info) from 2013 and maybe Shape Grid Circles from 2019. I realized there are a few other related things but maybe they warrant their own post. Especially if I can find the videos. (If not, I can recreate them.)

Okay, that went a bit off course (of course) but the important thing is, if you’re on the Fediverse and want to see new dot-based colorful art each day, just follow @dotbot@botsin.space

And if you’re not on the Fediverse you can still get the RSS feed! Just grab https://botsin.space/@dotbot.rss

Note: The botsin.space server will shut down in December 2024.