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I've made good progress on the console, despite the dork lamp and other sidetracks. I've finished the back panels and sorted out my interior and exterior lighting solutions. A couple of weeks ago I ordered a handful of goodies from All Electronics including three different potential lighting solutions to test out:

Image on the left was taken with the camera flash on, the right with it off.

From left to right we have a cool white cold cathode florescent light (CCFL) a neutral white LED strip and a cool white LED strip. They all run off of 12V DC, but the CCFL requires a small transformer to step up the line voltage. The LEDs are pretty cool because they are on an adhesive backed strip and have a very low profile which will make mounting a snap.

After a few tests in the shop and getting an important second opinion on light color I decided on the neutral white LEDs. Though the LEDs are more expensive than the CCFL tubes and don't put out quite as much light the ease of mounting, lower profile, greater robustness and simpler power requirements won the day. The little sample sized, about six inches, strip in the above pictures is going to be perfect for the interior lights for the console. I need two more strips that length for the interior and another 3' for the exterior back lighting.

In addition to buying some gizmos for the console I also finished the three panels for the back. Each of the panels consists of a mortise & tenoned walnut frame around a 3/8" book matched, raised cherry panel. I made the panels by cutting 1" cherry boards in half across the thickness (known as resawing) and opening them up like book and gluing together on edge. I resawed them by hand using my shop made frame saw.

From the back, just held in place with blue tape for now. These aren't going to be permanently installed but held in place with thumb screws for easy removal when I need access to the equipment inside. I'm getting threaded metal inserts which I'll mount in the carcass back and use machine screws to hold the panels in place, which will give a much longer service life than just trying to use wood screws.

Close up of one of the book matched panels.

Above we have the front view of the console with a stand-in top for shade. The first is, obviously, the interior unlit and the next two are with the LED strip aimed straight back and the other with it aimed down. I'm still undecided on which way I'll mount them but I'm leaning toward aimed backwards. I know in the test shots the shoulder plane looks better under the straight down light but this isn't going to be a display cabinet and the shelves will be much fuller So I think the dramatic effect of the interior lighting will be better with the light hitting the back panels instead of just hitting the top of the top piece of stereo gear in there.

The build so far hasn't been without error, here's the project blooper reel:

Something went horribly wrong when I hammered the draw bore pegs home on this corner of the frame. The peg didn't bend and instead pushed through at an angle and blew out a large chunk of the frame. I found the missing piece and epoxied it back in place later. However I had to carve a notch for the peg since it didn't come close to lining up with the existing hole. I filled all the voids with epoxy.

Screwed up my marking when sizing one of the frames and ended up short. I thought about scrapping the panel and redoing it and then I realized that if I left the horns on it would line up on the top and if I put this panel behind the drawers the gap won't be seen. As a bonus this answered the question of how to run power and other connections into the unit.

I was having so much fun plowing grooves for the center panel that I did this one twice, one out and one in.

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Dork Lamp
Entered: 2010-07-31
Edited: 2010-07-31
Type: workshop

I recently did a lot of cleaning and reorganizing in my home office and dug up a lot of old and/or broken hard drives and a lot of other misc junk. After taking apart the hard drives for the magnets I noticed than one of them, an old Seagate 1.2GB drive, had a pretty stylish top cover that might look neat as a project enclosure of some sort. I also came across a stash of spare lights I'd bought for a car I no longer own, my old Grand Prix I think. A few ideas started rolling around in my little ole head until one of them fell out. I took that idea, along with my little pile of junk out to the shop and started assembling some other spare bits my idea wanted me to find.

The junk I settled on for my project:

Perrier bottle (free)

Top of hard disk case (free)

Replacement bulb for a tail/brake/turning signal light (free)

5.5V 1200 mA wall wart power supply (free)

USB extension cable (free)

3/4" ID copper pipe (free - I bought it for making ferrules for chisel handles etc... still have plenty left)

Some walnut from the scrap bin (not pictured)
simple twist switch ($2 at Lowes, only part I bought just for this project)

With all my junk collected I sketched out a real simple design for a little desk lamp, using the top of the bottle as a lamp shade. I cut the top off the bottle and polished the rim a little to make it look nice. Then I soldered some leads onto the bulb to make it easier to work with and combined the two

I did some testing to see what voltage would be best shoot for and hooked the bulb into an ATX power supply and ran it off the 12V rails, it was a little bright and a lot too hot, the glass nearest the bulb heated up to hot to touch in about five minutes. Tried again on the 5V rails and was much happier with the heat.

Next up was to cut apart the USB extension cable. I wanted to use the female connector as a power plug on the lamp and the male end on the power supply so the lamp isn't tied to this power source, I upgrade easily by just splicing a male USB connector onto another power supply if I want to.

I opted to use the red and black leads in the USB cable for my power. I don't know if this conforms to USB specs or not so I won't be plugging this into a computer any time soon!

After sorting out the electrical my next step was to build the actual structure. My design called for a wooden base connected to a smaller wooden top that would hold the actual light. I dug some nice looking walnut cut offs from my scrap bin, cut them size, squared and flattened them. I put a nice chamfer along all the edges and corners too, for a refined, modern look.

The base was easy I just needed to drill an angled through hole for the copper pipe to fit into. The only challenge was finding a drill bit the right size. My pipe is 3/4" inside diameter and has an outside diameter slightly greater than 7/8" but not quite 15/16" either. Fortunately I have an adjust able auger bit that works a treat in my big 14" brace so I just drilled a couple of test holes in scrap until I had a good fit. Tight enough that the pipe didn't wobble but open enough to leave room for the epoxy. I eyeballed the angle and drilled away.

The top part was trickier, first I had to make sure it's mounting hole was at a matching angle to the base so it would come together level. Then I had to figure out how to attached the bottle top to the wood and wire it up. To match the angle of the holes I put the base on top of the top piece, with the top of the base on the bottom of the top, clamped them up tight and started my hole with them together, thus ensuring a matching angle, without having to measure anything. I separated the two and finished drilling the hole for the top, stopping just short of breaking through the other side.

With the mounting holes for the pipe done I needed to figure out a way to attach the bottle top shade. I came up with the rather clever idea to cut a notch, much like the pin side of a dovetail joint, that matched the angel on the bottle's shoulder with the top of the notch slightly smaller than the threads on the very top of the bottle. It fits perfectly. On the under side I also carved in a V notch for the wires to run along, as you can see in the above picture.

With the wooden parts ready I cut the pipe to length, just eyeballing after holding all the bits together. One important thing to do was to cut an angel on each end of the pipe that matched the angel of the mounting holes. This maximized the amount of the pipe embedded into the wood and thus secured with the epoxy.

Before putting it all together I drilled a couple of holes in the side of the pipe to thread the power cord in and out of, and buffed out the pipe and the hard drive cover to a nice sheen. While the epoxy was curing on the structural bits I finished wiring the "circuit" inside the cover, mounted the switch, drilled out holes for the mounting screws and cut notches for the USB socket and for power back up into the pipe. I used a dremel and files for the USB notched until a I remember I have a sheet metal nibbler which I used for the notch for the power lines to exit the cover.

At some point in the process I put my standard finish on the walnut, boiled linseed oil and garnet shellac. Rubbed it down to a low, satin sheen since I think the metal parts have all the shiny this lamp needed.

Finished:

The last shot shows it on my desk, as the only light on the in room. It makes a nice night / accent light but isn't really useful otherwise. But the point of this project was to use up a bunch of otherwise wasted gear and have some fun with an out of the box design. I did leave myself some flexibility to modify it later on. Specifically I want to replace the bulb with a few LEDs and I have a neat idea for making the light source modular so I can build a few different bottle top "bulbs" and swap them out at will. There's more than enough room under the cover for some simple circuits that could control a colored LED array or react to sound etc... I plan on using this as an ongoing learning platform as I try to learn more about DIY electronics and circuit design.

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Saying goodbye to an old friend
Entered: 2010-07-28
Edited: 2010-07-28
Type: essay

After a nearly a dozen years of faithful service I finally decided to retire my old server Discworld For a long while ole DW hosted this site, ran email for the domain, was the primary DNS server for acerbic, served as my firewall/router and was a file/print server at home. When I (foolishly) left Alaska for Texas I transferred DW's public duties to a virtual private server at a colocation company. When I got setup in Houston DW continued to do all of the internal server duties at first. Gradually it started to shed services. Without a static IP and public facing services on the home network there was less of a need for advanced firewall services and the router that came free with my Vonage account was more than adequate and required less maintenance. We bought printers that were already network aware and file server duties were being usurped by a newer server on the network built out with larger drives. All that remained uniquely DW's job was DNS.

Recently it became clear that it was time to consolidate services and sadly poor old DW was just not up to the challenge. It's successor, a server named Bollocks, had newer hardware, more disk and in general was much more respectable and maintainable. DW was something of a victim of it's own success always serving critical roles on the network I was loathe to take it offline for maintenance for long so in some cases hardware was held in with tape, it was running such an old RedHat distro that the only way to update any software would have been a total system reinstall. When consolidation time came it was much easier to take Bollocks offline for an OS upgrade and start transferring DW's services and data. In the end despite the aged software and bodged together hardware DW's uptime at final shutdown time was a respectable 217 days. It's last shutdown was to remove a bad HDD that was throwing enough errors to affect performance. Before that it was hurricane Ike. Despite the heoric uptimes it was only a matter of time - the system drive had a bad bearing and each reboot took more and more coaxing before the drive would concede to spin up.

I can't quite bring myself to just pitch it though, or even take it to the recycling center. Instead I want to take the motherboard out, clean it, and set the whole thing in clear casting resin and sorta make like a thick tile with it and set a few white LED's along the edge. I still have the MB from the very first PC I put together from parts myself so I figure I can do them both and use them as tiles in the top a work table or desk in my home office. A couple guys I work with have a lot of experience working with small castings like this so I think I can pull it off with some advise from them...

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Entertainment Console
Entered: 2010-06-17
Edited: 2010-06-19
Type: woodworking

I've been making slow but steady progress on the new entertainment console the past few weeks. I've glued up the actual case and fitted and installed all of the shelving.

The center divider is installed in a dados (grooves that run the width of a board) in the bottom and across the three top pieces. The divider and the case sides also have matching dados to hold the shelves. While dados are an easy joint to cut a lot of care has to be taken when laying them out to accept shelves in a wide piece like this, it doesn't take a large deviation to end up with crooked shelves. It's best to lay them out and cut them before gluing the work since it can be a bit awkward to do that once a large case piece is assembled.

After assembling the case I finished fitting the center divider and then prepped the shelves. All of the shelves are pine, like the divider and after being cut to size and fitted were painted with a semi-gloss black paint. I just used a water based acrylic interior grade paint from the hardware store.

And here we have the unit with the shelves installed and painted. Right now I'm working on the frame-and-panel assemblies for the back of the case. I decided to go with three back panels instead of four because with three panels on the back I should only ever need to remove the left or right panel to have good access to all the equipment from the rear in normal use. With four panels I figured I'd be removing two panels every time I needed access, which would get annoying. Once the panels are done I'll install threaded brass inserts in the case so I can use machine thread thumbscrews to hold the back panels on securely. It's also about time to start ordering the electronics going into the unit and planning their placement. Ventilation for cooling remains an issue, in particular I want to find a way to vent hot air that doesn't involve putting a big hole in the back somewhere, I really, really, really want to have the option down the road of placing this console in the middle of a room (with the back exposed) and not have to plan on putting it up against a wall for ever and ever. More on that later on though.

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