The year is coming to an end, the Holiday season is approaching. In case you are looking for a nice present: I have completed my version of a sand clock: a clock writing the time into sand:
Sandclock
If you are interested to build your own version, I have documented the different steps with tips and tricks…
I’m experimenting with different 3D printed LED frames printed with ABS (see “Avoid Warping ABS on Ultimaker 2“). I frame multiple Adadfruit 8×8 NeoPixel WS2812B LED modules with 3D printed diffuser and frames to create color effects:
Diffuser with Frame Effect
3D printing is like cooking or like BBQ: It is more about barometric pressure, humidity and temperature than you might think of. To me, printing (and cooking) is a combination of art and science. And as with cooking, sometimes the result is not usable.
I’m very happy with the Ultimaker 2 printing PLA material. For a LED matrix project I have to use ABS as this material is suitable for higher temperature: PLA simply will not stand the heat produced by the LEDs I’m going to use. And here the joy ended: printing using ABS was definitely no fun. While the first small test print came out OK, I produced afterwards a pile of unusable parts because of warping :-(.
Pile of bad ABS Parts
As a remote controller for the Sumo robot (see “Zumo Robot with Magnetic Encoders“) we have used so far a combination of NXP FRDM-KL25Z board and a Joystick Shield (see “Joystick Shield with nRF24L01 driving a Zumo Robot“). That solution was not ideal, so this weekend I created a 3D printed prototype:
tinyK20 Remote Controller
In “openHAB RGB LED Light Cube with WS2812B and NXP Kinetis” I started experimenting Kinetis boards, a LED cube diffuser and Adafruit WS2812B NeoPixel LEDs. That worked well, but I was not to very happy about the visual effect. So here is my next version: I wanted to have control over each side of the cube. For this I have built a cube inside the cube with a 3D printed structure:
Bare LED Cube
Does everybody still know why in the ‘old’ days there was the need for running a ‘screen saver’ on the computer? With the modern LCD displays they lost their initial purpose. After “3D Printed Classic Mac Apple Watch Charging Station” I’m doing more ‘good old days’ 3D printing. The ‘elder ones’ might remember the “After Dark” screen saver software for Apple Macintosh and Microsoft Windows machines. Yes, that was 1991! For me most famous and iconic theme were the “Flying Toasters”:
Flying Toasters
Now there is a 3D printed version 🙂
Flying Toaster SD Card Holder
One of the first machine I used for development many years ago was a Apple Classic Macintosh computer. My days of development with Pascal and Modula-2 are long gone. But with the availability of 3D printers I can print a Classic Mac :-). But now it is not used for development: I use it to charge an Apple Watch:
3D Printed Apple Watch Charging Station
The tinyK20 boards are now used in several projects. Initially I was considering a commercial USB thumb drive enclosure for it. But this needed some tweaking of the enclosure so at the end it was not ideal. 3D printing is probably that hot topic for 2016. So why 3D printing an enclosure for that board?
3D Printed Enclosure for the tinyK20 board
MCU on Eclipse 