3D printers, robots and Sonoffs. My Sonoff Basic Wifi switches arrived! My evening was spent getting them working and set up the way I wanted. First step was to connect them and get them going with the stock firmware. I downloaded the EWeLink app and got one of them working. That done, they needed to be reflashed with …

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Interesting evening, and we’ll do it again this Thursday. Earlier in the week, I managed to redesign the pendulum ball holders to snugly fit the magnets in place, as well as being a bit more springy an nicer-looking. My mission for the evening was to print out a few examples and tweak until happy. I did get a few …

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We had an interesting evening. My phone camera is fuzzy, and I forgot to take lots of photos again… Otto showed us his 3D printer battery holder for an ancient Festo drill/driver. Great design, with space for 4 18650 cells and a voltmeter to provide manual discharge cutoff. A really solid way to upcycle a rugged …

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Another successful maker evening! I was so busy that I forgot to take any photos, and I did not make a timelapse, so just a text report this week. Tom brought his little walking robot, an updated version of Bob The Biped . Very nice little robot. Stèph brought his Alphabot 2 robot, which he’s busy getting up and …

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My 3D printer has a detachable x-y stage, which makes it very easy to create a hot wire cutter. In fact, that was the first thing I did when I got the x-y stage working. The cutter is very simple: I hang a rope from the roof, with the cutting wire (a steel guitar string) tied to it, and a 12V supply to heat up the …

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Yesterday evening I hosted a Maker evening in my garage. We had some good discussions and even worked a bit on projects! The garage door was wide open most of the evening, so people had no trouble finding us. Nice warm evening. Timelapse of almost the whole thing here: https://youtu.be/rVXQBAnWsEs Discussions Otto …

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I’ve decided to start holding makers meetups in my garage. I announced it on Facebook on the Arduino Cape Town group and on Zatech Slack. Here’s some info, copied from the announcement posts: Initial announcement: Calling all Makers in the Stellenbosch area! I have a double garage, a bunch of tools for …

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I built a Persistence of Vision speed indicator for my dog, using an Arduino, a few LEDs and resistors, and less than 40 lines of code. This is the story of the process and results. The beginning I’ve had an arduino for ages, but didn’t really have a project that I wanted to build. Then, at the end of 2012, …

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