Microsft Research never cease to amaze me, I was lucky enough to briefly visit the labs in Cambridge last week and I’ll freely admit I was gushing like a star-struck fan! Engadget have an article up featuring some of the work MSR are doing with Surface and SAR robotics, well worth checking out.
http://www.engadget.com/2011/08/11/microsoft-surface-controlled-robots-to-boldly-go-where-rescuers/
Keegan
For the workspace I’m building I’m combining a set of shelves and a folding desk, as if a set of Hungarian Shelves mated with a writing bureau. I recently build a set of those shelves for the back of my room so these should match nicely.
![284164_10150242651463096_517613095_7464576_3446591_n[1]](https://i0.wp.com/www.jedibowler.com/wp/wp-content/uploads/2011/08/284164_10150242651463096_517613095_7464576_3446591_n1.jpg "284164_10150242651463096_517613095_7464576_3446591_n[1]")
Those shelves (left) were made of two sheets of MDF from B&Q, a bargain at £36 for both as the price included cutting! I’ve gone back to them for the same reason but for this project set myself the challenge of using only one sheet. There should be enough spares left over from both projects to make a TV stand too but that’s a project for a later date.
These are the before and after pictures of the MDF sheet, it was about 5 minutes work for the fellow at B&Q and the cuts are square as can be, a lot quicker and tidier than I could have managed to boot!
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One word of warning, the blade their saw uses is 3mm so factor this in! The last shelf ended up being over an inch shorter after the others but this could work well, I’ll use it as the shelf the desk hinges off and it can act as a conduit for cables.
As with most plans, they are subject to change, I got lucky this time but hopefully someone else will learn from my experience. Hopefully I’ll get a cracking peice of furniture out of this for only £16 and some elbow grease.
Keegan
I’m still getting to grips with CAD, I’ve not really used it since school, and I’ve always preffered jotting things down on paper. At the minute it’s quicker and sketching ideas down on paper seems to make things more real to me. Diffcult to describe but true.
Today I needed some graph paper to draw a quick plan of the required cut for the desk project, B&Q can do the heavy lifting this way, but with the prolification of spreadsheets such paper isn’t easy to come by. Unless you have a printer that is…
http://incompetech.com/graphpaper/
I came across this wonderful site that allows you to generate paper to your specifications, including everything from engineers paper to music score sheet and guitar tab. Put in what you want and it spits out a PDF. Very useful for when you need a couple of sheets of something rather than a whole notepad!
Keegan
As if by magic IEEE Spectrum have posted a guide to setting up your workbench for electronics work, great minds think alike it seems! Peg board wasn’t something I had considered for my build but after seeing this post it or somthing similar is a no brainer.
Keegan
IEEE Spectrum via Boing Boing
Be it a desk, workbench or even the humble table; a workspace is an important place for any aspiring maker. It could be in a shed as is traditional for British inventors, a bedroom, an office or even rubbing shoulders in your local coffee shop. It is therefore fitting that with the rebirth of my blog into a more structured and regular part of my life my first project will be the creation of my new workspace.
An Englishman’s home may be his castle but a makers home is their workshop.
I live in a one bedroom flat so space is at a premium, I’ve a living room that has to wear many hats so having a permanent space to be creative is a must and something I’ve lacked thus far. My plan is to build a set of shelves on one of the walls with a folding desk attached below. Hopefully it will be simple but effective, it should prove fun to make and most importantly will give me a corner of my flat in which to tinker.
This won’t be a carpenters blog however as my interests are in programming, electronics, 3d printing, gaming, technology in general and pretty much anything shiny that beeps. I’ve experience with Arduino, Netduino, the recently announced .NET Gadgeteer and more Microsoft developer technologies than I can remember.
More posts should be coming over the coming week, I should be getting the wood for the desk tomorrow and the building can begin in earnest. Ladies and gentlemen, start your Dremels!
Keegan
A few years back I came up with a challenge for myself, to cook everything I eat. Seems simple enough but I intend to make bread, condiments and all the treats we order from the take away from time to time too! The intent of the challenge is to eat healthier, hopefully save some cash but most importantly learn new tricks and recipes at the same time. The challenge will culminate in a BBQ at the end of the month with everything home made, including the beer…
I’m also trying to source ingredients as locally as possible, in Reading we are lucky enough to have a good farmers market and there is a food coop that set up shop once a week around the corner. I’ve food growing on the balcony
The challenge started yesterday with Lamb Meatballs and Pea Pilaf which came out very tasty! Cooking rice in stock isn’t something I’d tried before and as the water reduced it made a very nice sauce, something new learned on day one!
Today I’m baking some bread and having Toad in the Hole for tea, tomorrow will be pizza bases for the freezer and my first batch of ketchup.
Stay tuned for more, I’ve also received parts for my 3d printer and I’ll be building that too so the techy side of my blog wont be overlooked. Hopefully I’ll be printing egg cups in no time to tie the two together. 
Stay tuned for more!
Keegan
In my first post last year I stated that my New Years resolution was to build more stuff, the Jukebox lights are wired up and that project is more or less done. One of my other ambitions mentioned was to design and build a UAV.
Now, I’m a Microsoft guy. It’s what I know and do for a living so I know thier developer stack pretty well so upon learning of the Netduino a plan came together and this years project was born! So far I’ve the Netduino, a Razor 9 DOF sensor board and a plan! I’ve been following other similar projects such as Aeroquad and I plan to blog the project as I go.
The plan is currently fluid, I’ve not built anything like this before though have flown model helicopters before. I’ve a few specifications that the copter will be built around;
I’ve set myself quite a challenge though as with all my projects it should be a hell of a lot of fun and quite a challenge. Stay tuned for more…
I’m not finished yet however the lights are in the Jukebox and I thought I’d post a pic of a test I performed by hardwiring the lights to be green;
It’s the first time since I’ve owned the Jukebox that it has been lit up like this, not long after buying it I tried with EL wire but frankly it looked terrible. The outer band used to be transparent, for those interested I used a glass etching spray to give it that frosted look and to diffuse the light. It looks far better in person that this picture would suggest.
I’m currently working on finalising the circuitry to control them as well as the code to control the colour from the PC. I’ve been mostly successful with my prototypes but there are a few bugs to iron out yet.
Still, the wiring for the lights was by far the biggest hurdle so should be quicker progress from now on.
Keegan
I’ve been having an issue for a long time now where video hosted on WHS is played back in Media Center and seemingly randomly the video stutters or stops completely and the UI becomes unresponsive for a while. After a lot of digging and troubleshooting both in Media Center and Windows Home Server I discovered a simple trick which laid the issue bare.
When the issue occurs you can look at task manager on WHS then it may appear that there is little CPU utilisation, the trick here is to add the columns “IO Read”, “IO Write” and “IO Other”. You will likely see that DEMigrator.exe has numbers increasing in “IO Other” when the stuttering is happening. I implemented a fix from the We Got Served Forums and it seems to have worked a treat! I followed the workaround on the page, repeated here for my records and as it will be easier for me to find and pass on. 🙂
The fix is very simple to implement, just create two text files with the contents below and rename them as indicated. Create two scheduled tasks, one for on and one for off, and set them to run over night. I have mine set so DEMigrator is running for three hours between 3am-6am. You will get an error about the service not running but other than that all should be well.
DemigratorOff.bat
@echo off sc stop "DriveExtenderMigrator" sc config "DriveExtenderMigrator" start= disabled exit
@echo off sc config "DriveExtenderMigrator" start= demand sc start "DriveExtenderMigrator" exit
Keegan
I’ve a Touch Diamond 2 that tends to remain connected to my PC when at work however as my desk tends to be messy at the best of times I wanted some form of cradle to keep my phone tidy at least. As any reader of my blog will know I’m also a fan of reusing old parts lying around and I just had a brainwave.
I’ve had an old AMD CPU cooler on my desk for a while and until now I’ve been using it to hold cups of tea, with a simple flex of one of the bracket slots at the back and some prodding of a standard USB cable I have a holder. It’s actually very sturdy and it’s the simple hacks I’m a fan of. One DIY phone cradle, no tools required.
Regards,
Keegan
