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Some idle entertainments to while away my retirement. A poor man's makerspace I have over the years taken on small jobs - sign making and such - on the hill.

I am starting to move away from searching out those types of jobs and am concentrating more on being a maker space - working on my own designs and fabrications without looking to sell the final product. I am still interested in hearing about novel jobs, and will still support my friends on the hill when I can. I'll also still make items that we might sell at local craft shows, but those efforts are going to take a backseat to things like the 40 foot tall steel yeti (and wifi tower) I hope to construct on the property. Ok, just kidding on the yeti. I'm still working with simple cut vinyls, printed and cut vinyls, laser engraved acrylic and wood, laser cut acrylic, wood, and paper, laser marked metals (using cermark) and anodized aluminum, CNC routered wood and soft metals, and plasma cut steel. Also, wood working, and lathe and mill work in metal.

13/02/2026

Made a few banners for the Next Step folk up here on the hill. All are 2x6 feet in size and use a printable vinyl banner material and various colored Oracal 651 vinyls. Added grommets and hemming to complete.

I had to create a new workshop in the house, since Pine Squirrel workshop is becoming a bit more than I can physically access or move around in. The household workshop isn't really big enough to lay out 6 foot banners but I was able to get it done with what I had.

Only 1 has been hung but I'll add pictures of the other two in the wild, once they are there. Based on how that first banner was hung, I provided Next Step with hardware to hang the banners and, hopefully survive any high wind events.

07/09/2025

FRC Poster in the wild. With Chris, Penny, and Colleen attending. Appears they are using shower curtain rings to hang it.

22/08/2025

Made a 2x7 foot banner for the Foothill Resource Center in Challenge. Used pre-grommetted (every 2 feet) banner material. I extended each end of the banner another 6 inches past the end grommets, tape hemmed the resulting edges, and applied a grommet in each corner to complete the full seven foot length. Trees and text were cut from green and nutbrown Oracal 651 vinyl, weeded and applied to the banner. The banner will be used at FRC booths set up during local events.

I'll get a picture of the banner hanging in the wild at some future point.

18/08/2025

Moon night light V1 is pretty much finished. I designed up and 3D printed a simple base with a well to hold a light source and the moon globe.

I opted to use an Adafruit Circuit Playground microcomputer for the light source. It also has a light sensor and I was hoping to use that to turn the lights on and off but it isn't sensitive enough to provide a wide enough range of light intensities. It supposedly can detect light in a range of 0 to 1000 (its own units, 1000 is bright), but it returned a 25-27 no matter the light level. Oh well, that'll be for another day.

The Circuit Playground is a fully programmable computer with lots of sensor options and I plan on playing with the moon in the future. Let it have more interactions and responses to the environment than just a silly night light in a single, unvarying color.

Base and moon are made from PLA+ in white and black. Moon is a 17 hour print and the base is 2 hours.

09/07/2025

Posted this on my personal page but it really belongs here. I 3D printed a 7 inch diameter moon from basic pearl white PLA. The design isn't mine. This is a lithophane and designed to be illuminated from the interior. I just set it on an iPhone for now. The shell varies in thickness with thinner portions allow more light to pass through. The pattern of shadows then produces the features of the moon.

I'm in the process of designing a base that will hold a 1 inch long, flexible LED noodle (Adafruit item 6141, for instance) halfway up in the ball to provide illumination. It'll run off 3V (2AA batteries). I'll post the finished base when I'm done.

08/07/2025

The new sign in situ (at the thrift store as guessed). I made the vinyl portion of the sign, not the wood frame (or the big wood frame it's hanging from).

05/07/2025

Swapped out the old and put in the new. Dates, that is. Updated the Mountain Fair advert sign I made a while ago. This will hang, I think, at the Thrift Store (or maybe the Brownsville sign). Sign is about 2x7 feet. The Fair moved from August dates to July dates. Used gloss black Oracal 651 vinyl. Date cut from a single 5ft piece of vinyl, weeded, masked and applied in one fell swoop

08/06/2025

Experimented a bit with 3D printing a Lithophane. Imagine a black and white photo where the thickness of the paper provides varying shades of gray when a light is shined from the back. Instead of painting the image with charcoal on white paper, you are painting the image with gray shades of light. Now, if you affix a color image of the photo to the back of the thin/thick sheet of paper and shine a light through it, you will see a 'colorized' version of your shades of light. The effect, as I use it, creates an ethereal version of the original image. Works for low light uses like night lights or mood lights, I'm not sold on uses that need to provide brighter lights.

In any case, the original image needs a bit more preprocessing to smooth out the highlights on the face (and elsewhere), but for a first try it gives me some ideas.

4x4 inch printed result. Uses basic PLA filament in Cyan, Magenta, Yellow, and White colors. Took about 10 hours to print on a Bambu Labs Carbon X1 printer with AMS, 0.2mm nozzle.

27/02/2025

Apparently, the Water District workers doing their jobs out in the foothills, in unmarked trucks, were generating calls back to the office. People were reporting that some guys in white trucks were messing with the District's meters and equipment. I created 4 sets of vinyl door stickers for them to explicitly brand their vehicles as belonging to the Water District. I installed 3 sets today and the 4th set went to the District until they determine which vehicle to place the set on. Black Oracal 651 vinyl placed on front passenger and driver side doors.

07/11/2024

Missed Halloween but these are kinda fun. I have two sets of eyes that will, eventually, track a person in front of them. One is fully digital and is finished. The other is a mechanical version that still needs realistic eyeballs and the tracking hardware (an 8x8 pixel, IR camera) tied into the system; it's arriving next week. The design came from the web. I 3D printed the animatronic eyes from PLA filament, and modified the controlling software (C++) to poll the camera, calculate where the hottest spot in frame is, and moved the eyes to look in that direction.

The digital eyes will be part of a flying ghost marionette I built a couple decades ago. The parts came from Adafruit but I'll modify the software once it's installed on the marionette to give it some more personality. The mechanical eyes I think will be in a little window in the front door. Give trespassers something that'll pay attention to them.

05/11/2024

Swapped out the paper hours sign on the door of Books & More. New sign is a coated aluminum sign blank, with Oracal 651 glossy black vinyl lettering, and magnets to hold it to the door.

22/09/2024

Wall-E's eyes are finished, and in the process of printing the first 30 (of 70) treads needed to roll on the terra. Sanding and painting are soon going to take over the schedule. Then the electronics.

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