cyborgworkshop.org

Just some shots I forgot to upload.

This is my little workshop in the basement. Nothing too special. The computer rack is pretty much empty now (thank you vmware) and the toolbox is a $40 homedepot special. The desk itself is 8ft by 3ft with a 1ft ledge and the monitors are a 23 and a 15. They are hinged to the table and can fold backwards. What you can’t see is a drill press on the other side of the toolbox.

The one neat thing about the lab is the spool holder. I made this from a reject levolor mini blind. I just took all of the slats out of it and mounted the mechanism to my ceiling. The bar is a $2 curtain rod mounted to the blind base with a couple of screws and nuts. I use zip ties to keep the various spools separated from each other.  I just lift it into the ceiling when I don’t need it and lower it down when I do.

The wife and kids bought me a USB microscope for fathers day that I promptly hacked. I got rid of the cheap base and mounted it to a 3rd arm, then I took and drilled 2mm holes about 70 degrees apart from each other all around the focus knob. I mounted a screw on multimeter probe with a harddrive bearing bolted to it into the holes and now I have a very fine motor way to adjust the focus of the scope. The stock way was prone to sticking and could be frustrating.

Last is the latest change to WHIA. Instead of controlling the dampers in the basement, I’m moving to controlling the registers. To that end I bought a whole bunch of tiny servos and I’m modifying the vents to fit them directly into the register. The servo’s shaft actually becomes the pivot point for the vent and allows me very simple torque transfer without any of the clearance issues that I ran across when I tried a linkage style mount. Works great, very quiet, look for more of this soon.