I built a doll house for a work event concerning climate change. It’s based on the typical small house as abundant in the city of Ghent. I used it during the event to promote green roofs. It actually proved invaluable to explain several concepts, like how it feels to have a green roof in your view instead of black EPDM.
I used leftover materials, wood glue, hot glue and brats (nails). No Playmobil® kitties were harmed.
I made a book safe for my Secret Santa via Make in Belgium (Facebook group, also known from Koterij with Henk Rijckaert). It’s based on arduino. I did everything myself: programming, creating and printing case. I truly didn’t enjoy cutting in the book. It was a lot more work than anticipated.
Parts list:
Apparently, when you knit something, you should “block” it. Meaning: making it wet and stretch/attach it to something to get (or keep?) the right shape. When I have to wash a knitted item I tend to panic. I’m really not into knitting. Someone else was however, and she wanted “something with measurements” to make the blocking easier for the many little pieces she was working on. Might have been blankets for a whole family of mice, I don’t know.
So I made a 20*20 cm thing in Fusion 360, with logo and 1 cm intervals. You can download it here.
When having a 3D-printer for the first time, one is obligated to print a lot of useless stuff before making something, ah, less useless. So I printed a whole set of 3D-Catan tiles. I painted e few of them (in the foreground). When they are all painted (by 2030?) it will be cool!
I also bought 500 magnetic balls (Ø3 mm). I will design a matching base, drop in the balls and glue them to the tiles. The tiles will then stick together, or so says the internet.
My parents have a nice and – quite – luxurious Camper. They bought it when it was a few years old but barely used. As usual my Dad started to make improvements immediately, all while complaining about “bad design and worse implementation”.
Quite soon he found out that the locking mechanism wasn’t an exception. When closing a lock there’s some stress on the lock housing, and it cracks after a while. Probably worsened because of a higher brittleness caused by UV or plastic ageing. New locks could be ordered, but for a hefty price tag.
Enter me and my brand new Ender 3 Pro 3D-printer. I made a copy with Fusion360 and many, many iterations later we have a functioning replacement. I tried to use PETG, but layer bonding wasn’t as strong as PLA.
Apparently eggs don’t grow on trees, but drop out of cloacae. A fancy name for a multi-functional butt hole. I made mine a fully enclosed dinosaur cage, which was quite handy during the bird flu. It also prevents them from getting eaten. One of the 2 dinosaurs dropped dead anyway and got eaten in very small increments.
A tried to make a dinosaur house using advised dimensions. As usual, scope creep gave the house an actual living roof. I’m surprised that almost 2 years later, the plants are still alive.
In spring 2021 I had to electrify my cargobike. The combined weight of 2 kids just became too much. It’s a “bakfiets.nl”, first generation, so the Bafang engine didn’t easily fit. Nothing a bit of cutting and welding couldn’t fix :-).
I also upgraded the back brake and strengthened the cargo part.It used to be painted with Shaun the sheep, but Shaun had shed a lot of his wool so the kids were allowed to choose something new.
The fat unicorn is based on a internet GIF, that I can’t find the correct source for. The shark is my own design.
After 9 months and ~3.500 km, the biggest challenge is that I have to recharge often (really not that superb quality battery-management wise). Bolts and stuff tend to come loose faster. On the other hand I only had to invest ca. € 800 to have a functional and very unique electrified cargobike.
Somewhere in 2020-2021 one of the school’s teachers proposed the idea of “lending” each kid a fluorescent jacket. The goal is them getting used to wearing it. Always.
There are existing systems to stimulate this, with stickers or stamps on a savings card. However, this is something they can only do for a few weeks because of extra workload involved.
Enter me: “Why don’t we just attach some RFID tags and read ‘m? Should be easy! Maybe the thing can play some movies, it will motivate the kids themselves to wear the fluo thingy.”
Guess what, it took me some time to get it all working. By ~1 November 2021 to be exact. It now exists of:
There’s still some work to do:
In time I will probably add the source code to this page.
Zynthian is a nifty raspberry-pi powered open-source synth. Go to https://zynthian.org/ for more info.
I ordered the breakout board + 4 rotary encoders from them, the rest I sourced myself. The case is designed in Fusion360 and printed with my Ender3 pro. I still have some work to do on the back panel and the kickstand. I also have to connect the 4 buttons. It’s not ready for gigging yet.
In the very beginning of Covid-19, lockdown march 2020 in Belgium, I made some mud kitchens for the school of my kids. Preschool age: 2.5-5 years old. All shops were closed, so I ordered a bunch of pine wood & screws online.
Before I could order, I made a concept with Sketchup:
Once I started building, I changed quite a lot of things. I dropped the idea of bolting everything to a bottom plate. I also made 4 separate elements instead of 2 big ones. A lot more easy to transport or to move around!
