Category: Blog

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The obsolete computer parts sarcophagus (or coffee table if you prefer)

IMG_3609
A close up of the finished table with its lighting on.

I’ll admit I’m a bit of a hoarder when it comes to computer parts. Over the years, I have collected a fair amount of equipment with the hope than one day, some of it might come handy. Well, a GeForce 3 from 2002 is not like wood scraps or loose electric cables, the more time passes, the more it becomes useless. Standards evolve and with them connectivity; there is just no way this type of video card will fit in a modern computer (now that everyone uses laptops too). I have had a need for small servers for some projects and an old PII with linux on it would have made a perfect candidate, but then again, the power consumption of those machines are just not worth it. A small embedded computer or shared hosting would pay itself back in no time.

One day, I came across this project through Make and thought it would be a perfect way to give purpose to all that junk, especially that like the inventor of the first table, some of it was from my first machines and while it was now devoid of computational value, still retained sentimentality. Electronic circuits have a mesmerizing power for the knowledgeable and the profane likewise. While staring at an A7N8X for hours will not give the non-engineers any further understanding on how bits are turned into pretty pictures on a monitor, it could nonetheless spark educative discussions on the general role that it plays into this process and at least help dissipate the “black box” effect of modern personal computers. So I proceeded to file the link in my ideas folder, knowing I was then lacking the woodworking skills and tools required for this type of project, and at the time not really thinking I would ever come to have my own computerpartscoffeetable.

A CAD plan of the table. Save a few millimeters, the end result is the exact same.

Coming back from some time in Europe and having only worked with my brain for over a year (except for this project), the time felt right for a physical challenge. Drawing inspiration from this other computer parts table, I opened FreeCAD, got drawing and in an evening came up with a design of my own: something less imposing, with more modern lines, all without sacrificing the “sarcophagus” effect.

This is not a how-to so I will spare the building details but for those that are interested, feel free to download the CAD file, leave a comment or write me. Basically, the table is build around a frame of particle board which also serves as the bed for the parts. At both ends of the frame are two dark walnut glue-ups with some chamfering all finished with several coats danish oil. Frankly I was not expecting the end-result to be so stunning, the images do not do it justice. The panes of glass fit in a grove carved in the leg members and with the top glass being 10mm (3/8), this makes one solid and stiff piece of furniture. It takes two fully gown men to move it around.

The table is lit up from two led strips at a 45 degree so they can illuminate both the top and their respective side. Powering the strip is the actual only functional circuit of the whole display: a switching power supply I built for the occasion (also something that had been sitting on a shelf for a couple of years).

Money-wise, the project was a bit on the expensive side. I did maximize reuse and recycling, but as every woodworker will confirm, precious wood will cost you, in fact a lot more that what is normally found in hardware stores. Add to the total the price of thick custom cut glass panels and the addition is somewhere around 400$. A coffee table at Ikea is a tenth of that price, but the commonalities ends with function: there is nothing like the quality, craftsmanship, the beauty of a solid piece of wood furniture.

Since I am travelling again and did the finishing touches the day before my departure, I cannot provide a picture with a few happy people around some empties. For now, it is quietly sitting in my workshop under a protective blanket, patiently awaiting my return for merry moments with friends or a lazy coffee the Sunday morning after.

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Coffee tables with reclaimed wood and wine bottles

The finished product
Ten green coffee table
The original design

My friend’s apartment in Toulouse, France, was really lacking furniture so I challenged myself to find a design I could build with whatever materials I could reclaim from the garbage, a budget of 10€  and nothing for tools but a saw, some sanding paper, a drill (or the kind of stuff not-so-manual people keep in their toolboxes).

While browsing instructables, I came upon what I felt was the most promising design, the Ten Green coffee table by  Zero-Waste. It is built with easy to come by materials (wine bottles and wood), but what I found problematic was the hardware used for the tensioning system, which for the three levels of tables would have costed me at least 50€. While it certainly looks great, it was totally over my budget so upon realization of that fact at the hardware store, I got my brain to work and stated walking up and down the alleys for inspiration and quickly came to figure out a more economical solution with nothing but screw eyes and strings.

The wood: a pallet

The pallet

Finding wine bottles is trivial (especially in France), but cheap wood is another story. There were plenty of discarded pallets in the streets, but it took me a while to find a suitable one. It had to be large enough, clean (ie: mostly free of dirt, cement and/or paint) and built with decent quality wood which for pallets is very uncommon. I forgot to take a picture of the whole pallet so this one does not quite do it justice. It was a pain to carry across the city, back-breaking work cutting it and immensely tedious to sand the pieces manually but I managed to build my two tables out of it.

The two surfaces of the first table

Apart from the physical hardships of working without power tools processing the pallet into decent looking surfaces was a piece of cake. I cut up the pallet in even size planks (which numbered 30) and then sanded them down to remove some coarseness (they use very low grade timber). I then assembled them into levels and drilled the four corners of the bottom levels with a hole large enough for the neck of a bottle to fit in.

The wine bottles: Cabernet-Sauvigon, Shiraz, etc.

The part most will enjoyed the most. Be careful though, wine bottles vary in shape between brands so you should buy bottles in four. If you want bottles very quickly ask a nearby restaurant if he can put them away for you and come pick them up after a service.

Assembly

Half of the tensioning system in place
A detailed view of how the rope is kept under tension

With two levels done, I screwed eyes at the eight inside corners of the table, inserted the wine bottles and layed the table upside down to build the tensioning system.  Starting from a bottom eye, I routed the string in the upper eye and then to the opposite corner and down again; Tied both ends and repeated for the other side. To prevent the ends of the strings from fraying, I dipped them in melted candle wax. Then, all there there was left to do was to put a long enough (to give torque) wood screw with an unthreaded shank between the two strings where they met in the middle of the table and turn to tighten the rope. Once I felt there was enough tension I simply drove the screw in the surface above to lock the whole system in place. Make sure the string is able to withstand a fair amount of tension because you need some if the bottles are to be kept tightly sandwiched between the two levels.

Assembling a two (or more) level table was a matter of simply repeating the process. The two level table ended up being more stable because the wood was just thick enough for the neck of the upper level bottles to lock itself inside the dip of the bottle below. The necks will make nice feet but If you want more adherence on the floor or want to protect it, you can put back corks into you bottles. Also, you are by no means limited to wine bottles, it could be beer bottles (on a good night with a few friends, you can get enough for a full shelving unit), or hard liquor bottles (but they take more time to accumulate in quantity).

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Partitioning an Ipod to FAT32 and ext3

I recently inherited my sister’s “defective” (but fixed for 5$) 120GB Classic Ipod and managed to partition it the way I wanted. It was not a trivial process so I tought I’d share my experience with the web so others can benefit from it.

My music library is far from being 120GB so even if I feed the Ipod all my tunes, I’d still have a lot of free space on it. Granted, you can mount the Ipod as a mass storage device and stuff the rest with anything, but here’s the catch: Ipods will only format to FAT32 or HFS+ file systems if you use iTunes. As a consequence, if you pick HFS+, you will not be able to use them on windows and some *nix (if they lack the HFS+ support module) and if you choose FAT32, backup solutions such as backtintime will not work (they need a journaling file system).

So I took to partitioning my Ipod with two different partition using a different file system for each, FAT32 and EXT3. I tough it would be a simple task, but turns out that it wasn’t. Just formatting the Ipod and letting gtkpod rebuild it did not cut it; the device would stutter, only play the first few seconds of each track and give off artifacts while displaying the CD covers. And when plugged in iTunes, the software would report the device as corrupted and offer me to reset it. I thought that gtkpod must be missing on something so I should use iTunes instead yo rebuild it, but iTunes would still ask me to reset my iPod. Here is what worked after a fair amount of tinkering:

  1. Reset the iPod with iTunes (on a different computer since this tutorial assumes you are using a *nix).
  2. Plug it on Linux and run the following command on the user partition. My Ipod is a 6th generation classic, there is no partition for the firmware, it sits somewhere on the MCU flash, but it appears that older Ipod use a firmware partition so leave it alone. Paying attention to that particularity, here is the commands you need to run:
    1. Unmount the plugged int Ipod with umount  /dev/sdXY Where X is the device letter of your Ipod and Y is the partition number.
    2. dd if=/dev/sdXY of=ipod.bk bs=512M Where X is the user partition of you Ipod and Y is the partition number. This will effectively copy 512MB of raw bytes from you Ipod partition and save it to the ipod.bk file.
  3. Next, take your Ipod and format it the way you want using fdisk. If you have a firmware partition, do not destroy it! Keep the following points in mind:
    1. Use a Master Boot Record (MBR)
    2. All partitions should be primary
  4. Finally: dd of=/dev/sdXY if=ipod.bk bs=512M Where X is the user partition of you Ipod and Y is the partition number. This is going to copy back that 512MB file we extracted earlier from the Ipod, setting that partition the way it was before the repartitioning.

Voilà! Plug your Ipod in, upload music with you favorite app and do backups with your file system of choice. Mine is happily working with that setup: Ipod stuff on FAT32 and backintime on EXT3.

The quirk I got with this technique was that both iTunes and the Ipod report the full size of the internal hard drive as being available for music while in reality its not; it looks like the firmware keeps a record of the empty space withing the files of the user partition (why it is not computing it is anyone’s guess). You should probably be careful not to fill it up to a point where the two partitions would overlap (although that should not happen if the firmware is paying attention but then again, not tested).

Enjoy!

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Climate change (again)

Posted here: http://climaterealityproject.org/2011/08/26/what-climate-change-deniers-and-carbon-dioxide-have-in-common


Friends!

I think we let ourselves carried over by the first’s commenters’s misconception about CO2. The debate (if there is to be one) should be about the post and in there, it’s indicated verbatim that CO2 isn’t toxic to humans and that it’s the greenhouse effect that is potentially harmful for the earth as a closed system.

Climate change is in my opinion part of a bigger issue: one of resource management. The earth can certainly afford a bit fossil fuel burning and resource usage as anyway, it will one day be engulfed by the heat of the sun as it expands towards its red giant state.

However, the alarming rate at which we are conducting those activities will very likely make us fall prey to Malthus’ law (population grows until ressources are all consummed, famine occurs and then population resorbs massively) very soon instead of us as a species living to see ourselves getting cooked by our star.
Technology (not policy) has certainly helped us averting that for while, but it won’t last forever if we keep consuming and growing like we are right now. As Carol Pullitzer clumsily suggested, it is not cars and industries that pollute and use resources, it’s humans; feel free to have you own conclusions about that, hers (birth control) is perfectly sound even if it is nowadays synonym with totalitarian policy.

And that is all simply because the earth is a closed system, and that  you cannot have infinite physical growth (economy of growth, yay!) inside a closed system. The earth is a balancing act, and we shall see return of pendulum sooner than expected if we keep going down that route.

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A milestone

Too bad I work alone and mostly at nighttime. Otherwise, I would have some people around to share the sheer joy that I am experiencing right now. For a lack of that, I’ll turn to the web. Just an hour ago, I completed a major milestone in my main project line. I am ecstatic as with work of this magnitude, the light at the end of the tunnel is always months away( and right after, you get into another tunnel…) Here is the writeup on the situation.

I have had a fascination with oscilloscopes for a very long time. While being incredibly useful (for those who are into electronics that is), they have a mysterious sense to them that still gets me after all those years of hanging out with complicated machinery. I remember clearly seeing rows and rows of them during my first university year, having only a very rough idea of what they were for but still knowing, judging by their numbers, that they must be very useful for every electronics bench to get its own. They are what epitomizes the knobs and dials (screen in this case) strange and obscure apparatus of the modern age.

So much so that I decided to program one from scratch for my final engineering project; I had very ambitious plans for it. The electronics would be managed by a Microchip PIC18F4550 – a USB microcontroller – and the application on the host PC would be programmed in C#. Its killer feature would be that its display would be 3D, giving the user one more dimension for visualizing, combining and probing waveforms. Turned out implementing the USB stack was a major bitch (should have used Microchip’s ready-made one…) so I decided to get signals through the sound card input. No big deal, the main application was agnostic as to where its data came from. Then, the 3D part was a huge headache too (80% of the code, a primitive but complete 3D engine), but I got trough it and in the end it worked well enough for a public showing. I will post all its code and some screen shots when I find the motivation too, but for reasons that will be developed upon at this time, I decided no to further its development. Simply put, I had discovered the world of Open Source and realized that platform-locking my project (DirectX, .NET) was not inline with my philosophy of getting good electronic tools in the hand of the masses.

This new one is implemented on an OS of mine (Elements, but beware, the post is very outdated) and thus completely web oriented and RESTful. The user interface is described in XHTML, SVG and JavaScript with all of it getting served along with the oscilloscope function by an ATMega328p with 32kB of static EEPROM storage. That’s a web server, TCP/IP stack, a file system and oscilloscope running on 32kB of Flash, 32kB of EEPROM and 2kB of RAM embarked on a 16 MHz chip! It had been a web server for quite a while, but tonight, I got it to behave like a usable oscilloscope. I am a happy man…