MSRaynsford

I have alluded to being pretty busy recently but I have now finished and here are the fruits of my labour. I have done the fulfilment for the Hex Terrain Toolkit  for the very successful kickstarter campaign. 260 sheets of Poplar plywood cut into toolkits ready for shipping to backers. Changing the wood over every 15 minutes for the last 3 weeks has been long and tedious but there is quite a sense of accomplishment when you complete something like this.

I was quite taken by this Heng Balance lamp I saw on kickstarter so I decided to make myself one. I wrote an instructable about the process and sharing the files. It's pretty straight forward and now it sits happily on my wife's desk.

Here is my first shot at a Raspberry Pi case, I took the mechanical drawings from the Pi website and used it to calculate the positions of the mounting holes and overlapping items. The Pi is held into the case with some screws (that aren't really necessary) I put some nice rounded corners onto the top and the whole top cover just clips into place so no screws. The HDMI holes could be smaller and the power connector hole could be smaller too. It doesn't have GPIO slots yet but I'll add those as and when I need them. Now to get playing with RetroPie

I'm slowly catching up with the cyber and I now own a Raspberry Pi 3. I knocked up this case and put it into my machine to see what I liked/disliked about it. It's taken from a thingiverse case and it feels like it scaled wrongly but it's functional. I've been cutting a lot of parts for someone else recently, running the machine for 12 hour days. Eventually I shall have photos of the massive stack of material building up in the garage but for now I keep squeezing these little projects in between other cuts. Now I'm off to make my own case.

I've got a couple of strings of WS2811 LEDs that I use for Christmas lights. They've been floating around the garage since I took them down at Christmas and they keep getting tangled up so I thought it would be handy to cut a couple of winders that I can wrap them round. There are definite improvements that could be made but I only had one shot in a busy week of laser cutting so they came out pretty well.

I always said I wouldn't do any Carcassonne expansions after the main set took me 200 hours to draw , but I always wanted to try the Cult expansion tiles  and I had a few hours free while waiting for the new year. For those that know Carcassonne cloisters have an unfortunate habit of clustering together. The cult acts exactly the same as a cloisters but if you place it next to a cloisters the first person to complete gets all the points and the other person gets nothing. It was just a manual trace and draw operation which I did with all the other tiles but I thought it might be interesting to screen cap the process so here is the video of me drawing the tile in inkscape and you can see exactly what goes into it. It's 90 minutes of drawing compressed down into 5 minutes of video. If this is interesting for anyone then please let me know and I'll happily do some more drawing videos like it.

The kids grew some pretty epic sunflowers over the summer and we harvested the seeds to grow some more next year (third year running actually). We decided to share the seeds with people for Christmas and I laser cut a load of packets to go with them. The details were printed onto the paper with a standard laser printer, as you can see from the close ups the cut lines were incredibly close to the printed lines. The trick is to let the laser cut a hole to show you where to put the sheets of paper.