Category: Uncategorized

Cutting small pieces is a piece of cake. But whenever I try to cut a big piece it breaks more or less in the right place but with jaggedy bits. So it looks a bit rubbish but at least my greenhouse is now complete with the old wonky bits removed

A while ago Oliver asked for some space in my office to build Lego creations.  Being the dutiful loving father [ and a little bored ] I decided to indulge him.

The wood was a 40mm x 900mm x 3000mm piece of birch from eBay which I had to chop down to size in the garage.

I completely messed up getting the braces in a line.  I’m really not very good at that sort of thing.

So I eventually went with supports at either end and then worry about making it safe later

Below is not quite the finished item.  I had to wait for a hole saw to arrive and then I added 4 x 60mm holes near the wall to keep cables tidy and underneath I installed cable trays so that it still looked neat when all the kit was in place.

Finally I used a car jack and a stool to lift the whole desk up a little and add some steel supports underneath so the whole thing doesn’t just collapse if somebody sits on it…but I’ve yet to pluck up the courage to sit on it.

Massive thanks go to Mark from #4 who helped me carry to wood from the garage to my office and then came up with the cunning plan of sliding it into place using the sofa bed.

A 007 themed tablet stand has been spotted in the wild with Dragan

From a rough piece of plywood to the cut-outs below

to this thing of beauty.

That’ll be the last of the Xmas dinner leftovers then

The annual boxing day recycling. It’s become quite the tradition

 

This is how we roll in the Steele house these days.  Christmas Eve is spent wrapping presents and soldering time of flight distance sensors to build a hoopy height adjusting gizmo for my raspberry pi / k40 laser cutter.

Now for wine…

Plenty of people are buying cheap K40 laser cutters from eBay and lots more people have a growing collection of Raspberry Pi’s – I fit into both of those categories.

Fortunately I made the decision to replace the stock K40 controller board with a Smoothieboard.  This gave me the capability to connect via Ethernet and a whole bunch of other things that made me all excited.

Unfortunately my K40 is positioned on the other side of my “office” so whenever I wanted to use it I had to run an ethernet cable across the room which was very annoying.

It was whilst messing about with a Raspberry Pi I had an epiphany.  These things have WiFi and Ethernet built in, surely it can’t be that hard to turn it into a bridge/router/packet-forwarding-death-bringing machine.  Turns out it really wasn’t that hard…

I followed this guide which got me 90% of the way.

By the time I had finished implementing the above [ which is really just setting up wifi and ethernet and enabling DHCP ] I was able to telnet from my Mac into my Raspberry Pi and from the Pi I could telnet into the 192.168.2.x domain that my K40 was now sitting on.  So that’s nice – but it isn’t what I had hoped for.  I want to just telnet in from my Mac, or hit the Pronterface interface or use LaserWeb3 or whatever…straight from my damned Mac.

iptables are your friend

There are several guides online talking about using bridge-utils to accomplish this but I couldn’t get them working, and with hindsight I’m glad I didn’t.  If I’d have used the RPi as a bridge then I couldn’t SSH in or do any of the funky magic that I have planned for the future with this K40 such as z-axis manipulation and a full on pretty UI running on a RPi powered LCD touch display, but I digress.

All I really really wanted to do was forward certain ports from the RPi wlan0 interface to the smoothieboard eth0 interface…

-A PREROUTING -p tcp -m tcp –dport 23 -j DNAT –to-destination 192.168.2.10:23

-A PREROUTING -p tcp -m tcp –dport 80 -j DNAT –to-destination 192.168.2.10:80

-A POSTROUTING -d 192.168.2.10/32 -p tcp -m tcp –dport 80 -j SNAT –to-source 192.168.2.1

By adding something along the lines of the gibberish above to your iptables setup file that you created using the “Wifi to ethernet adapter…” then you should be cooking on gas.  Basically the prerouting stuff forwards anything received on telnet or HTTP ports onto the smoothieboard.  The postrouting stuff is to allow the response from HTTP to make it’s way back to your host machine.

You may have to modify your smoothie config file if it’s currently setup for static IP but seriously, if you’re buying laser cutters, modding the control board and then pondering sticking in a RPi to do wifi bridge/route/death then I’m pretty sure I don’t have to hold your hand and lead you through the config file modifications.

If you need help you can find me on Google+

Back in the crazy foo factory days I bought a magnetic white board to design level layouts and dune buggys and stuff.  It kinda sat/hang languishing on my wall for a few years before I offered it to Emma.  She accepted it but said she wouldn’t need it for a while.  That very day I got sick of having photos sitting around on my desk and stuck them on the magnetic white board….no way is Emma having it now.

Not quite as much fun as the real thing but still had a lovely time.  It was a bit embarrassing when drool started coming out of my mouth – don’t remember that happening in California!

The usual Saturday morning

I hope nobody has their washing out…

Cousin Nik on his whisky drinking mission

There’s two things I always buy at the Xmas market. Coconut macaroons… See above, and then a £10 bag of mixed sausages. Mission accomplished. 

We took a family trip to the Manchester Christmas market. It all started with a fantastic breakfast at Bills. A new Steele family tradition has been born

The eleventh theatre performance of 2016 was excellent fun. Thoroughly recommended

The power company had to turn our electricity off for a while. We wanted tea. Out came the camping stove. 

Now this is what I call a happy work environment

Usually I’d just have cheddar or maybe a chili based cheese, but put some Camembert on those mushrooms topped with finely sliced chorizo and boom, breakfast heaven

Several people opine that Santa Maria is the best pizza place in Ealing if not the whole of London. We recently heard that L’Oro Di Napoli, right around the corner, was even better. We went, ate, drank and had fun. It was a great place and we thoroughly enjoyed it. I still think Santa Maria is a little better but I haven’t been for a while so maybe I should check it out again soon

It may be a big, bulky and heavy thing to carry around but it really is excellent fun.