As a Raspberry Pi and Linux user, I was in need of a new wireless mini keyboard and came across an inexpensive Bluetooth option that caught my eye. It had a number of features that sounded appealing, including RGB backlighting and a mouse control with adjustable DPI, so I decided to give it a try.
When the keyboard arrived, I was pleased to find that it came with a short USB cable for charging and a small user guide. I quickly unboxed it and took a look at the keyboard itself. It had a nice feel to it and fit well in my hands, with a clicky feel and positive action. I also appreciated that it had a battery compartment for a replaceable BL-5C battery or, according to the manual, two AAA batteries (though the keyboard didn't actually have connectors for the AAA batteries).
However, I was a bit skeptical about the Bluetooth connection, as I've had mixed experiences with Bluetooth devices in the past. But, I was hopeful that this keyboard would work well on my Raspberry Pi and Linux setup.
I plugged in the receiver and turned on the keyboard, but quickly realized that the setup was a bit confusing and I needed to do some research first. I spent some time reading the manual and charging the keyboard before attempting to use it on my Raspberry Pi setup.
The setup wasn't hard once I read the manual. I was presently surprised; the keyboard worked exceptionally well. The mouse control was particularly useful and I found the keyboard to be very responsive. It's a full keyboard in a small form factor, which is perfect for my setup, with a switch on the top to turn it off when not in use to preserve battery life.
Overall, I'm extremely happy with the performance of this inexpensive wireless mini keyboard on my Raspberry Pi and Linux setup. It did have a bit of a learning curve in terms of figuring out how to use it, but I found it to be a great value for the price. If you're in the market for a new wireless keyboard for your Raspberry Pi or Linux setup, I highly recommend giving this one a try.
Here at House of Hacks we do tutorials, project overviews, tool reviews and more related to making things around the home and shop. Generally this involves wood and metal working, electronics, photography and other similar things. If this sounds interesting to you, you may subscribe here.
Wondering how well one of these inexpensive wireless mini keyboards works?
So do I. So I got one and we're going to open it up and see how well it works on Raspberry Pi and Linux.
I've used a number of Bluetooth devices on a number of operating systems and hardware platforms over the years.
I've always found them to be a little finicky.
Sometimes you turn them on and they work and sometimes they don't.
I've had some devices i just couldn't work get to work at all.
So, i'm hopeful that this will work.
It's got some really cool features:
It's got RGB backlight on the keyboard.
It's a full keyboard in a very small form factor.
It's got a mouse control that has adjustable DPI so, depending on the size of your screen you're working with, it makes it easy to control.
On the surface it sounds really cool, but it's bluetooth and I'm kind of skeptical about that.
So we're going to open this up and take a look at it and try getting it running on a Raspberry Pi.
If we're just meeting, Welcome!
I'm Harley and this is the House of Hacks.
I make stuff here, usually out of wood or metal, but sometimes that involves technology like Raspberry Pis and mini keyboards.
So I'm kind of hopeful that this is going to work well.
I would really like it to.
So it comes out with first of all a short USB cable with a large and small connector on it. I'm assuming this is for recharging purposes.
And then we have just the keyboard unit.
It's in bubble wrap to help protect it.
A very small user guide.
It's all pictorial. No... a little bit of writing inside.
And not much to it. A small trifold thing.
And there's the device.
It's got some keys for... for controlling things and then the keyboard.
It actually has a pretty nice feel to it. It has some a click feel and real positive action.
I've been pretty impressed with it so far.
I don't know how to use this at all. It's controls are a little confusing.
It fits well in the hands but so... yeah it doesn't doesn't feel too bad.
It looks like it has a battery compartment back here.
OK, so here's the receiver unit... so maybe it isn't Bluetooth.
Oh, that would be cool.
Maybe it looks just like a regular keyboard. That would be better... interesting.
And it has a little slot in here for storage.
It has one battery that's easily replaced and it's a BL-5C, so that's nice.
It's probably rechargeable since it has the cord here but is it easily changed.
At first i thought it had AAs in it, or AAAs, and that was going to be a little bit of a pain.
But that looks like a nice unit.
It's got a switch here on the top. I assume that's the power switch and then a plug here for the USB cable which, as I said, I assume that's just for charging purposes.
I'm going to read the manual and take a look at this and try to get it hooked up.
I've got the Raspberry Pi here set up with my little tiny video monitor and it's plugged in.
I don't have any keyboard or mouse though at this time.
I have gone through the instruction manual that came with this thing.
Like I said, there's not much to it.
It basically says plug it in and turn it on and use it.
One thing of note, it does say though is it will take either the battery that we saw before in it or it will also take two AAA batteries.
Well, the manual said it would take AAA batteries...
and the case has a place for AAA batteries...
but there's no actual connectors for AAA batteries...
so while you could technically put them in here, I don't think they're really going to do anything.
And then it has a little troubleshooting section that has just basic common sense kind of things...
and maintenance... "Don't submerge it in water," that kind of thing.
So not a whole lot of interesting stuff there.
So I did throw it on the charger for a little bit and I'm going to take this out for the receiver... out of the little holder thing... close that back.
I'm going to put this in one of the USB slots and turn it on and let's see what happens here.
I turn the power on my screen... Raspberry Pi boots...
And this does have, in addition to kind of the D-controller that looks like it works for the mouse, there's also a touchpad.
We'll see how that works... We'll turn this on... Now it's booted and...
Well the mouse works for the touchpad.
It doesn't seem to work using the D-controller.
There's no instruction manual on this so it's kind of going to be a little bit of experimentation.
Looks like there's a mouse button here that brings up the context menu.
It's right click and then you use the up and down arrows to select something.
The mouse does work and you can tap it to double to do a click and it's supposed to have some sort of scrolling...
Oh, that probably works if you have a... if you have an app open...
Let's try opening the browser... and we'll just pull something up here...
So it's working really well other than learning how to navigate the keyboard.
One thing i did notice is it only has shift and control on the left side.
There's nothing over here on the right and also the Windows key is on the right side which is opposite most keyboards.
So if you want to do... you know control keys... and you have to kind of reach over the keyboard.
Probably not a big deal with a small enough keyboard.
Triple fingers will allow you to scroll...
As does the D-controller... scrolls either way.
So yeah, overall it looks pretty cool.
It's got the backlit keyboard.
I have no idea how you change change the colors on the keyboard. It defaults to blue.
Oh, I see these... it's hard for me to see without my glasses...
This keyboard has buttons on here... This is a right click and looks like a left-click buttons...
But that's not kind of what I saw... it seemed to be the other way around.
Oh, if you triple click it will bring up the context menu too.
So the icons seem to be backwards to me. This one says it's a a right click... that's the way i would interpret that icon... but it's actually a left click.
And this one is a right click and the button looks like a left click to me.
I guess it's one of those cases where you can't... when you only have two items and there's one there's a little graphical differentiation between them, you don't know which the graphical representation means.
It's kind of like when you have a menu item and something's highlighted but you don't know if the highlight is the selected item or the unselected item.
That's always kind of fun.
The same same issue here.
But it seems to be working just fine. No problems whatsoever hooking it up.
It's not Bluetooth like i originally thought so that's probably why it actually works. It doesn't have all those finicky drivers that you need to hook up.
So i'm really impressed with this little thing... I think I paid $13 or $14 for this... I think it was under $15...
So it seems to be working really well.
I assume that there's a way to change the colors. I'm not going to try to fiddle with that here on camera but just first impressions it's working.
I give it a thumbs up! Yeah!
Over here is a video that Youtube thinks you're going to enjoy.
And while making things remember: perfection's not required, fun is!
Interested in a Labists Starter Kit For Raspberry Pi 4? In this episode, Harley unboxes, assembles and runs through the initial setup wizards for one of these kits.
Here at House of Hacks we do tutorials, project overviews, tool reviews and more related to making things around the home and shop. Generally this involves wood and metal working, electronics, photography and other similar things. If this sounds interesting to you, you may subscribe here.
Today at the House of Hacks we're going to unbox and setup this Labists Raspberry Pi Starter Kit.
OK, the box it comes in is nice and sturdy, not much to it.
Just kind of your basic box.
We're going to go ahead and open this up.
It's got a couple anti-tamper stickers on it.
And we'll just open this up.
Recently I've had some ideas floating around my head for some projects where it needed a little bit more computing power than what an Arduino supplies but I still wanted to be fairly close to the hardware.
So, of course the Raspberry Pi is a great solution for this.
Having never worked with Raspberry Pis before I didn't have anything and I wanted a starter kit to just get going quickly.
So, I searched on Amazon and found this Labists Starter Kit. It came with pretty high reviews and seemed to be pretty complete. So I went ahead and got one.
It's supposed to have a case and power supply and other miscellaneous things that you need to get started.
It doesn't have a keyboard or monitor, of course, but I have those in plenty.
I went ahead and got one of these. It has 8 GB of RAM and 128 GB SD card and so I thought I'd open this up and show you what it takes to get started.
If we're just meeting, I'm Harley. Welcome. This is the House of Hacks where I make stuff.
Usually out of metal or wood, other kinds of media like that. Sometimes it includes things like Arduinos and Raspberry Pis.
It starts off with a Raspberry Pi Model B. 8 gig of RAM.
That looks like the main box or the main computer.
I have to rip the box and there's the Pi.
They are pretty small little units, aren't they?
It has the connectors on the side. The power supply.
Network. USB. Looks like USB 2 and 3.
And yeah, there's not much to it. Not much bigger than an Arduino.
Just for size comparisons, there's an Arduino Uno.
It's a little bit bigger but about the same size.
Digging more into the box...
Packing material.
Oh, and inside this box looks like there's some basic instructions and a fairly large piece of paper with multiple language instructions.
We've got a Quick Start Guide.
A power supply... with an on/off switch.
Labists power supply.
We have, looks like a case.
I assume it snaps open somehow. I won't do that on camera but it's got holes for the connectors.
It must go this way. There's the connectors that way and that way.
And interestingly, it looks like it has a 1/4-20 connector on there which I'm guessing they may have it setup for putting a camera on this. That kind of looks like a camera hole. I don't know exactly.
That looks like a hole for a lens on a camera. They might have an aboard board camera you could put on there and then that would be for taking pictures with.
Interesting little concept.
HDMI cable.
This looks like another HDMI cable.
That's definitely HDMI... and that's definitely HDMI.
So, two HDMI cables.
A cute little tiny fan.
I assume that goes in the case.
An SD card that says Raspbian on it. So, I assume it's preloaded with the operating system. That's handy.
I don't recognize that.
I'll have to read the manual for that one.
A little screwdriver for mounting the fan.
Some heat sinks.
And that's it.
So, everything that comes in the box.
Those are the things that are inside the box in this kit. I want to get into the setup of this and see what happens when we turn it on for the first time but before that I do have an exciting announcement.
Those are you that have been around the channel for awhile may have noticed that my uploads this year have been down from previous years.
That's not because I've been slacking off but because I've been working on a new project.
This is a beginner's guide to working with electronics, specifically the Arduino ecosystem.
So, if you've been interested in getting Arduinos into your projects but don't know anywhere to begin, this book is for you.
I talk about three things in it...
Basic electronics. What is a transistor. What is a resistor. Real basic things like that.
And then I talk about how to setup a computer to program an Arduino.
And third, I talk about the basic elements of what goes into an Arduino program and the fundamental programming issues related to that.
If this is something that's interesting to you, I've left a link down below for a mailing list where I'll be announcing when the book is released and also providing a discount code for those that are interested.
Now that we've got everything unpacked, let's assemble this.
The Quick Start Guide is fairly thick and a bit intimidating at first glance but there's six languages in here so for any one language there's only about four pages.
Half of those four pages are how to install the operating system on a blank SD card.
The SD card that comes with this is already pre-formatted so we don't need to worry about those two pages.
About half of the rest is specifications and what comes in the kit.
So there's really about a page, page and a half, of actual instructions for getting started and those seem to be really clear in reading things over.
I don't have any questions off the top of my head.
We'll see how complete they are once we get into it and see if we have any questions.
The mystery piece that I wasn't sure when I was unboxing it is actually an SD card reader which is kind of handy.
It's a type C connector. It pulls apart and there's the connector for plugging into USB and there's where the SD card goes in on the back side.
So that's kind of cute. It's an inexpensive one. It's not great but I'm sure it works for the purposes that we have here today.
There's really only a couple steps we need to do.
We need to install the heat sinks onto the card.
We need to install the fan into the case.
And then we need to install the card into the case and put it all together.
Finally we can install the SD card after the card is in the case and then apply power and keyboard and monitor and see how it works.
They do say that you don't want to have the SD card in the computer when you're trying to put it in the case.
I think there's a fitment problem trying to get it all lined up and stuff.
So you put the card in after everything is assembled and put together.
So, let's get to this.
First we're going to put the heat sinks on the chips and the manual says exactly which ones they go onto and they are self adhesive so they should go on fairly easily.
We've got this one goes on that chip.
We've got this square one that goes on the main CPU.
And then we have this other smaller one that goes on, looks like the chip that's right there.
So that's how it's assembled.
Time to get out the tools.
I've got a pick that works really well for taking off things like self-adhesive tape when it's hard to get off.
That one wasn't too bad.
So that goes on... try to get my fat fingers in here on this little board. That goes on that chip.
Just press it on.
This self-adhesive tape isn't too bad to take apart. Sometimes it can be a real pain.
That does on that chip.
And this goes on the last one.
I assume that is the primary CPU. It's this metal cased one.
That was easily done and I didn't need the pick at all.
So now we want to install things in the case.
The case just pulls apart. There's a little handle there.
And there's screws for mounting the board and there's screws for mounting the fan.
It seems that there's more screws there than I actually need.
And this case also is designed for a camera. I didn't get the camera option but there is a hole in the case and mounting space to snap a camera in there.
The fan can go in two ways. There's no indication of air flow.
I don't know that it really makes a difference which way it goes in.
I'll put it in this way so the strain relief on the cable pulls up.
The self tapping screws go into the fan. They have a round head on the top.
They're a bit longer than the screws in the other package that are for the card.
You don't want to torque them down too tight since you may strip out the plastic.
You just need to make them so it holds things in without rattling.
And that's the fan in there.
Next we need to mount the board.
It's pretty obvious. There's big holes in the case go for the USB and ethernet port.
And this should just drop in there.
And there are...
It seems to fit... fairly snugly.
There we go. You can kind of feel it where it snaps in.
You want to make sure the connectors are all lined up with the holes and the connectors on the side actually fit into the holes on here so there's a bit of a snap feel to it.
Get the other screws.
These screws I'm going to need the spectacles for.
It'd be nice if this screw driver was magnetic but that one went in without too much difficulty.
On screws like this, I tend to start them, get them all started, and then I go through later and with a second pass tighten them down for good.
That way you don't... If you tighten it down one at a time, sometimes you'll knock things out of alignment and then it's harder to get the other screws in.
And for both sets of screws, they sent me one screw more than I actually needed. Which was convenient since I dropped of those on the floor. I'll have to go retrieve that later.
And then I can go through a second time and tighten everything down.
Again, you don't want to tighten it down too tight because you don't want to strip the threads or the head.
And this screwdriver seems to be possibly at end of days.
This one screw... No this one screw has some munged up threads.
The screwdriver is fine. The head is rounded out without putting any torque on that at all.
And I can't get it out so now I need to get the pliers.
Let's try the extra screw that they gave me.
Those are magnetized and it's making it hard to get the screw in.
Once you have threads in plastic you want to do a technique called indexing where you turn backwards until you feel a click and then you can go forwards again.
That way you're not cutting new threads into the plastic.
And this new new screw worked much better.
There we go.
So I think now we are ready to put the operating system SD card into the case.
There's a small slot right there on the back of the case that this should slide into just like so.
And yeah, it protrudes out so if that was in the card when we tried to put the card in here, we'd have problems getting it in. So that's definitely what's going on there.
Now we're ready to wire up the fan.
The fan goes in this way and there's two options on this.
The red wire is positive and the black wire is negative and the manual says which ones go where with some pretty detailed instructions.
There are two options on this fan. You can either run it at low speed on 3.3 volts or at high speed on 5 volts, both of which are available right here on the GPIO connector.
And the black one is ground and it's on pin 6 which it shows right there.
I'll orient this in the way it shows in the diagram. Pin 6 is the third one on the top. So it goes in there.
And then the red is either pin 1 for 3.3 volts or pin 2 for 5 volts.
So I'm going to put it on 5 volts because, hey, more power! Right?
And then everything should just snap together if I can figure out which way this goes on.
And there we have it. We're ready for power, keyboard and video.
So, we have the things that came with the kit and a few extra items in order to use this.
We need an external monitor. This is a small HDMI monitor that is designed for use with video equipment but any HDMI output source will work.
I also have a keyboard and mouse. Those are really the only things you need in addition to what comes in the kit.
For the purposes of today and this particular setup, I also have an HDMI splitter so that I can run the signal out of the Raspberry Pi, not only to the monitor, but also into my computer to be able to record it and capture it in high quality so that you can see what's going on in the video.
That complicates this particular setup but that's not a setup that you'd normally need when working with the Raspberry Pi.
One thing of note, is while the power supply that comes with a Pi looks like a normal wall wart, it is a high power device.
The Pi requires more than what most wall warts produce.
Most wall warts output in the milliamp to maybe 1.5 amp range.
The Pi needs more than that and this particular one that came with this kit is a 3000 milliamp, or 3 amp, power supply.
So, you do want to make sure that if you're not using a kit that you get a power supply that has sufficient output for the Pi's use.
If you don't have a power supply that has enough power, you'll get weird things happening.
It'll work sometimes and not others.
It will just work for awhile and then suddenly not work.
Just kind of bizarre things like that. So if you do have problems like that and you don't have a power supply that came with a kit, make sure that the output of the power supply is sufficient for the Raspberry Pi.
Let's start putting this together.
Everything's plugged in now, including the power supply into the wall.
I've got the software running on the computer to capture the screen.
I'm using OBS by the way just to record everything.
It's Open Broadcast Software I believe is what it's called and we're just using that as screen capture at this point off the HDMI input and the little converter thingy that I have.
Down here in the corner I have overlaid a time code on the screen capture.
I'll be speeding up through parts of this so we don't have to wait during the entire video.
The time code will show the actual length of time it took in real life.
It takes a bit to start up and now we have a background with this welcome message.
I'm going to go ahead and hit Next and now we get a chance to setup our country, language and time zone.
I'll set mine for the United States and since I'm in Mountain Time, I'll select Boise.
Clicking Next it takes a couple seconds to set that and now we have the opportunity to set the password for the main account.
I'll put that in here what I want to use and click Next again.
Now it's asking about screen setup.
We can see around the outside edges here that we have a black border where the background screen doesn't take up the whole screen.
This has to do with different HDMI display devices and sometimes you'll see these bars and sometimes you won't.
Since we see them here, I'm going to click this check box and that should remove them in the future.
So now I'll click Next to save this.
And the next step is it's looking for wireless networks.
We can see a bunch from the neighborhood here so I'll scroll down here and select mine and it refreshes the list and now I have to select it again and hit Next.
And now it's asking for my wireless network password. I'll put that in and continue on.
And now it wants to update the software. I'm going to click Next and...
uh, oh. For some reason it didn't connect to the network. I'll have to look into that.
For now, we'll just move along. That's something that I can do in the future.
And I guess that's it for the setup wizard. It's going to reboot and let's see what happens.
OK. That didn't take too long.
Now we can see the whole screen is being used. We don't have the black borders, so that worked.
In the top right corner here we can see that we now have a network connection.
Now let's go look at the software installer.
I'll go over here to the menu and click on the Raspberry Pi icon to pull the menu down and then I'll go down here into Preferences.
Let's start with this Recommended software option.
It'll start off by checking for updates so it's going out to the network and seeing what's different between what's been released now and what the software was originally setup for.
Well that took about a minute. Now we can see all the menu items that are part of the recommended list for the Raspberry Pi ecosystem.
On the left we have different categories and when you select one it shows the items in that list.
You can check or uncheck the box on the far right to add or remove the options that you want installed on your particular Raspberry Pi.
After you have everything you want selected, click Apply and it'll start installing or removing as you've directed.
This may take a bit depending on what you've selected and the speed of your internet connection.
Fortunately it does a good job of telling you what it's doing with all the status messages and the progress bar.
After it's gone through and figured everything out, we get this completion dialog when it finishes.
If I hit Apply again, we'll see that nothing happens since it's all caught up.
So I hit Close to finish this step.
And so now if we look here in the menus, we can see that it installed the software that we asked for.
Now I want to make sure that the operating system is up to date.
To do that, I'm going to go to the terminal window and run a command.
"sudo apt update" will check for updates for everything that's installed on the Pi, both at the base operating system level as well as any additionally installed applications.
It takes a little bit, but generally not terribly long.
When it finishes, we get back to the command prompt.
All this has really done is update some internal lists so that it knows what needs to be updated. It hasn't actually done any updates.
To do the actual updates, I'm going to run the command "sudo apt full-upgrade".
This will compare what I have installed to the update list and tell me what needs to be changed.
I have the option to continue or not. Hitting return selects the default Yes answer that's indicated by the capital Y and off it goes.
This does take awhile. It's a two step process. First it has to download all the actual items that it needs to install and then it has to actually install them.
Again, it does provide good feedback while it's doing this but it may take some time depending on how much needs to be changed and the speed of your internet.
In this situation, it took between 7 and 8 minutes that I've sped up through here.
Now that the updating is all done, I want to see how much storage space I have available for future development.
I'm going to use the "df" command with the "-h" option.
On the first line it's showing that I have 3.1 gig used and 110 gig is available.
That's out of 128 gig SD card. So that'd not doing too bad.
There is some overhead for the operating system of course and things like that.
The update process downloaded a bunch of files that really aren't needed anymore.
To clean those up I'm going to use a "sudo apt clean" command. That doesn't take any time to run. It just returns immediately.
Running the "df -h" command again shows that now I have 3.0 gig used, freeing up about 100 megabytes. Not a whole lot, but every little bit counts.
Now I'm done setting this up and so we're going to use the exit command to close the terminal.
All told, that took around 19 minutes to do the initial setup and now the Raspberry Pi is ready to be used.
For now I'm going to shut it down by selecting Logout and then clicking Shutdown.
You always want to make sure you do this when you shutdown so that everything gets written out to the SD card properly.
Do you have a Raspberry Pi now? Or are you thinking about getting one? What are your plans for it? Leave a comment down below. I'd love to hear about it.
I'll see you over here in this video that YouTube thinks you're going to enjoy.
And when making things remember...
Perfection's not required. Fun is!
Here at House of Hacks we do tutorials, project overviews, tool reviews and more related to making things around the home and shop. Generally this involves wood and metal working, electronics, photography and other similar things. If this sounds interesting to you, you may subscribe here.
I have had that cutting table top for more than 20 years since before we moved here. And it's really hard letting go because I've had it so long... But, I'm getting a much better one and I'm can't wait! It's happening today!!
I think she's pretty excited there! That was some unplanned video that I found when I was reviewing the footage.
If we’re just meeting, I’m Harley, that was my wife, and this is the House of Hacks where I make stuff out of a variety of materials.
In today’s episode we're going to be looking this cutting table that I made for my wife’s sewing room. It's primarily woodworking, but I also want to touch a little bit on some of the resistance we run into when creating things.
In a previous video, I showed how I made a table for my wife’s sewing machine out of largely recycled materials. In this video, we're going to be doing the same for her cutting table.
Overall design
The ends are filing cabinets that my previous employer was throwing away. And they're attached to a base that's primarily 2x4s and some plywood. This serves to hold the cabinets together so they don't move around and also to provide a little bit of a toe kick.
The cabinets were designed to go underneath desks in cubicles, and so they're designed to have things attached to the top which works perfectly for this application with the table top.
Back here in the middle, my wife wanted to use these cabinets that were designed for maps and blueprints. And here we can see see they’re stacked together, they're a couple inches taller than the filing cabinets on the end, so the design will have to account for that.
Since this table is right behind her sewing machine work area, she wanted this one corner to have a cutout in it to accommodate her serger. That adds a little bit of complexity to the overall design.
So, I took some measurements, got the materials and started to work.
Initial Construction
I started with an 4x8 sheet of plywood. This was several inches larger than I needed on both the length and the width and so cut it down to size.
As I did this, I sliced it off in thin strips. I then glued and tacked these strips to the bottom side edges of the table top to give a little more substance for the edge banding to attach to. I mounted these a little bit proud of the edge so when the glue dried, I could use a router bit to make the edges flush.
My wife has some poplar trim in her sewing room, so I cut some banding out of this for the edges to:
improve the looks,
protect the exposed plies of the plywood and
to tie the different elements of her room together.
I then glued and tacked the banding to the edge of the top.
And then the project sat.. and sat… and sat.
Resistance
I ran smack dab into what Steven Pressfield in The War of Art calls “Resistance.”
Eventually I did get going on it it again.
Steven Pressfield sees Resistance as an invisible inner force that keeps us from exercising our genius, from doing the thing that we were born to do. In the book. he talks about the various forms this can take and different ways of overcoming it.
As a Christian, I don’t know that I completely agree with all the things he talks about. In particular, he talks about praying to his Muse. That doesn’t fit within my faith framework.
But the part about Resistance being a force opposing the creative process does resonate with me. He seems to see it as an impersonal force within ourselves that we have to overcome. I’m not sure that’s the whole story.
I believe we are each made in God’s image and part of that is being imbued with creativity. We’re creative because He is creative.
In what follows, I don’t have any scripture for this. It’s based more on general spiritual principles than direct scriptural support, so don’t take it as doctrine. It’s just musing on my part.
I think Steven is right in that there may be psychological, internal reason we face Resistance when creating things. But I can also see Resistance as being a tool the Enemy of our Soul uses to keep us from doing the very things that God has created us to do. He's always trying to stymie God's plans and purposes in our lives. I think this may be one of the ways he does it.
I suspect it’s probably some combination of the two, both the psychological and the external, and the ratio probably varies from one person to the next.
Habits to overcome Resistance
I started a new job at the beginning of the year and now have a longer commute. To make use of that time, I subscribed to Audible and have listened to a number of books that have been on my reading list for quite a while, The War of Art being one of them.
Another one I listened to is Atomic Habits by James Clear. I found it interesting that some of the things James talks about in forming habits dovetail nicely with some of the strategies Steven talks about in overcoming Resistance.
If you’re interested in using your drive time, or chore time, or any other time where you could listen to a book, sign up at the Audible link below. It’s a 30 day free trial where you get two audible books that are yours to keep, even if you don’t continue past the trial period. Or if you’re already an Audible subscriber, there’s a direct link to both these books below too.
Final construction
Getting back to the project, under the plywood, the table top has a skirt that is boxed in on each end.
The boxes serve multiple purposes:
they add rigidity to the whole top,
they provide a mounting spot to attach to the cabinets and
they fill the space difference between the two types of cabinets.
The bottom of the boxes are made with a thinner plywood and have t-nuts in them to attach to the filing cabinets. The thinner plywood also acts as a top in the serger cutout.
After it was all assembled, I painted the main field and then put a polyurethane top coat over the paint, the edge banding and skirt.
Finished product
With a little help, putting it in place was simply a matter of taking out the old top and placing the new one in its place. And a bolt on each corner keeps it from sliding around.
Join me in this video where I show how I put made the table for my wife's sewing machine. And down here is a playlist of other sewing room related projects.
Thanks for joining me on our creative journey, long as it may take some times.
Someone asked in the comments of a previous video, what all the outlet tester light meanings were. Tester tools typically have a limited space and only explain the most common ways plugs are miswired. In this video, Harley looks at all the different ways a plugs wiring could be messed up and shows what lights the tester shows.
Here at House of Hacks we do tutorials, project overviews, tool reviews and more related to making things around the home and shop. Generally this involves wood and metal working, electronics, photography and other similar things. If this sounds interesting to you, you may subscribe here.
Music under Creative Commons License By Attribution 4.0 by Kevin MacLeod at http://incompetech.com.
Intro/Exit: "Hot Swing"
Transcript
A number of years ago, I did a video talking about this and how to use it.
It's a 110 outlet tester and it lists 6 different ways that outlets can be miswired and gives you codes for these lights light up.
A couple people commented that they were getting the lights lighting up in ways that weren't documented.
In today's video, I'm going to go through all the different ways, there's 6 listed here but I counted 12 different ways, an outlet could actually be miswired and see what kind of light codes we get for the different ways that they're wired.
If we're just meeting, I'm Harley. Welcome to the House of Hacks.
I make things out of various things here in the workshop.
Sometimes that includes doing 110 wiring, for which these are really handy.
Let's go over to the workbench, see the test setup and then checkout the 12 different combinations and what the lights look like for those.
At the bench here, I have an outlet that's wired correctly and the wires are plugged directly into an outlet.
I do not recommend you do this at home.
There is exposed 110 voltage here.
And there's a high risk of shock, injury and potentially even death.
So, I'm doing this so you don't have to.
Right now, this is plugged in over here in the correct configuration, as we can see from the outlet tester.
I'll go through the 6 different documented ways that the tester will report errors and then I'll go through the 6 undocumented ways and we'll see what the lights look like.
So, hopefully, that will tell us something about what those commenters were asking and give you that information.
OK, here we can see we have correctly wired because our lights are lit up to be correct.
And now we have hot/neutral reversed with the red and orange.
And now we have the open hot with no lights lit whatsoever.
And here we have open neutral with a single orange light.
Here we have a hot/ground reversed configuration.
And here we have the last documented item with an open ground with just a single orange light.
Now let's take a look at what other combinations we have that aren't documented.
Here's a ground/neutral reversed. Interestingly, it doesn't show up any different than a correct.
And here we have an open hot with neutral/ground reversed.
And in this case we don't get any lights because we don't really have any power coming into the tester for it to be able to light anything up with.
OK, this is a very confused situation where we have hot going to neutral and ground and neutral swapped.
OK, here we have a situation where ground and hot are reversed and neutral is open.
Looks like the tester can't detect this situation.
Now this is a really twisted situation here again where nothing is anywhere close to being correct.
Neutral is wired to hot. Hot is wired to ground and ground is wired to neutral.
OK, and here's the last undocumented configuration where ground is open and hot and neutral are reversed.
If you're interested in the video where I talk about how to use one of those outlet testers, it's in this video over here.
Down here is a video that YouTube thinks you'll enjoy.
Want to make an Arduino project a bit more complicated than blink? In today's episode of House of Hacks, Harley starts a project on how to make a binary clock. This project will use an Arduino and be presented in multiple parts. Today, the first part will be the overall requirements and design. In future videos, the software, circuit and finishing it off with an enclosure will be covered.
Resources
All the information to make this project: https://www.house-of-hacks.com/p/arduino-project-binary-clock.html
If you just want to buy one: https://amzn.to/3eGXFVD (Amazon affiliate link)
Get a digital version of the new Arduino poster by signing up for the House of Hacks newsletter: https://list-optin.house-of-hacks.com/arduino
Or a printed copy of the poster can be bought on the House of Hacks store: http://store.house-of-hacks.com
Contents
0:00 Project introduction
0:59 Welcome and about House of Hacks
1:19 Description of BCD
2:14 BCD for binary clocks
3:05 Project requirements
4:02 Controlling the LEDs
5:45 Tracking the time
6:18 Adjusting the time
7:23 Arduino selection
About
Here at House of Hacks we do tutorials, project overviews, tool reviews and more related to making things around the home and shop. Generally this involves wood and metal working, electronics, photography and other similar things. If this sounds interesting to you, you may subscribe here.
Music under Creative Commons License By Attribution 4.0 by Kevin MacLeod at http://incompetech.com.
Intro/Exit: "Hot Swing"
Transcript
A number of years ago, at a software conference, one of the evening activities as an outing to a hands-on science museum.
While there, I noticed and picked up this binary clock.
It uses something called BCD encoding and I thought it'd be kind of cool to make my own version of this as a project.
Technically, it could be done with some simple logic circuits and a timer.
But this would involve more hardware design and wiring than I wanted to be involved with and so I'm going to go the easy route and use an Arduino.
This is going to be done in four parts.
Part one today is the basic requirements and design.
Than as I'm waiting for parts to come in, I'll go over the software design and how to actually do some testing without having a complete circuit finished.
The third video I'll assemble all the circuits and get it running.
And then the fourth video will be creating an enclosure for it.
Welcome to the House of Hacks. If we’re just meeting, I’m Harley and I make stuff out a variety of materials.
For example, in this project, we're doing design discussions, and software and electronics and mixed media for the enclosure.
If making a things out of a variety of materials in the workshop is something that's your thing, consider subscribing and you won’t miss future episodes.
BCD is an acronym for Binary Coded Decimal and this was an encoding system that IBM came up with nearly a 100 years ago in the 1920s for use in their early mechanical devices.
As early computers came on the scene, they took this basic coding that they used and expanded upon it to use in the computers.
It was called EBCDIC at the time and was actually used until relatively recently.
Interestingly, early in my career, I had to write an ASCII to EBCDIC conversion routine for use by our business partners.
Before going to the whiteboard, a couple notes.
First, the code and schematics for this project, is available for free download off of GitHub.
And second, a commercial version of this clock, kind of like the one that I picked up at the conference, as well as all the materials I'm using in the project are available on Amazon. I’ll leave links for everything down in the description below.
In BCD, each column represents a decimal digit, coded in binary. The first column is the tens digit for the hours, the second is the units column for the hours. Next, we have the tens and units digits for the minutes and the tens and units digits for the seconds.
In decimal, we need four bits to cover the all digits 0-9 in binary. So all the units columns on the LEDs have four LEDs. Because on a clock, none of the tens digits go all the way to 9, we don’t need a full 4 bits for each of the tens columns. Hours for example only go to 2, so we only need 2 bits for a 24 hour clock. The minutes and seconds only go to five so we only need three bits for those.
So, to make this, what are our requirements?
For the LEDs, we have 3 groups of 4 and 2 groups of 3 for a total of 18 and another 2 for a total of 20 LEDs that we need to control.
Second, we need a way of keeping track of the time.
Third, we need a way to set the time.
I’ll talk about all these requirements in detail but first I’m excited to announce that I’m working on some Arduino training materials. I have an Arduino reference poster available now and am working on a book for people new to digital electronics and programming the Arduino. A digital version of the poster is available by just signing up to the House of Hacks mailing list where I’ll keep you updated on things happening here. I won’t bombard your email with a bunch of stuff. Just occasional updates when products are released and an occasional news item that I think you might find interesting related to making things. If you’re interested in this, there’s a link below in the description below.
Now, back to the design...
Looking at controlling the LEDs, my first inclination was to think about this as a single string of 20 bits where each digit in each group was put inline with the rest of the bits. The common way of working with large numbers of LEDs is to use a '595 based shift register. This only requires three pins on the Arduino but provides a number of digital outputs. This is so commonly used that there’s a shiftOut command built into the Arduino ecosystem. ‘595 chips typically only work with 8 bits (although there are variants that have more bits) but they can be daisy chained together so you can have an almost arbitrary number of digital outputs, all controlled by only three pins.
Since there’s 20 bits needed and each ‘595 provides 8 bits, I thought about using three shift registers, daisy chained together. This would give 8 times 3, or 24, bits. The first 20 bits would be used and the last 4 bits would be ignored.
I coded up a prototype sketch using this idea but it ended up being more messy than I really liked. All the code was one big blob with a bunch of dependencies spread throughout the whole thing. Some of that mess could be cleaned up with some refactoring, but it was still going to be more messy than I really liked.
Upon reflection, I realized each group of two numbers only needs at most 7 bits and I have three groups. For the purposes of this project, I could still use the three ‘595s but instead of daisy chaining them together, I could connect each one to the Arduino directly. This would help make the code cleaner. Each ‘595 needs three pins, so that’d be a total of 9 pins for the LEDs instead of 3. Let’s look at the rest of the requirements and see if there are enough pins.
To track time, the most reliable would be to use a clock module. A real time clock module, also called an RTC, is designed to interface with micro controllers and has it’s own battery backup. There are a number of different models. I selected to use a DS1307 because they can be had inexpensively and communicate with the Arduino using only three pins over the I2C bus.
It would also be possible to use the Arduino itself to track the time although I’m not to sure how accurate that would be. It would provide a software only solution though.
Finally, we need a way to set the time.
The commercial unit I have uses two buttons. One increases the hour each time it’s pressed. The other increases the minute each time it’s pressed and if they’re both pressed at the same time, the seconds are increased.
This could work, but I don’t have any good buttons that’d be appropriate for mounting in an enclosure and, in my spare parts bin, I have a rotary encoder.
Rotary encoders come in different styles. This particular one allows the user to spin it in either direction without any limits. It can also be pressed to indicate an event. The micro controller can detect which direction it’s turned and take appropriate action.
I think this would be easier to make accessible to the user in the enclosure, so I’m going to use it. It uses two pins to the Arduino to communicate the rotary action and one pin to communicate being pressed.
So, all in all, I’m looking at using 9 pins for the three ‘595s, 2 pins for the clock module and 3 pins for the rotary encoder. A total of 14 pins.
Since I want to keep this pretty compact, I’m going to select the Arduino Micro. It’s only about 2 inches long and about 3/4 inch wide and designed to go in breadboards and pre-made circuit boards with standard hole spacing. And it has 18 digital I/O pins. Four more than then 14 that we need.
I think it should work well.
So, I’ll go order the parts and, while waiting for them, I'll show you the software in this video.
If that video hasn’t been released yet, I’ll see you in this other video where I do an Arduino project simulating wind to make wind chimes sound indoors.
Interested in photographing splashing water? In this episode, we'll see how to take splash photography and capture the image every time. As demonstrated by Peter McKinnon, capturing high-speed events can be achieved by repeatedly doing the action and using your camera's burst mode. This doesn't take much equipment but does take quite a bit of time. Today, Harley shows how a little bit of inexpensive equipment can enable getting the splash every time, allowing you to fine tune the image to get it perfect.
Here at House of Hacks we do tutorials, project overviews, tool reviews and more related to making things around the home and shop. Generally this involves wood and metal working, electronics, photography and other similar things. If this sounds interesting to you, you may subscribe here.
Music under Creative Commons License By Attribution 4.0 by Kevin MacLeod at http://incompetech.com.
Intro/Exit: "Hot Swing"
Transcript
Want to learn how to take splash photos?
Is an hour for one image to long for you?
Want to get this image...
every...
single...
time?
Stick around and I'll show you how!
\Welcome to the House of Hacks!
If we're just meeting, I'm Harley.
I make stuff and I show you how to make stuff too.
I love Peter McKinnon's work. He's both inspirational and informational in the photography related videos that he makes.
Recently he did a video regarding splash photography where he made some really cool product portraits. The way he did this was to just take a whole lot of images and hope one of them turned out in drive mode. This is kind of a spray-and-pray method if you will.
The advantage to this is it's very inexpensive. Beyond the basic photography
equipment that you probably already have, there's nothing new required.
The disadvantage is it's very time intensive. I think he said it took him an hour to
get one good usable image. Well, if it's taking you an hour to get an image, if
you're trying to dial in on a specific look, it might give you quite a while and
a lot of patience. Or you might settle for something that's not exactly what
you're looking for.
I'm going to show a high speed photography setup that I use to get very repeatable results when dropping things into a water tank. Every time you drop something it's going to show up in the same place in the frame every time.
The equipment that I have is pretty old and it's no longer available but I've left links in the description below for equivalent systems that are available now. The total cost for this is less than $100. So while it is a little bit of investment, it's not very burdensome.
Today I'm going to cover two topics: 1) the equipment and how to set it up and 2) how to set your exposure to get the right images.
To do these splash images, there's really three things that are required: a photo gate which is a light based trigger so when something interrupts a light beam this sends out a trigger signal, and then there's a delay unit because you don't want the flash to go off when the beam is interrupted but rather when the object has had time to drop down into
frame where you want it, so you need a delay that's measured in like milliseconds.
A number of years ago I found these HiViz kits online and when I got mine they were just getting developed and were pretty rough. I got one and it was basically just some components and a schematic. I wired that together on a little point-to-point circuit board and put them in these cases so they're nice and neat and easy to use.
Since that time they've really refined their kits quite a bit and now you get a
whole assembly where you can assemble the kit and put it inside the control
panel that comes with it and the box that comes with it so you get a complete
package.
And then you need a way to trigger the flashes. I'm using a wireless system by
Cactus. These aren't made anymore but there's a new model by Neewer that
looks like it does pretty much the same thing. You don't need all the fancy TTL
stuff that drives up the price on these. You just need a simple on/off switch
because we're going to be running these in manual mode.
You could also, instead of using a wireless system, get one of those little devices that goes on the hot shoe that has a remote trigger input on it. That would work just as well.
First of all, the light beam needs to be set up across the opening of the tank so when
something falls in, it interrupts the beam and sends off the trigger.
The kit came with an infrared LED laser but I found that to be very hard to use
because being infrared it's invisible and trying to get it lined up this
distance so that it could trigger things was very very difficult. I found that a
normal red LED laser works just as well and is much easier to set up since you
can see it. I've got the laser on one side and I've got the sensor on the
other and that's going into the photo gate controller.
The wireless trigger just slides on to the bottom of the flash and now whenever the trigger is put off the flash goes off.
We could take the output from the photo gate and plug it directly into the transmitter for the wireless unit. The problem with this is we'd get an image when the object immediately hit the laser beam and not when it actually got into frame so we'd never see anything.
To solve this problem we use a delay unit that will delay the trigger signal by a
couple milliseconds that it takes to fall from the laser beam to where we
want it in frame and then the output from that delay unit then goes into the
transmitter for the wireless system.
Putting this all together, this is the equipment setup. We've got the LED going to the sensor for the photo gate. It's wired into its control module. The control module for the photo gate's output is wired to the input of the delay unit and the output of the delay unit is wired to the wireless trigger for the flashes.
So now whenever the light beam is interrupted the flashes go off.
Now for the exposure part of the setup.
To freeze action, a high shutter speed is required. And to get high shutter speed, a
lot of light is required. Peter used a combination of a nice light and high ISO.
On modern cameras, a high ISO isn't usually a problem. But without expensive
lighting, getting enough light on the object can be a problem.
An alternative is to use flashes. Speed lights work well for this. An interesting fact about speed lights is the lower the power, the faster the flash. This isn't necessarily
true about standard studio lights. With both studio lights and speed lights on
high power, typically the flash is long enough that motion will blur on you.
An interesting point when using flash is shutter speed isn't very relevant. Most,
if not all of the exposure, is from the flash, not ambient light. So if ambient light is low enough, shutter speed can actually be quite long.
Putting all these facts together, using a low power on the flash, combined with low
ambient light, and also combined with shutter speed in the order of seconds, we
have enough time to be able to trigger the camera and then drop the object. As
long as the shutter speed is long enough for us to do that operation, we're good.
So I have my camera set to two seconds for the shutter speed, f/10 to get a decent depth of field and ISO 200. The flashes are set to 1/16 power.
Once the equipment is set up then we're ready to dial things in. The photo gate
has a sensitivity setting that I find mid-range works best. If it's too
sensitive, random things in the air will cause it to trigger. We want it to be
reliable though when the objects that we're dropping really do pass through
its path.
Then there's the time delay that we need to set. My unit will work in
seconds, milliseconds or microseconds time ranges. I find that for dropping
objects in a set up like this, milliseconds works best. The range that
you'll use will depend on how far the trigger is from where you want it in
frame and how fast the object is moving. We'll dial this in through a series of images with kind of trial and error once we start making photos.
So let's start making them.
When I set up for this shot, the first image captured the item just before it hit the water.
I adjusted the lighting and tried again.
The lighting was better and the item was exactly the same place.
See how repeatable this is?
I then adjusted the delay in one direction and tried again.
This time the flash went off before the item was even in the frame.
I dialed the time the opposite direction and tried again.
This time it was exactly what I wanted.
As we can see from these subsequent images, once it's dialed in, the object will be at the same place in the frame every time.
These images are all sequential. They're not cherry picked from a bunch of different ones.
It's important when dropping things that they're dropped from the same height every time. But things of different weights can be dropped each time without changing the height. You will get a bigger splash though.
As you've seen, every time I drop something, the item is in the same spot in the image.
Over here is a playlist of other photography related videos and down here is a video that YouTube thinks you'll enjoy.
Remember when making things, perfection's not required, fun is!
