With work and getting married I have had little time for blogging not to mention working on any projects. I hope I’ll have more time soon

Today I woke up to a warm and sunny day.  It was already 30 degrees centigrade on the balcony and to my horror all plants was close to dead and very dry. A emergency water run to the kitchen was required. About 15 litres of water later and I think they will be fine for another summer day. The picture is taken about 15 minutes after I watered the plants and in such short time they are getting back on the right side of the track.

I’ve been talking about the CNC mill in the previous posts. Today I can show a useful result of my work. This is the faceplate for the Arduinome on the way. Actually it is the lower of two faceplates that will be sandwiched together. I’m making this from the Machine collective design as they seems to be out of business.

As I don’t do machine programming that well yet, the program was running very slow, this whole thing took about 4 hours to do. I thing I could do it in one if I tried again.

The last two of weeks or so I have been waken several times, most times at sun break by some seagull chicks outside. A week or so ago they where mere balls of feathers. Today however I got a chance to see al three but by the time I got the camera out only one where left. But the one left are not shy for a camera let me tell you.

The window in the first picture are the bedroom.

The cats are more than a little interested but the chicks and the cats seems to be more of companions than enemies.

On a completely different matter, this weekend there was a furniture sale and we picked up a new  sideboard. Now almost all our kitchen furniture are from IKEA. But I still happy with the new arrangement.

Today I found a wax containing the main ingredients for a good moustache wax, beeswax and petroleum jelly. Unfortunately is smells like a fourteen year old girl. Now, I don’t mind the smell, if your a fourteen years old girl. However it is also quite soft. To soft for my rebellious upper lip hair. I am still on  a mission to make my own.

It is crazy difficult to take a good picture of my own moustache, so I settle for just plain crazy.

If you remember my little recap from this spring. The sad little plant. Well, one of the cats actually tried to kill that plant. Not only tried he succeed, or so he thought. I found it on the floor ripped up by the roots. However, shame for those how give up. I got it back in the earth and with a little love it got back on it’s roots so to speak. And now that little plant is the pride of the garden. Look at these peppers from a couple of weeks ago.

This is the peppers that are almost red today. (look at my previous post)

Yea, its about time to replant the small peppers. Unfortunately the pictures came out really dark as I used the camera in manual mode last time and my girlfriend didn’t check it. Anyway, they are coming along great. The early one is getting red, a nice chocolate brown colour. It’s getting late and I’ll leave you with the pictures as a gallery.

I’m not much of a LEGO builder, but on the other hand I have never really grown up ether. I stumble upon this piece by Wochenender on the  Brothers Brick blog.  I really like the details. If I only had the time, money and talent…

Yes, three updates on the same day. As the two other didn’t technically happened today I thought I might as well make another update. After work today I didn’t have my car anymore, it’s my fathers car and he needed it back. But still I wanted to  get some work on the cnc-mill done.  There where no other option than to take the bike to my office and continue the work. It would be easy if there where air in the tires.

I got some work done, the limit-switches for x and y axis are in place. And I rebuilt the last axis. Not much to talk about but that is what I did today.

As I mentioned this morning I finally got the serial driver for my sound player working.

It all started with me and my friend Kim working on our bar. We come up with the idea that it might be funny with some sound effects. Things like  rimshots, studio laughter and so on. After using “instant rimshot” we wanted something of our own. After some time I went to work. Now finally it’s done and I’ll try it out at the next gathering. I missed the three year anniversary  of the bar but at least it’s done.

I’ll just show you some pictures now

The buttons I got from e-bay, they where about $10 including shipping from Hong kong. The box is actually two picture frames, one from IKEA and the golden one is from a local barging-store.

I turned the IKEA frame backwards but kept the stand. After drilling four holes and fasten the back to the front I had a pretty good enclosure.

The buttons is mounted on a piece of brass sheet with an etched pattern. And the sheet is mounted instead of the normal glass.

All buttons need to have diodes soldered to the terminals, the way the buttons are connected makes the buttons send a four bit binary number on the four data-pins. The downside is that one the highest button get registered if two buttons are pressed at the same time, the upside is that it’s very simple to make.

All the wiring are old network cables. And it may not be pretty but it works fine. The serial cable is then connected to a small circuit board by a contact. It’s the only way to get the back on there. As the stand is left in the IKEA frame the buttons can stand by it self. I’m very happy about how it turned out.

I’ll sign of with a picture of the buttons completed. The serial cable are three meter long and should be enough for the bar. Later I will update with more details of the software and some pictures when I got it installed in it’s proper environment.