Thursday, May 19, 2016

long time no blog

I haven't given up, I promise.  Lot going in my life lately.  Did a ton of work on the house because we were getting it appraised to refinance.  Things I should have done long ago all stacked up, but I got most of them done and the appraisal is over with.  Combine that with staying busy with mods.. Not only am I helping work on mods for Mezel Mods, I'm getting contracted directly by Sparky (who has a big backlog for his stuff, but I'm not going to say no to easy money).  Heck, just last week I had a guy from the next town over contract me to model up a mounting bracket for a tanneau cover for his pickup (apparently the part doesn't exist anymore).  Couple hours of modeling and a quick print and I'm $40 richer.   He found me because I made an account on makexyz.com (local 3d printer vendor list).  None of this is going to make me rich, but it's sure nice to have a side job to fund things.  I also have a backlog of LCD mods, of which I cannot really work on until they start shipping raspberry pi zeros (should be anyday now).  They had to move their factory to another facility to keep up with demand since the pi3 is also selling really well (and has slightly higher margins).

Anyway, now that I'm catching up on things I'd like to get back into this.  I've tried to sell my treadmill to make more space, but I refuse to sell it for the $100 people are offering on craigslist (I originally paid $1200 and it's barely used), so that may be staying.  However, since the house is clean and purged of useless stuff, I may be putting a rocking chair that's taking up space down here upstairs in the library.  It belongs to my wife, but it used to belong to her grandmother.

After hearing the interview with Mission pinball (boom go podcast), I really want to try this framework out.  I've watched videos in the past (getting demolition man up and running in a couple hours), but hearing in depth talk of it makes it more clear what it does and what it doesn't do.  Hugh shipped me the latest rev2 boards about 3-4 weeks ago, and I hate to see it just sitting there.  I still need to tweak my layout a little but I have some ideas.  Also I came up with a way to make quick wireform ramps using 3d printed brackets:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=w2ocsm5AkkU