April 2023

Weather Smart Lego Lighthouse

The basic Lego Lighthouse kit on our kitchen table, awaiting . . . magic
As the father of two sons, I'm required by international law to be into Lego.  And of course after my boys lost interest, I had to go on and build 'adult' Lego sets. Not so much required by law, but strongly encouraged by The Lego Group, plc.So, last Christmas, as a request, I received the Lego Motorized Lighthouse set. This is, to say the least, an extremely cool, and as the title says, motorized, lighthouse kit. I managed to  hold off on finishing the build for 24 WHOLE hours. But once finished, I added batteries, turned on the switch, turned off the lights in the room, and watched the beacon light sweep around the room, with a warm gentle fireplace light showing in the little house. To say I was smitten is to understate the patently obvious.But then . . . and here come the words that any engineer will tell you are the most dangerous in the world . . . . I got to thinking . . . 

For the moment, this is a placeholder until I can add the updates. I've moved very fast on this project, and only a little bit of it is woodworking related. Otherwise it's Lego, electronics, interface design, sound design, and python programming. I'll start with the wish list:

The motorized lighthouse is cool and all . . . but I want it to do more. I made the mistake of, the second night while showing it to my wife, opening my phone, finding a lighthouse sound effects video on Youtube, and played that in the background. Even she got goosebumps. So I wanted it to do more:

  • Sound effects . . . obviously
  • Timer function to turn it on and off
  • A foghorn . . because DUH, obviously.
  • Oh, and the foghorn has to turn on when it's foggy out.
  • And it has to lose the batteries, so I need it to plug in and run all the time
  • And it can't have an attached computer, so I need a way to control the thing

See . . . . nothing much. Just a standalone lighthouse toy that looks, sounds, and acts like a real automated lighthouse with foghorn.

Sounds  a bit mad.    But ya know what . .  .I've BUILT it. And it is AWESOME!

Much more to come.

StartDate: 
Friday, February 17, 2023 to Wednesday, May 31, 2023
Finished project?: 
Yes

Beginning Main Box Joinery

  • Posted on: 10 April 2023
  • By: Jay Oyster

I haven't posted on the Tansu Teabox project in quite awhile, but I have been working on it. Slowly, as ever. But after a couple of major side-tracks in the maintenance of my basement shop, I also had problems with my website, as I've mentioned elsewhere here. But in between, I did manage to make a bit of progress on the teabox. Last December, I finally resawed the sidewall pieces to the 1/4 to 1/2" thick pieces needed for the box shell, and planed them down and joined them, then cut to final dimensions.  Through all of that, I neglected to take any photos. 

But after a major effort to fix the flooding problem in my shop this past year, I got my tools put back . .  in particular my workbench. With the bench back, I started working on the dovetails for the teabox case.

Cutting dovetails of the main box case

Enough --- I have to reclaim this site

  • Posted on: 9 April 2023
  • By: Jay Oyster

OK, there are clearly theme problems with the Drupal site I've been running. And my version of Drupal is old enough that migrating is a major undertaking. I refuse to migrate to Wordpress or Joomla or SquareSpace or Wix. I'm just going to downgrade the current site to get the basics of what I want out of this hosting/publishing function. I have many projects that I've not published here because of the problems with the underlying tech. No more. I'll just go back to a simple layout and keep the old content as is.Coming soon . . .