MakerGeek

Maker|Geek I mess with CNC, laser, machining, 3d printing, woodwork, electronics, welding

Also on tiktok

2025-07-12

If you're thinking of making random custom stuff for your car, pro move is to buy a colour matched spray paint so you can tone things in nicely.
This is a pair of speakers I made today, laser cut side panels in ply wood then spray painted to match the car. I've now installed these behind the seats. But matching the paint colour really helps make them feel like they belong.

Two speakers say on the boot of an mx5 showing the colour matched panels
2025-07-11

@clolsonus fwiw I run mosquito MQTT in a docker container on a little Linux server that sits on my desk.
Along with the containers for home assistant and everything else.
If I wanted to make it accessible from the internet I'd just need to allow that port in at the router and port forward it to the Linux box.
One of the other containers I run is managing dynamic DNS, it checks the external IP associated with my home and updates my DNS records in route53 accordingly.

2025-07-10

@clolsonus what do you want to connect and where would you host the MQTT server?

2025-07-10

@clolsonus in my case I'm running everything locally in my house. There is no reason why very disparate things couldn't communicate over a common MQTT server, so long as they are each able to connect to the server. The clients each connect out to the server so long as they can resolve the address and hit the port they could be anywhere. I was actually considering publishing a public DNS for my control server so my watch would work even when I'm not at home. Pretty simple routing job.

2025-07-10

When I started using MQTT for interacting with my robot I worried that I was complicating things. That it would be slow or unreliable. But I'm definitely into the phase where adding capability is super easy because all I have to do is subscribe to topics and publish events.
Similarly, ages ago I built a watch app fort my Garmin that just requests a JSON doc from an endpoint which it then turns into a menu structure where the leaf nodes are URLs to action things.
So this was actually easy to do

MakerGeek boosted:
2025-07-10

I might have been obsessing over a certain game recently. 3d printed a little model which I painted today.

Hollow knight disapproves of my wine drinking
2025-06-28

I might have been obsessing over a certain game recently. 3d printed a little model which I painted today.

Hollow knight disapproves of my wine drinking
2025-05-23

@MisterMaker I tried blender, but I have a hell of a time getting as good of a result from the camera tracker. I honestly prefer blender to actually work in. I'm sure I'll end up doing a mix.

2025-05-22

@trevorflowers thanks, . After the many issues and set backs is nice to play with it for the intended purpose again

2025-05-22

3 separate motion moves, stitched and matched with a warp, camera tracked and 3d text added.
I'm trying to start practicing actually using my robot cameraman setup to achieve shots and learning enough DaVinci resolv to be able to make use of them in interesting ways. There's a lot to learn.

2025-05-08

@oblomov I should probably say I also put the STL into blender to light it and animate it for that video but once you have the STL you have lots of options

2025-05-08

@oblomov I used invesalius.github.io/ for this. I've also been playing with slicer.org/
Which is less intuitive but I think more capable.

2025-05-08

It's my brain!
I recently had an MRI and I requested the imaging data. Turns out there are some free tools you can use to process it. The brain is the easiest bit to get a good model extracted. Pretty weird that this is possible and this is actually my brain

2025-05-05

Many upgrades and tweaks. Movement is now reliable and repeatable if a little jittery. Sensor reliability is still an issue but this is a pretty decent rendition of the motion planned in blender using it's armature IK

2025-05-03

Watched a YouTube video this morning by black beard projects in which he made a massive workbench from an old surface plate. He made levelling feet from bolts with a machined foot and welded but m retaining nut. Seemed like a good idea and I copied it this afternoon whilst making a stand for my washing machine.

2025-04-21

I've been making improvements. Bigger motor on the elbow, the previous one used to upgrade the rotation power. Welded up a fixed mount for the counterbalance weight. This test showed a very promising repeatability in position. Always a list of stuff to improve, but it's come a long way

2025-04-14

I've spent soooo much time trying to get this to work. You would imagine it shouldn't be that hard to transmit 6kb of data to a few esp32s. But it's been a nightmare. Tried 3 different transport setups and 5 different libraries. 3 of which where mqtt. Finally got one that didn't corrupt the data or segfault-reboot.
And now I can get back to aligning the robot axis to blender.

2025-04-10

Completely rewrote the whole motion planning stack. I'm now pre-calculating steps in blender then transmitting a motion plan as time sliced step counts to be handled in a tight loop task on the Esp32.
I have to stream it straight into flash storage then load it back out because it's too much to try putting in memory at once.
This is just one axis to prove the code is working end to end.
The result in this video is not very impressive, however I think this pipeline is going to be more flexible

2025-04-05

@jonossaseuraava ha yeah, it's only about 20kg, but at full reach the robot can hold a 2kg camera about 1m out so the torque including the robot itself gets pretty high

2025-04-05

It's been a long long time coming, but the robot is starting to work properly. This is a composite move to try and move a straight line through space

Client Info

Server: https://mastodon.social
Version: 2025.04
Repository: https://github.com/cyevgeniy/lmst