With almost all the last fixes on the apartment done, I felt that I needed a new project to pick up. Something that in no way was practical and had a deadline, but just for the pure joy of doing it.

I decided to try to build a steam engine from scratch. I spent all of that time in the hex project learning CNC, but then in the end I never really used it. And if I am to get some credibility as a hobbyist mechanical engineer, a steam engine is the perfect portfolio piece. Nothing speaks old-school engineering quite as much as a steam engine.

During the month of December and January, we completely rebuilt the apartment. This means that we tore out all walls, floors and electricity and then rebuilt everything.

Since early February, we have been moving in, and custom-building bookshelves among other things. The living room is now done. Everything in oak was built by me.

Sandblasting and powder coating!

They say that powers coating really needs clean metal, so I decider to sandblast all pieces. Now they all have this beautiful ghostly white color with a subtle glitter. Really beautiful.

Before pulling all of the pieces at risk, I decided to do a test coating on a throw-away piece. Not much to say. I hung it from the trolley, grounded the powder gun and sprayed. Except for the area closest to where it hung from the wire, the powder covered the piece with perfect smoothness.

So we are rebuilding our apartment from scratch (New walls, floors, ceiling and kitchen) and as a part of that, the kids are getting their own rooms. In their own rooms, they will get raised beds that are attached to the walls in three corners. The fourth corner has to either stand on a post on the floor, or hang from the ceiling. Naturally, I want to make a ceiling mount to keep the floor clear.

So back in the game, I have entered a period of working with oak.

First up was a holder for the toothbrush chargers. Having more than one really looks messy, but now they stand in a proper line.

I knew that the makerspace had lots of tiny pieces of high quality wood, mostly oak, so I took all of the tiny pieces, planed them up and glued them together into a block. I put them on a diagonal, just to make things a bit more interesting.

It took a while, and the construction is rather fragile, but the Lego table finally got its internal lighting working. The idea is to make it easier to see the pieces even without pulling the drawers all of the way out.

The result was highly appreciated by the users. 😀

So as we will be moving to Bangalore for a year, and I cannot bring an entire electro-mechanics lab with me, I had a pretty hard deadline to wrap up the hex project one way or another.

So I set myself the goal that I wanted to capture a film of the thing walking. That meant that all of the components had to actually be in place and working together. It took one full day of work, but here it is!

I am running out of shirts again. So I bought some new ones and I felt I had to add some quotes to them. Dare to be different. Dare to be brave.

I also learned an important lesson about sharp tools (again). The first cutouts of the text refused to properly detatch. So I sat for over an hour with a scalpel trying to detatch the letters one by one. Finally, I gave up and replaced the knife. Fifteen minutes later I was done with both cutouts. Lesson: Keep your tools in good condition.

The robot is build with four independent circuit boards. Three of them are driver boards that power and control one leg pair each. Each driver board contains a dual motor driver and one Arduino. The Arduino is programmed with the low-level logic to drive the legs, including a PID, homing encoder support, etc..

However, the way this robot should walk is that the two opposite tripods walk together. So something needs to sync the three driver boards. This is where the controller board comes in. Right now, it only has a single Arduino on it, but I have space for a Raspberry Pi Zero are well for future expansion.

Yeah, so it happened.

First I made an improvised fire-proof charging station. I wonder if the people who cast this pot literally almost 100 years ago could have even fantasized about the kind of battery power we have access to today….

So attaching two legs and the battery, I finally managed to get the thing to walk across the floor…… 😀

… Yeah, I might not exactly have paid the royalties for the music in the background….