So I had an idea that maybe my ugly welds were due to poor electrical contact or some chemical reaction to surface impurities. So I redid the exercise from before where I cut a pipe and then try to weld it back together and make it waterproof. The difference is that this time I took the angle grinder and really polished all surfaces to a glimmering shiny new-steel surface. That gave a clear improvement!

So the final stretch was just about putting it all together. The benefit of doing a proper model and then following it precisely is that the pieces actually fit together (Sometimes. :P). First one drawer…. And then the rest of the drawers, and the Lego boxes. In actual use, the lids have to come off, of course. Otherwise you would have to pull out a drawer and open a lid to get to a piece, which you of course don’t want to have to do…

First some background. One of the great gifts my parents gave me was sorted Lego. Not just Lego, but Lego that was sorted into a logical system so I could easily find the piece I needed, when I needed it. Of course, the big investment from them was to help me keep it sorted and in order until I was old enough to do it myself, which took quite a few years…

So I decided to give welding one more go. Not because I have a project in mind, but simply because I was not in the mood for thinking about anything difficult. Yeah, I can also procrastinate. Writing embedded code with full test coverage isn’t a walk in the park… or, it is. But programming the functionality I need isn’t. So I took a square pipe, cut off three “rings” and then welded them back together with a plate as a bottom.

So today’s visit to the makerspace was more of an “I should get out of the house” rather than a part of the RHex project. First up, another quote on another shirt: Then some more time in the welding room welding junk together. When practicing my spot welding, I realised that I could connect the dots, and that means I could write something. So I did: That is all. Now time to go home 😀

So while I am improving the quality of my code, I still have to get out of the house occasionally and do some non-family-related stuff once per week. This week I didn’t really have a project, so I decided to try to go from a completely useless welder to a less useless welder. I had taken the basic safety training, and although I kind of liked how those welds came out, the next time I tried to weld something (The bucket for the toy excavator from the sandbox) all that happened was that sparks flew everywhere and some random blobs of melted metal got stuck to the bucket.

So we decided to read the book “Clean Code” for work (Yeah, the author has supposedly said some pretty dickish things and should perhaps not be endorsed. The book still has a valuable perspective, though). So of course I have to write my code more or less to that standard now that I have told all of my developers to do the same. So full TDD it is…. turns out it is true that TDD really shapes your code in a different way and that just adding tests to existing code is hard and potentially useless.

So I spent most of my free energy finishing the dress. That took a bit more than a week. Hare are some photos from the process. First up is the prototype I did. Simple cotton fabric strips just to see exactly what sort of pattern I wanted, and that it would follow the curves properly. And here is the completed front of the prototype. I just love how this came out.

So a wedding is coming up. Time to dust off the old sewing skills and take a level in sewing. A few years ago, I bought the most beautiful blue silk taffeta in Bangalore in order to make a proper evening gown at the next proper occasion. It took a while, but the occasion is now here. 😀 First step was drafting a pattern. After having assisted the manikin to the proper dimensions, I went back to my old trusty method of simply wrapping the manikin in newspaper and painters tape.

So all three driver boards are now completely wired and tested for dual motor control. One Arduino gave up and let out the magic smoke, for no apparent reason. Lucklily, I had bought a spare right from the start, so that was no issue. I also finished the foam inlay so the robot is now supported from all sides, lid included. But I also cut out all of the foam that wasn’t doing any work so I have some space for other stuff that I want to pack along.