Home Automation Hangout 2020-09-06: Lab tour

[Music] yes [Music] good morning superhumans i hope you're having a great weekend so far ah good morning andy you just pinged me on the back channel which is cool that's going to be very very useful today now first thing is this is the first time that i've ever done a live stream using this radio mic which is currently linked to the receiver plugged into my computer so i need to know that people can hear me it looks like i've got audio levels but i don't know for sure this is going to be a bit of a strange one today uh okay so while people are joining the stream uh i'll just oh cool thanks kevin um i'll just quickly do my my aboriginal awareness shout out for today is the aboriginal literacy foundation and as you can imagine the aboriginal literacy foundation provides services related to literacy and also numeracy and they also do weekend camps which do like cultural immersion sort of things particularly in working with the kuri people so and they operate out of about 150 different locations around australia including a very remote place called marble bar which is where my grandfather was a squadron leader during world war ii out of flying out of a secret air base there doing missions into japan so i just put the link to the aboriginal literacy foundation in the chat cool uh so today this is going to be strange trying a few different things so i've been wanting to do a lab tour for a while and i've already partly recorded a proper lab tour video which is you know one of the ones where i record it and edit it and try to make it all make sense and be a little bit more concise than just rambling live like this but hey live lab tours could be fun so what i've got is i'm just going to switch cameras for a second if i switch to that let's see if it works hey so that camera that you're looking through right now is actually my mobile phone and from there whoops you can see back to my workbench and this is where i'm streaming from at the moment so i've got obs and notes and discord and youtube over there and other stuff that i'll show you in a minute so for now let's just switch back to here and we will go for a little tour through the lab in a minute so as i'm doing this it's going to be very difficult for me to to follow anything that's in the chat and i'm going to be walking around the room a little bit but what i'm going to do basically is just give you an overview of my lab setup show you a few of the different things i've got in here and you can ask questions about whatever it is that i'm showing you but please be patient because i may not actually be able to see the question until i come back to the computer i've got andy also watching in the stream so he's going to be grabbing things and sending them to me through a back channel to try to help me from missing things so let's begin well firstly let's just say hello to a few people uh guru of nothing is here cool hey grant and daryl frank mike oh migraine sorry to hear that you were not feeling too good last week mike um yeah lots of people james hello from milwaukee how do you say that nelly walkey aaron cool and dustin's creations is here as well um oh and chris yes raspberry pi with screen for chat or time for a tts live chat raspberry pi project um i for this sort of situation i would normally use my phone to follow the chat but right now my phone is being the camera sitting away back over there so i can't do that milliwaque as alice cooper says uh adams it's hi from the uk and kevin is from atlanta all right oh and dodgy's here too all right so uh let's see where to begin as you can tell i really don't have a plan for this i've just got a mobile camera i've got a radio mic and i'm going to make it up as i go alrighty so oh it's warming up getting hot let's get rid of that all right i'm going to walk away from the computer for a while which means i'm not going to be able to see jerry said we're not worthy no um uh party on wayne so pecophone let's see switch to the overall view now one thing that i'm very conscious of is moving cameras can make people feel really sick and so if i pick the camera up and i just wave it around too much what's going to happen is everybody's going to be feeling quite seasick so i'm mostly just going to be moving around putting it in a fixed position and then talking about things all right so what can you see from that point of view okay so this is looking in from the door of the lab like if you just walked in from the back of the garage and you're looking over my shoulder this is walking in the door and it's an l shape because this section to my right is cut off and you'll see that probably sometime down the track so there's the l-shaped entrance and then it opens up into a larger room and the bench now i'm going to have to unplug a charger hang on i've got because i don't think the battery on my phone is going to last all that long i've got i've had it plugged into a charger but now if we come in through the entrance you can see the main bench area that wraps around so it goes around to that far corner now one thing that's not particularly apparent when you're looking at this on video is that this room is not square that back wall actually comes in at a diagonal because it's on the boundary line of the property and it's just the way the property works so that far corner of the bench that's not a square corner it's a weird angle and everything has sort of had to be made to suit it so when you're looking at it through the camera like this it looks like you're looking at a straight on wall but you're not that wall is at a strange angle okay so let's start from this area here because everything kind of comes out from here in fact let's just cover that spot because that this is pretty much the core of everything it's where everything else comes out so um what i wanted to be able to do was have some way that i work on the computer and work on electronics pretty much within arm's reach what i've had in the past is and when i say past i mean like 10 years ago plus was somewhere that i had my computer and somewhere that i had like a soldering iron and tools and everything else set up and it was really frustrating so what i very deliberately did when i set this up was make it so that i could be here at the computer which means i can be looking at say design files like in eagle or keycad or whatever and have them open visible on a screen while i'm working on the hardware on the bench which is right beside it and probably even more importantly what i want to be able to do is run say my code doing software development i want to have it all open on the screen here and have the device that i'm coding on sitting on the bench here which might be attached to test equipment or you know bench power supply or whatever and be able to just do code updates and have that applied directly on here so having the computer and the electronics area kind of merged together was a very deliberate decision and the original layout of this room was quite different i originally had all of my electronics workspace on the left side it was down this bit of bench and the reason i did that was that i've got a big window here which i'll probably open up a little bit later so you can see out and i thought that it would be really useful to have to have good natural light coming in onto the workbench area and it turned out to be really counterproductive so what i ended up doing was basically it meant that the lighting was always unpredictable if i was working at night then i'd need artificial light anyway and if i was working during the day the sun could be really hot it could be too bright and glary it was just uncontrolled so what i ended up doing was switching around oh and the other thing this is really important is having your workbench directly under a window robs you of the opportunity of having vertical space above your bench and that is really really important so as you can see here i've got test gear on the first shelf directly above the workbench tools below and then other things within reach that i might want to get and if there's a big window right in the way here all of this is gone you can't use that space and all of the things that you would put there end up having to be put off to the side somewhere or down on the bench which means they get in the way so this has gone through a few iterations firstly in terms of major restructure like moving things from there to there but also in terms of rearranging how things set up on the bench so um what else uh okay i suppose we'll have a quick look at the computer setup itself since that's probably [Music] an interesting starting point move it just down there try to get it in view a bit better all right so two rows of monitors as you can see and they're on two different computers this bottom row is all my imac so that's the imac 27-inch imac running to an apple thunderbolt display and then this is a i think it's a kogan brand like 2k display so the resolution on all three monitors is the same so basically it's three 27-inch monitors across the bottom row and then three 25-inch monitors on the second row those monitors are all connected to an ubuntu machine which is down under the desk let's see can you see it no it's basically directly below this part of the desk you would have seen it in the wider shot and then everything is cabled back through there and there's a frame you can probably just make out here there's a bit of timber so i made a custom frame that fits around the back that only monitors mount on so those are sitting on a frame which is sitting on the desk and then oh look there's louis sitting on the front steps so cctv around the house so that i can see when someone comes to the front door or whatever's going on that's the inside of the garage which is just through the doors through there and the back veranda area which you can see is getting a bit grubby i need to clean the lens on that camera so that camera is actually only about a meter away from where i am right now it's just through the wall right on the outside of that corner of the building looking sort of diagonally back towards the back of the house so in a minute when i open up the blinds we'll see out the window and we'll basically see this view but from a slightly different angle all right um okay other just wondering what's useful or interesting about this uh okay so computer i've got a variety of input devices as you can see i don't have a mouse i gave up using a mouse how long ago it'd be over 10 years ago because i ended up having some problems with i'm not sure if it was carpal tunnel syndrome or something but i was getting lots of pain in the forearms and so i did two things i ended up switching to the dvorak keyboard layout and i started using a trackball instead of a mouse and all the pain's gone away i haven't had any pain for uh probably seven or eight years it faded away fairly quickly and then after a year or two of being switched over to using dvorak and a trackball all the pain was gone so that's cool so what i normally do is i have the split keyboard in the middle trackball under the right hand trackpad under the left hand then there's a custom keypad which i have set up to send keyboard macros for eagle so just press one button and it executes like a series of functions within eagle or select tools or changes layers or whatever i want to do there is she who shall not be named oh and also i shall mention i made this mistake on a previous live stream i'm probably going to be using a couple of voice commands as i do this walkthrough to show you a couple of things so if you have one of these devices from amazon maybe hit the mute button on the microphone so that i don't do silly things to yours if it can hear this um this coming out so what else other interesting things not really oh yeah the um the 3d mouse which is awesome this one was given to me by simon so thank you very much simon this is amazing i went looking for one and i asked for i'd never used one and i started asking around to see if anybody had used one so that i could or had one that i could borrow just to see what it's like because they're pretty expensive they're hundreds of dollars and i didn't want to just buy one hoping that it would be suitable and simon said i've got one that i don't use so take it and uh yeah i've been using it ever since absolutely love it for vision 360 this is the greatest thing ever it's like being able to reach out and grab the model and just manipulate it in however you like so what i usually do is have and the reason i've got the two different pointing devices so the trackpad and the trackball is that i do gestures on the left hand and select and move and things on the right hand which i find is also super useful in eagle if i'm doing things like schematic or schematic or pcb it doesn't matter it works the same in both what i usually do is i have my hands on the two pointing devices and mac os handles it really elegantly what i can do is select an object using the right hand and then i can pinch to zoom and pan on the left hand and then put it down or manipulate it with the right hand so i can be using both hands at the same time to be selecting moving zooming panning that sort of thing and moving objects around so that is really cool um this is the microphone that i've been using generally for live streams and this one was given to me by grant guru of nothing so thanks grant for that before using this i was using the built-in microphone which was terrible so the only thing that's annoying about this at the moment is that i've got it on the little tripod stand right in front of me and that just it gets in the way a bit so uh if i'm not for the keyboard the keyboard is fine but for reaching back here like grabbing a calculator or whatever so what i want to do is move that probably put this on a little boom and mount it up here somewhere so that it's totally clear of the bench uh the only other thing that's probably the only other thing that's interesting is i've got i use a program called barrier so that the keyboard and mouse is shared between both devices even though one is a mac and one is a linux machine so if i grab my mouse pointer i've got to find it first where is it okay so mouse pointer is down there and i can scroll it up and now it's up here so then i can click on things and move stuff around up there and i can copy and paste between the two computers so if i've got something i'm working on here i can copy the url and paste it into a browser up here or whatever and they're also they also both are on the same dropbox account so all their documents are the same basically it's two computers that are as close as they can be to working together as a single computer even though they're different operating systems and probably one of the major reasons that i still use mac os as the primary operating system is for a fusion 360. and that can run on ubuntu really badly under wine in fact i've got it installed on ubuntu and it can run in a vm but it's just a pain so uh yeah alrighty so what else oh yeah label printer i love my label printer and that is one of the little tricks that i use to keep everything organized because as you look around here you'll see there are labels on everything so well since we're in this area okay here's a little tip what i do is i keep this box really close to me all the time so this box stays in that spot so that all i've got to do is if i'm in this area near my computer and work bench i just stand up grab that box and i've got access to zip block bags and little containers and things so the general principle is nothing should end up just being shoved aside into a corner and left unknown if i've got something that even something fairly transitory and it's a group of parts and i want to put it somewhere i can just reach up grab a bag chuck it in the bag print a label and i have the dynamo software open constantly so i just type out a label print it and stick it on and everything ends up labeled and it sounds like it's a really sort of anal way of going about things but it means that over time you don't end up with lots and lots of random stuff you just you end up with everything labeled and you look you can look at it and say oh that's what that is so i find that it really helps me to remember things like if i've got little display modules i'll print out a label that's got the resolution and the interface like whether it's i squared c or spi or whatever stick it on the bag and then later i can just grab the bag out and i know exactly what it is i'm not trying to think back to six months ago and thinking what is this display is that 0.91 inch or is it 0.96 inch i don't know all right so moving slightly to the right um to the more of the electronics area i'm just going to check what my battery level is like on the phone because i don't know if this is going to be chilling through the battery super fast or not i don't know it's not being displayed all right so the general electronics area sit down for this little bit oh um one thing i didn't point out is what i actually use those monitors for but i might get back to that so this this like one and a bit meter space is where i spend probably eighty percent of my time during the week either sitting at the computer just there or sliding sideways to the workbench right here i've got it set up with the hand tools that i commonly use across the back now the way this camera is working i've got to get it in pretty close to be able to see anything so i'm just going to move you in a bit closer so you can get a more detailed look at the workbench alrighty so when i first set this up i had all of my test gear down on the bench and there were a couple of problems with that one of the big problems was cables ended up getting in the way because if you've got test gear down here and you've got things like blades plugged in they just inevitably end up dragging across the bench so what i ended up doing was moving all of the test gear up and putting it up on the first level shelves and that then let me have little organization containers so i've got basically it's just a row of they're like take away containers but they're thicker plastic they're a more durable sort of thing for different purposes and the idea is to keep the really common hand tools organized across the bench so i can always just reach for a pair of tweezers or screwdriver or whatever cutting tools picks and then wire as you can see here easy access and i've also got a couple of magnets attached along here oh and one thing i should point out is this gray material i did a video about this i think maybe two years ago i can't remember it was when i put it in this is a static dissipative material and if i pick up this bit of matte this is an off cut it's got the rubberized surface on the top and then a carbon impregnated back on it which is slightly conductive so and that is then attached through to an earth stake there's a wire that goes through the wall and down into a big metal stake that's in the ground so there shouldn't be any static build up anywhere on this work surface and i've got a anti-static wrist strap just here so like whenever i'm working i can put that on and there's a little what i did was make up a bracket that's a little bit of aluminium angle i just cut it and drilled it and that has got a banana connector in it so that goes through to the same earth connection as the bench surface so i can plug myself in there and the bench surface and i are at the same potential in theory so it should work anyway and i've got some little magnets glued up here so i can attach things so you know scalpel things that you reach for just stay up nicely out of the way now one thing that is really handy here is i've attached these two usb hubs up under the bench top and they are there i first i hot glued them on and then i put screws on the sides to hold them so they're really solid in fact i think i'll bring the camera in a bit closer so you can see more of what's going on there because this is a very useful thing and i'll bring it into it i'll make it more of a side view so you're not looking at the back of my head so much so i deliberately went looking for really skinny usb hubs so that i could flush mount them under the the shelf here and they're mounted so that the front is basically flush with the front edge of the shelf and there are two of them so these are connected through one of them is connected to the linux computer which is under the bench the other is connected to my imac and the idea with that is that if i'm working on a device say this one and i want to work on the electronics basically i can plug this in and power up this device it's connected to the usb hub which is linked through to my computer and i'm right here in front of all of my test gear so i can have the hardware project on the bench with access to all of the test gear that i want but it's also linked for data through to my desktop so i can set something up here slide across to my desktop and then do whatever coding i want to do and then just push the code down to the device which is sitting over here and that way it it gives a super convenient place to plug things in because normally the usb port on the computer on an imac in particular is on the back of the computer it's a terrible thing to get to so extending the usb ports around to the bench is a really handy thing so if there's one tip you take away that should be it it's very cool uh yeah a little device for monitoring power for a usb and uh what else oh yeah and similarly i've brought through ethernet this is a little netgear gigabit ethernet switch one of those little metal case desktop switches and i've got it once again it is glued and screwed under the bench and that's connected through to my um through to the wiring closet where the the unified switches are so i just heard a ding i don't know what that was i don't know if someone's trying to get in touch with me or not right so once again because i do a fair bit of work with power over ethernet you know devices like this it's got ethernet on it it can be very handy to be able to just plug into ethernet right at your bench instead of having the ethernet socket down on the wall like i've got ethernet sockets on the wall as well but instead of having to get out a cable and find where to plug it in and crawl under the bench if you've got ethernet right here it means that i can grab a cable plug it in and i'm on the lan so i can have a device here connected to the host computer by usb plugged into the lan and i've got a power over ethernet injector here so i can run oops so i can plug that into one of these bench power supplies and do power over ethernet as well either so that's what i use for like diy power over ethernet or for proper poe i've got injectors and other things to use for that purpose other things a little extractor fan here all this does is move fumes away from my face it's not actually a filter i'll turn it off so you can see it a bit better it's just a computer fan on a little laser cut base with a weight on the back and some led strip around it for illumination so what i can do is just put that like if i was working on this board i can put that right in front of it turn it on and it gives me good illumination for what i'm working on and it also sucks the fumes back and blows them away from me so the fumes aren't just rising up into my face so if i'm sitting here with the soldering iron working on something the fumes are being taken away now you might ask why i'm not doing filtering at this point and that is because there is a second system for that i've got this just to pull things away from my face so this is right at the point where i'm working but there is also let's see if you can see it oh yes you can if i move the microscope out of the way and if i pull the cover off so this big round pipe here it's a little right angle it ducks down i'll move that out of the way as well you can see that pipe ducts down below the bench and then underneath this bench up near the wall there is a bit of pvc conduit that runs all the way around the room and it picks up several points like this there is a t piece directly below the bench here and that goes to a an extraction fan which then vents out through the wall so any fumes and things that are generated in this workbench area the idea is that this will pull it away from my face and then this sucks it down the tube and it goes out and gets vented so hopefully i don't have too many fumes sitting right in front of me and i've just got a 3d printed cover for it so that i can close it up when it's not in use and also if i want to redirect the exhaust elsewhere because that same exhaust system runs around the bench goes down to my uh my reflow oven and my laser cutter so by blocking this off it means that more of the suction comes out of the other points okay i think i had better have a look at some of the comments because it's been a while since i've looked oh one other thing while i'm here before i move the camera this test gear is blue tacked in place which might sound a little bit strange but the idea is to have it set up so that the control surfaces are all flush things like these bench power supplies and this multimeter so this multimeter is a unity ut61e which is just a normal handheld multimeter but what i've done is hot glued a couple of angle brackets onto the back of it and i've also drilled a hole in the back and put in a connector for a bigger battery pack so that is powered by a 9 volt battery pack which is running double-a batteries and that should last i don't know probably a decade before it ever has to be changed and the angle brackets are then blue tacked down to the bench so it's standing up vertically but it's actually solid and that means that i can just reach up turn the dial and this one i hacked this one to add a backlight to the display so normal ut61es don't have a backlight this one does so i can just reach up and turn the dial i can press the buttons on it i can change the leads and the multimeter doesn't move it just stays there so it's like it i basically taken a handheld multimeter and turned it into a bench multimeter and these power supplies are also blue tacked down so i can push buttons on them and nothing moves same thing with the crow it's not a crow it's a scope it's a digital scope so i can push buttons nothing moves and uh okay let's have a look at questions and then i'll get back to a bit more about what's on this bench and then maybe eventually we will get to other parts of the room for now let's just aim it there while i check out what the questions are oh wow uh i've run out they went off the top of my screen so [Music] oh mike asked what's the name of the tool for machine mouse keyboard sharing this one i'm using is called barrier and cable tie i said there's another one that is used called synergy yes i've used synergy in the past as well that was actually what i used to use and my memory might be wrong here but i think that uh barrier may be a fork of synergy after synergy went commercial something like that anyway let's just switch back to the front camera in fact i'm going to put the phone back on the charger so that we can then go for another lab walk in a couple of minutes yes um james said i've been running synergy for years it's amazing yeah uh yeah i think barrier is the the proper open source fork of synergy uh yes oh um peter said how is this desk held up there's no legs and dodgy said white legs there peter yeah okay so the this bench is uh cheap rubbish that's because i made it so once we'd done all of the big renovations on the house we were out of money and my original idea what i really wanted to do was to go to somewhere like a kitchen company someone that does proper cabinetry and benches and things and have them fitted out so it would be like proper kitchen bench material and it would all be really fitted perfectly and very nice but it just would have cost too much so i'll just move this microphone it's falling down okay so what i ended up doing was getting some just some pine and screwing it around the wall and put some this is yellow tongue floor sheeting so it's basically like chipboard essentially and i cut it to the right dimensions and sat it on the strip the horizontal strips and then put in some frame underneath so there are legs and the legs are sort of spaced around one of the things i did have to do was this part of the bench just near where i'm sitting so the electronics bench that you saw a moment ago that has got two big steel big pieces of steel that run all the way across and in fact you can just see it on the edge of the camera here so this front bit of the bench if i push down on that that does not move at all it's like solid as a rock that's because there are two steel sections under the front that run from the leg which is just near me to the leg down the far end to make the bench really solid and the reason to make the bench solid is to make the microscope mount rock solid okay uh uh yeah so um oh andrew asked uh about the mechanical attachment um hard drive magnets yes the magnets that i've got just along the front of the edge of that shelf i pulled out of old hard drives um oh and james said i really like the under desk and under shelf lighting is that led strips you got in china yeah i just put led strips everywhere so i've got led strips under each of the shelves and that helps to illuminate down onto the bench one of the things i really wanted to do was get as much light as possible into here maybe i'll point the camera up at the ceiling a bit later once i'm back on the mobile camera because i'm in the process of changing over to a new type of lighting panel but one of the calculations that i did when i was planning this was lumens per square meter or whatever the unit is and i looked at what is normal in things like office environments and basically i took that and then went way brighter i wanted to make sure that there was enough light in the room that everything would be well illuminated and then once i discovered there were dark spots like under the shelves i put led strip under there to brighten those up and there is led strip underneath the bench as well going down towards the floor oh there's some interesting aquarium questions there but maybe they'll be for another time so i'll just keep going with the lab tour at the moment uh dodgy asked do you have blast gates on each of your points i'm not sure what that means maybe you could clarify that but if by points you're talking about power points then um no i think if that means the little flaps that cover the power points one of the other things i did is when because this particular room was being built specifically for use as my lab i had it wired up when the electrician was in like at the framing stage so there are three power circuits dedicated to just this room and there are 72 power points in this room so and almost all of them are four-way systems so i'll show you that you'll see that in a little bit because my gen my aim was that no matter where you were in the room you should never be more than one meter from a powerpoint and that has worked out pretty well but even that has not been enough uh hmm oh uh james asked are those psu kits or modules all right oh and there are some other things about test leads yeah there are some good questions here things i've been thinking about showing and hadn't got to yet so thank you for prompting me on those i'm just moving the portable camera back into place so i can show you a couple of other things let's see if that camera is still running yes it is all right so yeah these are the hard drive magnets that were mentioned earlier yeah there were a couple of other things i wanted to talk about oops i'm probably making everybody seasick again now i should have moved it before switching to it and right about there okay so uh the way i've got this organized is in distinct layers so workbench common hand tools connections so usb grounding ethernet etc test gear and then commonly used bits and pieces so solder reels rework uh all sorts of things that i always want within reach and um so yeah this is where there are there are led strips under each of these edges you can see the ones there but there are also led strips under that edge there are led strips under this edge and that means that there's no dark patch down here every shelf is illuminated by the one that's above it now there was something that i was just about to talk about now it's gone out of my mind test leads power supplies that's it all right so these power supplies you know i'll just turn this on these are um ryden power supplies id606s and i love these they're really cool i've had several different bench power supplies over the years these are how would you classify them good quality cheap i suppose they're certainly nothing like a you know like a ryegold bench supply or any of the they're really good name brand ones but in terms of their general capability these are really really cool um they do things like if i want to set voltage well you can have multiple voltage memories but if if you want to set the voltage you just do you know vset 12 enter and now i've got 12 volts and if i want to do current i do i set 0.5 enter and now i've got half amp current limiting set um you can use the knob as well and there's up and down and it's got wi-fi and i did there was some video i did a little while ago where i was showing power consumption i can't even remember what it was so what i can do is pull up the interface for this on my phone or on my computer and i can actually control the power supply from the phone so i can change all the settings on it you can log power usage it does charts of current consumption and you can do data logging and those sorts of things so i really like these oh and also i should point out there is a link on the super house site super house dot tv slash gear g-e-a-r and on that i've got links to a whole lot of this stuff like i've got links to these power supplies and all those sorts of things so if you want specific things that i'm showing you today that may well be linked from that from that page so yeah these power supplies cool i've i've actually got about five ryden power supplies i've got some of the older type they came out with little modules that you would build into other devices and so i've got a couple of those the original ones and i've got a high current one and i've got these two which are the really nice ones okay uh what else oh yes lead management lead management this drives me crazy it is probably one of the most frustrating things about setting up a workbench and i hate it leads uh leads of the devil um what i've got is as you can see i've got just one lead from my scope because most of the time i only use one lead on the scope sometimes you use two it's a two channel scope but this is just hooked up over a camera mount so i can flick this down anytime i want it and i've got the scope lead right here or i can flick it up and now it's out of the way and that was pretty much the best solution i could come up with for having the lead easily within reach and convenient but not sitting on the bench and making a big mess and getting in the way but other things are annoying so you can see here for example i've got the leads from the multimeter and can you see it i might need to move that camera just a little uh angle it up oh you still can't see it hang on i'll move that camera out of the way you can see there are a bunch of leads that are hanging up here this is a little laser cut plate that i made and basically it looks like a whole series of fingers sticking out it's got some wider slots at the at the left side narrower slots on the right and what that means is that i can just reach up grab my multimeter leads and they're right here and then when i'm done with them hook them up and they are there so as i said leads are one thing that really annoy me that this is about the most convenient that i've been able to come up with so i've got power supply leads beside it the leads from well one of these power supplies this goes to an xt60 connector at the moment but i've got different things that plug in here um the leads from this top power supply just come up here so if i want to plug something in or if i want to power something up i just reach up grab these pull it down and i've got them on my bench and i'm done shove them up there and they're out of the way and i've got jumper leads and test tweezers and resistance boxes and other things just hanging off that same little strip so that's probably about the best solution i've come up with so far and the other lead management thing i'm just going to bring you back in fact i'm going to sort of tilt you sideways so you can see this is looking around the side of the bench you can see i've got two more of those laser-cut little things that are screwed under the bench with a whole lot of leads hanging down so that's using space that is otherwise totally dead it's just on the end of the uh the bench and the long leads hang down behind the monitor but that's for things that i might reach for occasionally like there are different usb leads and ethernet patch leads adapt it like power supply adapters different things up there so most of the time if i want to lead i can reach around there and grab it but on a previous live stream i talked about the whole principle of local caching or local caching depending on how you pronounce it so up here for example on this i've got a few of each type of lead there are a few usbc leads few micro usb if you you know usba that sort of thing but then for each of those i have many many more in other places okay other interesting things here you can see i'm just trying to angle it so that you can see you can i've put a camera on here this is a draw slide so i got this from a local hardware store it's just the same thing there normally two of them on each side of a set of drawers so that when you pull the drawers it slides smoothly i just rotate it at 90 degrees so it's mounted under the top of that frame and then i've got a camera which slides out and that looks straight down at my workbench and that is currently connected to a usb to an hdmi capture device so if i come over to obs and switch to overhead camera that is now the feed through that overhead camera and if you can see if i slide that in or out if i slide it out i get it into the right position that's now looking straight down into the work area on the workbench or if i want to get it out of the way so i don't bash my head on it i just push it back and slide it out of the way and then it's out of the way so i'll switch back to portable camera so yeah that's the camera on the slider and you can see that there is a cable in fact there are a couple of cables here uh three cables so i've got an hdmi cable coming out of that camera there's also a [Music] firewire cable and there's a power cable so it's permanently on power and then there's this little wiring loom that goes down so this camera is permanently mounted it's permanently connected to my imac by stun by firewire and permanently powered and permanently hdmi out so that the output from that camera can also be thrown to that monitor all right let's back up a little bit more and oh i just saw that notification don't know if you heard the pink on my phone chris is trying to send me a video i can't watch it right now chris um so okay well i'm really spending a lot of time just on this little area i wasn't expecting this so other things the other thing that is really cool about this is the microscope and i love this microscope it's such a cool thing i first got a microscope i think about 11 years ago and it was i got one second hand from a factory in south australia somewhere that was upgrading their equipment the first one i got was a stereo microscope but it was fairly crude i used that for many years and then i ended up getting this microscope which is on a it's on an arm that swings around so i can move it wherever i want it to go and it just stays there it's trinocular with thermal focus which means i can use the camera and both eyepieces at the same time you can probably see if i move back there's another microscope just here this is the this is another head for this same microscope arm and it's also trinocular but it's not simulfocus so i'll show you that in a moment that's on a secondary bench and so okay well one other thing lots and lots of little things the way these are powered so this little fume extraction thing you can see it's on this white power lead coming into the back of it here and if you look at the top of the microscope the camera this lead here coming into it that white lead there is this white lead which goes to the the illumination strip the leds that are on the microscope and you can see there's another one that's just hanging around loose on the bench here these are all 2.1 mil dc jacks and they're all wired down to 12 volts and it's actually the 12 volt power supply coming out of my ubuntu computer which is under the desk and i did this so that i would always just be able to pull out 12 volts at any point and just plug something in so if i've got a device like this and i want to power it i just plug that in and as you can see it's now powered up so i've got bench power supplies which i can use for controlled situations like if i want to be able to select a specific voltage or i want current limiting or monitoring or whatever but if i just want to power something and i don't want to think about it i just grab the lead plug it in and i'm done and then everything else on the bench is set up with 2.1 mil dc jack specifically for that purpose so this little fume extractor thing has just got a dc jack on it and i've got these like octopus leads just hanging around on the bench in different places and those are in different places around the uh the work area so 12 volts on a flying lead always available it's very convenient [Music] all right in terms of soldering gear you can see i've got the this little hakko iron so i've got an fx triple eight and there's another fx triple eight just down there so the soldering gear that i've got just here in fact i'll move this camera slightly don't know if that's a better view or not it's all a bit strange looking at it through the camera instead of actually being here so for now i'll just swing this microscope out of the way and we'll assume we're not using that so for the salt in the soldering area i've got the the hakko as my just everyday general purpose iron and just to i've also got this chunk of wood which can be useful for doing hot air real work so i've got the the rework station here i can just reach up grab it and pull it down but when using hot air on things like this static dissipative surface the rubber expands and the whole thing tends to bulge so a lot of the time if i'm doing things like trying to remove parts from a board i'll just pull out this chunk of wood and then sit the target board on there and do whatever i need to do on it and you can see that there are scorch marks on it from you know burning things with the hot air but at least that way the bench surface is saved ah that's annoying that is why cable management is really annoying things falling down all right so that hot air then i also have this which is a board pre-heater it's basically like a hot air gun except that it's inside a box and it blows straight up these are little magnetic mounts and i'll see if i can get you a better view on that and this is usually used in conjunction with hot air to bring the whole board up to a temperature where parts are ready to pop off but they're not actually melted yet so if i was wanting to remove parts from a donor board for example one that is dead and i want to get some parts off it so i can reuse them what you do is use these little magnetic mounts i'll spin it around because it's got two different thicknesses and you mount the board over the little outlet and if i now turn this on into hot mode that's now going to be blowing hot air at the bottom of the pcb i'll turn that off so the noise isn't annoying but basically what this will do is preheat the whole pcb and it might bring it up to well it's adjustable but it might bring it up to say 120 degrees which means that the solder won't melt on it but everything is still it's quite hot it's already getting close to the point where the solder will mount so what you do is bring the board up to temperature and grab the hot air and then it basically makes the hot air magic all you do is like touch it on something and because it's already close to a melting point the solder melts almost immediately just lift the parts off so preheating the board is a really cool thing to do so i'm just going to turn that off chuck that back out of the way so board pre-heater very useful i use this soldering iron pretty much every day hot air pretty much every day the board pre-heater i might use every week or two so it's not an everyday thing just because of the type of work i'm doing but when i do use it it's fantastic it's like having a superpower it's like magic okay let's slide across a little bit more and i'll show you a little bit more of this overall bench setup now in fact i think i'll bring the camera way back to give you more of an overview there we go so this is my main workbench that i've just been showing you all this time and then over here is a secondary workbench so this is set up with the other microscope and it's got its own soldering is um set up so there's another hakko fx 888 on the side here there's a second iron here which has got a larger tip on it that's for times that you're doing things like soldering on connectors that have got a lot of thermal mass and you want a bigger iron so rather than changing tips it's just use two ions and also using two irons can be useful in surface mount rework where you're coming in with one iron in each hand and there's a solder sucker in this area i've also got this little device which is a solder pot it's probably a little bit hard to see from that distance but this is a heated pot and there's a little bit of solder in the bottom of it so what you what this does is basically give you a bath of molten solder so you turn that on and leave it sitting on the bench and the reason for using that is things like tinning wires if you've got a whole lot of wires and you want to strip the insulation off the end and then tin the wires instead of using a soldering iron what you do is you heat up the solder pot and then you grab the wires and you just dip them all into the molten solder so it's a very handy thing for doing tinning of wire ends if you're doing a lot of them but that's not something that's very commonly used but it's there occasionally other things in view nitrile gloves for keeping your hands clean when you're dealing with flux and other nasty things first aid kit with burn stuff in it uh just like napkins for wiping down flux and other sticky things and there i've got isopropyl alcohol and other stuff that's on a bench up behind the camera at the moment that is also used for doing cleanups so this is like a a second soldering area that's more dedicated to like production sort of soldering rather than rework and development soldering which is what i would do here and up here you can see some trays with boards in progress i did a video a little while ago about these little laser cut pcb trays and these are some boards these particular ones what state are they in yes they've had parts reflowed onto them but now they need headers soldered on and part of the reason for setting this up as a second work spot is that my son tom has recently been doing some work for me he's really been getting into fusion 360 recently he absolutely loves fusion 360. so he's been doing lots of 3d design and he's also been doing some assembly work so i've been getting him to sit here and assemble boards solder headers on and that sort of thing so this gives him somewhere that he can work doing production sort of soldering which is separate to here so i can continue doing my regular work and he can come in and use this at any time and doesn't have to disturb things that i'm working on other useful things stuff that is just kept generally in reach thermometer for measuring how hot things get there's a load this is really useful when you're working on power supply sort of projects it's a dummy load and it's programmable so what you can do is connect this to the output of your power supply or whatever your device is and just crank up the current and this dumps the power into a big heat sink and then the fans blow it away as heat so if you're testing a power supply and you want to put it under stress you can connect this to the output of the power supply and turn it up and see at what point the power supply fails so useful device then along here i've got test jigs so this is for products like well this is a free and fat tester i won't go into all this sort of stuff right now in great detail but basically this is test jigs for when boards have been manufactured it's got pogo pins on it and usb connection and power whatever you need there's an audible output and pass fail indications so once a board has been assembled you grab the test jig for whatever that particular board is push it on here and you get a pass or fail and also down here i've got some can you still see me yes i'm just looking at the field of view also down here i've got battery charges so i've got an area down here where i've got a few there's a charger for the battery for my main camera i've got 88650 lipo chargers there's a phantom charger for one of my drones oops there's a um a bigger lipo charger for my other drone and stuff and then just beyond that is another computer so in the corner if i move around here so we've got that soldering workstation where can i get this chair to get it out of the way and then down past that there is another computer so we've got another imac with another screen and keyboard and everything so um so tommy or whoever can work down there independent of me and for a while this area was angus's workspace and then he left me to go and work for espressive just very sad terrible career move there's no future in espresso fungus come back um all right let's back out a little bit and look at the overall room again while i'm going to plug this back into the charger while i look for more comments what do people have to say back to the front alrighty now oh so many questions [Music] all right so test leads i showed that um oh jairotech said how are you running all those monitors the um the imac row is just the imac plus an apple thunderbolt display plugged in on thunderbolt plus another display which is also plugged in on thunderbolt through an hdmi adapter and then the second one is just a different computer with a graphics card that's got i think four video outputs so there's no mystery about that just lots of monitors plugged in [Music] yeah oh okay so there was some more aquarium discussion and i think setting up an aquarium channel in discord could be a good idea i like that so we should do that stefan said are you also programming i saw you design a board completely from scratch yes so i do a lot of coding in fact probably i'm trying to think of the proportions it varies depending on what project i'm working on i spent many many years doing nothing but coding back in the in the ivt days i kind of left hardware behind for a while so i started off with hardware back when i was a teenager and um and through like my early 20s and then really got into software after that ended up doing nothing but coding for a long time and then sort of moved back into more of a mixed environment doing both coding and hardware oh so gustavo asked what do you keep open in each monitor all right so the let's see i'll switch hopefully you can see from the the long view where is it okay so hello looking over my shoulder again um the bottom row which is the mac that changes constantly because it is whatever i'm working on at the time so it could be like code editor it could be eagle could be fusion or whatever typically when i'm working on a hardware project what i will do is have open the schematic the pcb and the diffusion 3d view at the same time like on the three different monitors so that i'm seeing the logical structure of the circuit the physical layout of the circuit and the 3d representation and i find that's really helpful having all three visible at the same time just gives me more insight into how things are working and i think it's really helped my design over time the second row is more is information based mostly and so those things stay pretty much static um what you can't see i will move that camera a bit so you can see a bit better prepare to be seasick here we go going for another walk so what you can see on the bottom row is how i have it set up when i'm live streaming so you can see i've got obs over here with the preview window discord here with chat although i'm not actually looking at this discord right now i'm looking at the other one up on the other monitor there's youtube chat youtube stats but that changes so the interesting thing is across the top so this is pretty much always how i have these monitors laid out discord is up here on the left two thirds of that first monitor then i've got video stream from my 3d printer so i've got octoprint and i can watch that 3d printer and there's a space above it that is where there is a video stream from my other 3d printer which is turned off right now so that's why there's nothing there then i have the freetronix forum taking up the left half of this monitor then i have slack taking up the right half of the center monitor then over here i've got stock level warnings for the super house site and the freetronix site so you can see it's sorted like the focus isn't very good you can't actually read the text on this but um i've got lists of product codes and then the number in stock and when it goes out of stock it goes red and i've got number to reorder i've got stock value on hand and this is updating live from this one is from woocommerce this one is from shopify so if i can see that if i'm running out of stock on some product it's visible right there on the right i've got orders and i've actually got this in a sanitized mode at the moment so normally this is showing the when the order was placed the name of the customer whether it's been paid whether the order has been packed or shipped the value of the order etc so i can just glance up there and you can see that i've got two orders that need to be packed and shipped for super house i'm sorry for free tronics and i've got none for super house right now now those names are fake and that is because i have a special live stream mode that i put the status display into and it puts in fake names so that you can't see real customer data so i can show that screen and it's not a problem normally it's showing the real customer names and then the screen up above it is just cctv from around the house so hopefully that answers that question all this time has just been around this part of the bench there are other interesting things in the lab as well we'll get to that as well we'll get to that eventually all right other questions so uh um some call it fun said do you have some sort of master shut off switch for the bench uh not directly although i have i have circuit breakers for each of the three circuits there are three power circuits plus a lighting circuit dedicated just to this room and so if i trip something on the bench and it fires a circuit breaker it will take out that one circuit but it won't take out anything else anywhere in in the house but i do have things wired up through she who shall not be named so i think i'm about to use it so if you use the amazon voice assistant you should probably hit the mute button right about now pretty much everything in here for example if i say alexa turn off the office monitors okay you can see the monitors are going off and alexa turn off the soldering iron alexa turn on the office blind alexa turn on the printer light so pretty much everything in here is controlled through sonoffs or equivalent devices controlled by she who shall not be named and that means that it's very easy to do a total shutdown on things when i'm walking out the door at the end of the night i can be sure that everything is turned off because most things aren't directly switch controlled they're done through devices that i can control from the home automation system alexa turn on the office monitors okay that's a weird bug there's a um oh let's come back yeah often when i turn those monitors on this monitor loses power um very briefly and then i've got to manually power cycle it all right and this one doesn't come back on i've got to turn that on by using the old-fashioned method so uh let's move on a little bit this has all been stuck around this particular part of the lab and i'll show you yeah let's just keep moving around in that direction for now and i think i'm going to raise this camera [Applause] there we go that's more of an eye level sort of thing and what you can see now that we've got more of an overall view is more storage directly above the workspace so when i'm sitting here i've got things directly within reach so in arm's reach that i can get without sitting up from my seat so anything here i can reach anything here i can reach and then there is a second level of stuff where i've got to stand up but i don't have to move too far so if i want to grab pin headers in bulk or modules or an arduino board or whatever it's all accessible along here and there is a rudimentary color coding system so you can see that some of these boxes have got blue stripes on them that means that it's like a bulk stock box so pin headers for example that's bulk stock of pin headers i've also got headers down here so if i just want a couple of pin headers i can just reach up without getting out of my seat and i've got pin headers like a few of everything but if i want to um if i want like 100 pin headers i can reach up and grab that box and i've got everything in there so in here i can open this and then i've got like a 200 piece pack of yellow pin headers and 200 pieces of red and that sort of thing so bulk quantities of everything so these containers up here are for more of the things i want to get to quickly they're in the room and not too far from me but they don't need to be within hands reach you can also see that some of these have got red on them that means that they are a contracting customer and in general what i do is for things like live streams i if there is a customer who doesn't want it to even be known that i'm working for them those boxes won't be in here and if but the idea is that red is danger so i can't really show what's in those boxes on camera they need to stay away then yellow is projects slash products because a lot of my projects end up turning into products so things like the air quality sensor project that's yellow that's there esp remote open adapter controller they're all marked yellow because they're projects or products and then across here i've got smaller storage for little things like debuggers and sonic programmer d1 mini flash memory all sorts of random things um oh yeah one other thing i haven't mentioned is there are two ups's under here so just down under my to my left near my left foot when i'm sitting at my computer is one ups which is running those computers and monitors and then there's another ups down here which is running that computer in fact there are two computers and some other stuff is plugged into it all right continuing around keeping on going so i've got some more storage here lots and lots of boxes you can see i've got i don't think am i off i'm off camera that wasn't very well organized spin this around here so in this on this other wall can you see me now yes so i've got some old parts containers these old parts drawers with through hole resistors in them which i pretty much never use anymore a few random books and more projects and more stock things like wemos d1 mini so i use these boards a lot so if i want to do one mini just open that up and i've got like 50 of them in there regulator modules you can see all sorts of stuff here you can see from the labels rib nuts all the different sizes of idc connectors touch displays usb cables and stuff just piled up because i don't have enough room to put it anywhere across the top there's an old makerbot cupcake 3d printer i think this is number 153 ish give or take so the 153rd cupcake this is not actually functional right now it would power up if i plugged it in right now the leds are illuminated but it's not actually running its controller or anything that 3d printer hasn't been run for a few years a couple of drones i've got the the dingo car from the open hardware mini conf so this is the perception module that andy and john and a bunch of other people are including pancake legend who is here in the chat did all the mechanicals on this many people worked on that that's a really cool project so that's a machine learning system running on a raspberry pi to turn a remote control car into a self-driving car so oops knocked it off um what else oh camera gear so i normally have things like my radio mic and extra camera stuff stuck up here where i can grab it when i need it and a light tent i've got a couple of these light panels these are actually meant to be going on the ceiling but temporarily i'm using them on the side of the light tent so this is where i can take product photos if i've got a little module i can just stick it on the uh the little thing sticking out there turn on these lights and the light is diffused so the idea is you can have have the camera sitting here taking a photo of something that's inside the light tint and you don't get any background because the background is just like out of focus white you just have the object floating in space and then it makes it really easy to crop it and get a good photo out of it then the prusa 3d printer this is prusa i3 mark 3 whatever that i think like 3s something like that so it's in a lac table enclosure so i can open this up to get to it and up in the top there you can see an air quality sensor i put this in here because i was wanting to see if there were particular there was particular matter coming off the 3d printer turned out there's not this little sensor sitting here inside the enclosure can detect when i turn on the soldering iron over on my bench but it doesn't detect anything from the 3d printer so yeah then i've got there's the camera in here so the camera that we saw earlier up on the monitor that's the camera so the view that i'm getting looking through octoprint is from this camera looking at the bed of the 3d printer then i've got little reel holders hanging from the top here so i can have spools of filament and also the control panel for it is moved off the printer and it's been made external so from here i can you know do whatever i need to on the printer without opening the enclosure so i can preheat it or whatever and octoprint is running on a raspberry pi which is on the inside this enclosure with a touch screen so if i wanted to i could go print and then select something so all the things that are on the the sd card in octoprint are available here so i can go into a directory select an object i won't actually do it right now and hit print so i can interact with a 3d printer without needing my computer i can just walk up to it select something on the menu hit print and it starts you can see i've also got more filament down underneath it so there is extra filament down under here and i can either take the filament from here and swap it in and hang it on one of those feeders those reels or it can feed up through the bottom it's probably a little bit hard to see on the camera from where you are right now but there are corrugated tubes that go from the bottom here they run through and come up i might move the camera and show you this and they come through here so that the filament can be sitting in the bottom enclosure feed through and come down into the printhead and then there's more spare filament filament boxes etc let's move this around oh and just while we're here in this position i also have this little table in the middle which is a general purpose table that i use for whatever project i happen to be working on so let's come back around here everybody hold on to your lunches and don't get seasick and what's that position like i'm trying to judge this while looking at the the other screen that's on the other side of the room so from here you can see these corrugated tubes they loop around come down the back and go through this table and those corrugated tubes come through to here so for example this bit of filament that you can see coming down here that is coming off this reel here which is sitting down in the bottom so if i want to feed that particular filament all i have to do is grab it and i can push it into the extruder and i don't have to do anything down here so i can have multiple filaments down here queued up available ready to use um all right since we're doing this part of the room let's continue i'll move the camera to the other side just so that it's easier to see here we go so continuing from the printer back around there's a little bathroom in there i might show you that in a second so i've got part storage on here and this is grouped so each of these this is how many is it nine sets of drawers each set of drawers is for a different purpose so i've got passives over here with things like trim pots this is ics and transistors so semiconductors and things here i've got things like uh what have we got mcp 2550 ones so can transceivers i've got canon controllers and usb to serial chips i've got transistors and fits atmega32u4s this is just like small quantity stuff for prototyping this is not bulk quantity for production obviously adcs mcb2307s over here i've got more semiconductors this is sensors like bme 280 bme 680 we've got tilt sensors and piezos hall effect sensors leds across the top here bezels lots of mechanicals here so i've got uh i've got m2 m2.5 m3 m4 m5 m6 and i've got cap head so i've got multiple head types for each thing and where possible i've tried to get at least a few of every single length so on m2 for example and then each of these is organized so i've got nuts washes and then the lengths of the particular type so i've got m 2.5 nuts m2 sorry m2 nuts m2 washers and then i've got m2 in five millimeter six millimeter eight millimeter 10 12 16 18 20 so i can just grab whatever size is necessary and then same for m3 i've got m3 nuts and i've got them separated out so i've got steel nuts blackened nuts and then lock nuts and other unusual ones washes and then 5 6 8 10 12 15 16 18 20 25 etc clinch nuts lots of lots of mechanical stuff that's something that i found is really really useful because when i'm working on projects it's pretty normal to have things like resistor kits and capacitor kits and full ranges of those sorts of parts but when you're trying to make something physical being if you don't have like an m3 10 mil bolt and you need one there's not a lot you can do about it you just need it or you have it or you don't so being able to reach for like every size of every nut and bolt is really good then i've got connectors jumpers headers and once again there are things like pin headers and as you've already seen i've got bulk stock of pin headers over the bench and i've got a little container of pinhead is within reach when i'm sitting on the bench but i've also got more varieties here two millimeter headers din plugs spade connectors all the different types of usb connectors down here i've got power connectors so these are all the xt series that are used on things like drones and i've really fallen in love with xt connectors i think they're fantastic so i use those on lots of things you would have seen earlier that i've got a lead hanging off my lab power supply with an xt connector on it and i've been using those on robotics projects and all sorts of things so xt connectors are cool buttons switches so i've got tact switches and once again i've got them in every possible length so six millimeter um footprint attacks which has come in different lengths and i've got them here in four point three five six seven eight nine ten eleven twelve thirteen millimeter lengths so if i'm trying to make a device that has to fit inside an enclosure and i need a tack switch to just fit through the enclosure then i can just come along here and measure it and grab whatever is the correct length for it voltage regulators more stuff lots more things so up here this is something that really takes a lot more explanation i'm just going to give you a little teaser at this point because it's actually a really cool thing and i want to show this in detail so you can see there's a wemos camera device there that's not even powered up right now and there is a raspberry pi camera attached to this box you can tell that it's a high quality permanent installation because it's actual cardboard box that's sitting on a shelf um that pie camera goes down there's a raspberry pi that you might be able to see just hanging on the edge there that pie camera is set up so that it is positioned looking straight at the wall directly above my workbench and all of the boxes are in the field of view of that camera and what that can do is then used the um the uh aruka codes which are uh fiduciary positioning markers that are on those boxes they a few people have said what are the with the qr codes they're kind of like qr codes but they're a bit different they're used for augmented reality systems and what that allows me to do is run there's a little script that runs on the raspberry pi that can return the x and y coordinates of any of the boxes that are on the shelves so if i for example want to know where is my esp1sh box then it can tell me it's at this coordinates and i know that it's there on the shelf so that's a system for tracking the physical location of all of the containers in the workshop and what else okay let's have a quick look in here bathrooms aren't that interesting but there's a little bit in there now i actually can't see what this camera is seeing i'm just gonna try unlocking my phone can i do it let's see i'm gonna try unlocking the phone there we go okay i'll take you for a walk through there oops it's a little bit awkward with a tripod so little bathroom in here which is very convenient when working out in the lab and there is meant there is actually a shower just around this corner but you couldn't have a shower in here at the moment because there is stuff being stored so there is meant to be a shower screen we've never actually fitted it you can see there's another 3d printer this is the one that's currently turned off it's plugged into a sonoff so i can power this one up remotely and it's got the camera there on the front of it so i can then get the feed from it you can see it's got the touchscreen down the front and it's sitting on a fridge which is at the moment for solder paste and drinks so that's in fact that's the only thing in it right now is cans of soft drink and uh tubs of solder paste and little syringes of solder paste so apart from that there's a bit more storage you can see a couple of other lab power supplies there there's that ridiculous multi-way usb charging box that i showed on a previous live stream some more filament boxes and other things there's another microscope head just down there somewhere so that's like a little overflow storage space and let's totally spin things around now so this is now looking back towards the door that we started from however long ago it was an hour and a half ago so coming in looking at the computer that's the door that you come in and then just beside that door you can see there's a white board so that's a bit of glass that i drilled holes in with diamond tipped drills and painted the back of it white and then turned it into a whiteboard so other things okay so over in this corner let's just oh look bonnie's out there enjoying the sun that's it shake it off bonnie and you can see the auto mower over there um hiding just sitting in a stock so computer corner there and then there's the pick and place machine i've shown that a fair bit in the past so i won't really go into that today and then just to the left of the pick and place machine you can see the reflow oven actually i've i've done a whole video about this reflow oven as well when i first got it i did a video of the unboxing of this and setting it up so what i've done since then is put this enclosure over it and that's as a fume cupboard and can you see it yes just down here you see this blue hose this hose goes down underneath and it goes into that big pvc duct that runs all the way around and the blue hose comes up to the back and it joins into the back of this fume cupboard so what i can do is open this up put pcbs in here put them in for reflow and then when the exhaust fan is running it's sucking the air out from around this so that the fumes aren't just coming straight out into the work area and then it's got a hole in the top here so i can get to the control panel for it on top of that i've got cup tapes so odds and ends of tapes and surface mount parts and then there's a tub of reels it's a little bit hard to see at that angle but yeah oops there are more reels of parts for the pick and place machine what did i just drop i think i just dropped a bag of fits on the floor i did and then old real dispensers and things that i don't really use anymore so coming left of that oh and you can see that there is a little laser printer down there on the floor under it and more storage of different things coming left of that you can see my laser cutter which right now is not functional and that is because i've got the guts of it hanging out and i've just been in the process of replacing the controller and it looks like there might be a problem with the power either the power supply or the tube i can't tell which at the moment but i've got this what is it mini gerbil controller which i've just been wiring up to it so at the moment the guts of the laser cutter raw are all hanging out i've got a spare tube up here which i might end up having to put in so it's just a little cheapy it's one of the little k40 chinese laser cutters nothing special at all it's been totally rewired but it's just a supposedly 40 watt but probably less than that cheap chinese laser cutter so then back beyond that is my little baby cnc machine i'll see if i can get this into a position where you can kind of see field of view is not great okay so um oh and i just gotta put a password in here so i'll block your view of that so yeah this is my little baby cnc machine which i've been having a lot of fun with over the last six months in particular a lot of the time i just use it like a glorified drill press like if i've got something that i want to put precision holes into like a control panel or an enclosure then i just load it up with the appropriate size drill bits and write the g-code to drill the holes at the right place but i've also been using it for doing cutting like doing some actual milling of different things so that is um let's see home home yeah so this is the original power supply for the this has got the stepper drivers in it and i've got that connected up to a a little gerbil shield with an arduino behind it which is linked by usb through to this laptop so i'm just running universal gcode sender as the interface at the moment so what i do is do the design in fusion 360 on my desktop and then generate tool paths and generate the g-code from that which gets saved into dropbox that gets synced onto this laptop and then from this laptop i can drive the machine and do whatever the machining stuff is here the local operations now there is a really big problem with this and that is sorry it's being noisy at the moment because i hit the home button that'll shut up now so the really big problem is this is not in an enclosure and the result is that if i'm uh if i'm actually making chips and not just drilling holes stuff goes everywhere so firstly it's super noisy so i have to wear earmuffs when it's cutting aluminium it just screeches like a banshee and when and it yeah it generates chips that go everywhere so i'm just constantly vacuuming around it trying to keep it clean i've got these little shields around it which kind of help they keep things contained but it still throws chips over the edge so i just keep vacuuming up around it what i would really like is enough workshop space that i can have more like a mechanical workshop as well as the electronics lab and build a proper enclosure that this can go in and put a camera inside it so i can remote control it so just mount the work piece and then and then drive it remotely so let's kill that to turn it off uh oh yeah down underneath let's see can you see this we'll move it down just down here there's a tub of coolant so there's a big plastic tub here with hoses coming out of it that is used for both the laser cutter and also for the water cooled head on the cnc machine so there are a couple of pumps there that pump the coolant up and then up here so this is the um the water cooled like there's a water jacket over the motor for the spindle so it's a water cooled head uh now where else to go i think next thing is i had better check those comments again because i've been ignoring them for a while let's see what questions have i missed and uh wait i've lost my cursor there it is switch back to the front camera all right now oh yes i'm so far behind on comments i've got to figure out where i was up to before um so oh kevin hannon asked what did you use to avoid seeing individual led lights and i assume that question is in relation to the led strip that i've got around the bench and the answer is i haven't i've tried to keep the leds under the edge of the bench so that they're not directly visible you're not looking at the leds you're looking at whatever they're illuminating so i haven't done anything in particular for that there's no diffusion on them they're just regular led strips uh i uh um bartek said my idea was where would you chuck away a failed experimental piece of hardware if you were really sick of it rubbish bin also somewhere yes okay um my i even have multiple rubbish bins and this is following my whole local caching um sort of principle this is a rubbish bin and this is what i use when i'm just working on things on the bench like if i'm cutting part leads for example i'll just grab that grab a pcb grab some cutters and i can go and i can cut the part leads into there and then underneath the bench i have a rubbish container so periodically whatever has gone into there i just tip it into the other rubbish container which accumulates it and then that one gets emptied out into the main rubbish bin and there is also a recycling bin so down under here you can just see it it's mostly empty at the moment there is a recycling container so things like all things i've printed and don't need or bits of cardboard or whatever they'll go into the recycling container down there but the other thing you're talking about failed experiments and boards i don't want anymore one thing i do is keep boards in fact up here this container is titled dead boards for parts and this is full of boards that are things like uh there's some ether megas in there a few other random things so if there's a board that has blown up for some reason failed or whatever i often just keep it if it's got anything useful in it because then i can harvest it i can take off cpus and voltage regulators and you know if i need a crystal or a particular capacitor or whatever i can harvest the boards harvest the parts off the boards so i often don't throw things like that out i just keep them back to front um oh okay that's interesting so um dodgy said a blast gate cuts off sections of your vacuum line you're probably using those caps to do something similar yeah sorry i didn't realize you're talking about the vacuum i think you're talking about power and i really should do something like that at the moment what happens is that i don't have any way of closing off the pickup that goes to the reflow oven or the laser cutter which means i don't really get enough suction down here near the workbench i can close off the workbench section to get to direct all the suction up that way but i can't do the reverse so it would be nice if i could isolate parts of it and uh 50 hertz said did you design this setup from scratch or has it just been a continuous improvement um yeah well continuous improvement it's things have changed a fair bit over time like as i said right at the start of the stream you may not have been here i originally had my electronics work area under the big window so that i could get natural light in and then i ended up switching it over to this side so that i could get more bench space so oh kevin asked what color temperature on the led lighting there are two answers to that one is that the led strips which i've got around here are actually alternating i've got warm white and cold white so the bottom strip is cold white then i've got warm white then cold white and i don't even know why i did that i think i just ordered random things over the years and then i just used them but the overhead lighting so this is something i didn't talk about earlier i mentioned it that i was going to the lighting in the room now how do we show this i'm going to switch back to the other camera and point the ceiling i'll point the camera up at the ceiling now you can see there's a skylight right in the middle obviously but you can also see a couple of different types of lights so there are these strips here these are cheapy led strips that i got from china and they fail fairly quickly i've had a few of these fail originally i had fluoro tubes here and then i replaced them with these led strips those led strips started failing so then i bought a bunch of these and these are good quality ozram lighting panels they are the same size as a ceiling tile in an office building so these are meant to be a drop-in replacement for office lighting and what i did was 3d print some clips so that i could surface mount them and so far i've just replaced the one directly over my workbench and computer as you can see there and i haven't yet replaced the others but i have enough of those to replace all of the lights in the lab and in fact two of those panels right now are vertically standing up on either side of the light tent but those are going to be relocated up onto the ceiling and in terms of the color temperature of those ones i can't actually remember at the time i did some looking into it and figuring out what would be the optimal color temperature i think it's sort of like a mid it's not really like cold white and it's not really a warm white which is a very yellowish sort of tinge um so [Music] oh for cable management dodgy brothers said it'd be nice to have something like a retractable lead but might have too much strain on it yeah there are some things you can get that are used in on assembly lines that are typically there are tools that people pull down from over their head use them and then let them go and they just hang conveniently in reach but um that yeah that would be a whole lot of work and james asked why haven't you gone wireless yet uh i don't know what that's in relation to is that poking fun at my um wires not wi-fi video i don't know uh yeah and johnny said kind of hard power injecting over wi-fi that is a top stuff pro a tough problem so gustavo said what are the bears over the monitors aha good question all righty um back to here for those that didn't notice them before you can see there's a little blue bear up there and there is a little orangish colored bear up here and that little blue bear was mine when i was a kid i don't know how old i was when i got it i might have been i don't know i was probably three or four pretty small anyway and that was like my favorite toy when i was um a little kid and i ended up staying at my mom's place for decades and then i came across it some time ago and grabbed it and stuck it up on top of the monitor because it's kind of a like a childhood memory thing so that was a nostalgic one this one is from one of my kids and i think it came from a school fate but it was kind of symbolic because it's um it's a it's working and repairing things so there's got a little badge on the front that says repairs for bears and uh yeah bk trades many kids i assume i don't know but they just seem cool because he's uh someone that makes things and one of my kids got that and uh so i stuck it up there and you can see up there dad's toolbox is one of the other things i think my son tom made that when he was probably in about grade one and it's just you know a little memento thing i've got they're probably hard to notice but i've got quite a few little mementos stuck around the office there's a little post-it note up there behind the connectors behind the cables which i think was written by my daughter when she was very little and it was um i've got it there because it's cute because it's like it's one of her very first attempts at manipulation because it says i want money i like daddy so she thought well if i say to daddy that i like him maybe he'll give me money and there are a few other things that the kids have made that are stuck around the walls and things from their primary school days all right uh i've got to try to get through some of these questions what it's 11 54. that is ridiculous where did this time go i'm going to try to skim through a few more of these questions to get closer to being caught up so gustavo said how do you power iot devices around the house for most of them i have some kind of well it really falls into three different categories they are either powered over ethernet so poe they are powered by local power supply typically using something like a phone charger so for you know five volt supply or they are battery powered in the case of zigbee devices but i have all of those different things and adam said how is that pick and place machine it's good generally i will probably show you i'll look i'll point the camera back at that in a minute so sixnot said what sort of work you do for a living these days i do contract engineering so i do product development create prototypes so i take someone's idea and make it physical i've got a number of con of uh clients a couple of who i mention on these live streams things like you can see the water canon robot project behind me for trx water trucks those sorts of things can be visible and i can mention them because my client simon is fine for it to be mentioned obviously i don't show you the designs and the work that i do for him in terms of how it works but it's okay to say that it's there i have other clients who i can't even name because it's under nda and i do hardware design and firmware development and those sorts of things for them so that and also selling products but i don't really make money out of selling the products because the cost of um of assembling and the time involved in things like packing and shipping orders and all of the overheads with doing that sort of thing just means there isn't really much margin in it all right so um jenna minnie i'm sorry i've tried to pronounce your name on previous live streams and i can never figure it out it could be jenna mine it could be genomic i'm not sure where do you keep all your arduinos and pcbs so many places i have what i've shown you today is just my electronics lab area what this is only a small percentage of the product storage and all that sort of thing through that white door that you saw on the camera earlier is the back of my garage and the garage has floor-to-ceiling racks that are stacked with boxes and boxes and hundreds more of those those plastic containers that are on the shelves directly above my bench that's a tiny percentage of the containers and the storage that i have most of the bulk stuff is out in that area it's not here in the lab which is stuff that i'm more typically working on continuously or through the day so daryl said i was going to say something about my microscopes uh yeah okay microscopes are a really interesting thing and given the time i'm not going to do it justice by going into it now but i've i have strong opinions about microscopes so i will talk about that but i think maybe i'll talk about that on the future live stream and we can go into that in a bit more detail so uh adam p said wonder how the pmp is working yeah it's working pretty good there are a couple of things it's an ongoing project my pick and place machine is halfway between being a tool and a project and i actually spent a bit of time working on it trying to improve it and make it work more effectively whereas if i had a pick and place machine as a tool i would want it to just work i don't want to ever have to think about it i want to be able to just put boards on it turn it on and run it so this is an interesting project it's been evolving over a number of years uh so michael i kind of pointed out also linuxcnc yeah so i could have used linuxcnc to drive the uh the cnc router but i'm not i'm using gerbil and uh universal gk sender uh so jay uh yeah so james said what's that black thing with the cream box above it under the bench oh that is a power supply the black box let's switch back to the other camera maybe you'll be able to see it without me having having to move anything you can just see it if you look down here you can see the cream box that cream box has a switch mode power supply in it that connects through behind the bench and it comes up and it drives these two lab supplies so that's what i use typically for working on the bench what the cream box is sitting on is a black box which is an enormous transformer it's probably out of a welder or something like that originally i don't know but it's rated to some ridiculous number of amps and that feeds to another power supply so that i use that if i'm wanting to do things like run high power motors and then oh i've got a visitor coming in hey if you come in you're going to be on camera you are on camera so this is my daughter amelia she's just brought me some coconut ice okay i'll be careful eating it in fact i'll leave until after the live stream i'm almost out of time so that big power supply i use when i'm wanting to do things like run large motors on robotics projects i can only pull six amps from these bench supplies but i can pull probably 30 amps out of the other one so lost my cursor again that is a continuous problem with this setup and um okay so i got a message from andy saying people want to see and hear about the pick and place machine in linuxcnc yeah um [Music] yeah given the time i'm not going to go into the whole pick and place machine but what i will do is pick up the camera and point it at the machine so that you can at least look at it in the last few minutes while i'm wrapping up other questions let's see where is the good position for it right about there yep so you can see it's powered off at the moment so i can just drag it around there's nothing stopping the steppers from moving you can see it's a dual nozzle system it's on a belt so like a push-pull thing so one nozzle goes up when the other goes down which is kind of like what's called a peter's head arrangement in the open vmp community and that can move around it's got the the little hollow shaft steppers for rotation feeders across the front here so you can see i've got reels down under here which come up into these feeders so these are the auto feeders and then i've got fixed position feeders mounted on here the target pcb goes on here and it puts all the parts on it you can see a little optical fiducial marker here and more reels on the side that just passively feed into these little slots so i'll leave that pointing at there oh look at the you can see flickering under the bench that's the underbench leds and it's just the frequency that they are running at you can see the strobing effect on the camera i actually can't see that if unless i look at it through the camera uh so it's just a weird thing to do with the refresh rate um so those okay um uh oh incognito said the picture on the left looks like a wedding photo what's the picture above the light tint oh cool okay so i will show you this because this is actually cool firstly yes wedding photo on this side and you can see my very cute wife there and over this side this i can't actually see on the camera whether i'm showing the right thing i'll try to get it a little bit closer so this is a drawing that was done by my grandfather um so right at the start of this live stream i mentioned that my grandfather was um a squadron commander a squadron leader uh deployed at marble bar during world war ii so he was a pilot but he also did engineering drafting and then he became a doctor and this was done so 1917 this is the connecting it's the large end of the connecting ride for a steam loco and he did this drawing as part of his examination for mechanical drafting i think it was and he would have been i think 17 years old when he did this so that was drawn in 1917 so 103 years ago which is pretty cool i really like that and i've actually got a few of his drawings because my dad saved them and he's kept them in storage and this one was framed i've got some others that aren't framed but one thing that i would really like to do is maybe recreate his drawing in fusion 360. so that we've got the the old style hand drawn 1917 version of the image and have the 3d 2020 cad version of the exact same thing that's something that's been on my to-do list for a little while but i've got some of his other drawings as well which are also cool so frank asked what 3d printer i'm using the uh the one that i mostly use is a prusa i3 but i also have that mendelmax which is the one sitting in the bathroom that i showed earlier it's not really a mendelmax anymore that's how it started life but i've modified it so much that it's only half mendel now and james asked are those glass doors on lac tables from ikea too no those that is just polycarbonate that i cut to size so it's just sheets that i got from bunnings and then 3d printed the brackets and things to hold all the tables together and then mounted it on that so i am really out of time but i'm going to try to get through these last couple of questions [Music] so xiaom said can you please recommend a laser cutter from my workshop now that is a super open-ended question and my summary if you can afford it is don't get one of the cheap k-40 chinese lasers like i've got it's much better to go to go for something with a bit more quality i've spent so much time messing around with this k40 laser over the years that if i'd spent an extra thousand dollars or so back when i got it i probably would have saved myself more than a thousand dollars worth of time in fact i definitely would have saved more than a thousand dollars worth of time so that's probably a subject that's too big to go into right now in terms of specific recommendations it also comes down to things like the size of the work piece that you want to be able to fit whether you need to be able to do continuous feed through the side like for long work pieces whether you want a rotational axis and also the type of material you want to cut which will dictate the power and other things so [Music] um oh incognito said how high are your ceilings i don't know just a regular sort of height i think it's too uh i actually don't know that's true um i haven't really thought about that probably 2.5 meters i guess maybe [Music] and frank said where did you get the printer housing yeah that was made out of lag tables and other pieces so there is a if you look for prusa lac table you'll find plenty of guides on how to do that it's a really common thing to do i just made mine a bit fancy by putting illumination in it and externally mounting the controls and all of those sorts of things so ruby ma said was my pick and place assembled or purchased it was assembled and a lot of it is my own design so it's evolved over the years i did a talk about this at a conference a few years ago where i showed an earlier version of it but it's changed dramatically since then the frame has been rebuilt multiple times and yeah lots and lots of changes to it and uh oh what desk chair do you use scott asked um okay so i'm just about out of time and questions but i do have i have opinions about desk chairs as well and i'm going to show you something so i'm going to spin back around here and you can see these two desk chairs and then i'm going to grab this and switch so this desk here now for many years what i would do is go and buy the typical office works desk chair you know the 150 180 desk chair which and this is probably one of the better ones that's like that but look at this you can see it flopping if you spend between like 100 and 200 dollars on an office chair within six months that's what's going to happen and this as officejs goes this is actually a good one for a cheap one and then so what i would find myself doing is i would have i'd get an office chair and it would last maybe 12 months or 18 months and then it would just be so bad that i have to get another one and then about i think it was nine years ago i thought stuff this i'm just gonna get something good and i ended up buying two of these and i ended up spending it was a really painful amount of money at the time i think these chairs cost about six hundred dollars each and i've got two of them but they're really heavy and very solid and even after nine years it's basically as good as the day i got it and the way i figure it is i'm going to be sitting in this chair for i don't know between 40 and 60 hours a week and it works out to be thousands of hours a year over the space of multiple years so firstly it needs to be comfortable it's got to not flop around and it that there are certain things that i've learned that it's worth spending extra on and it's pretty much anywhere that you as a human interface with something else like keyboards get a good keyboard input devices get good input devices monitors it's all of the things that you physically have to interact with so uh things where you have to touch it sit on it look at it those are really the places where if you spend a little bit of extra money it might seem painful and excessive at the time but then two or three or four years down the track you will have got the benefit of that better quality and i think spending the money in those places probably gives more benefit than spending it in other places that might sound like it's going to benefit you like a faster cpu or whatever so anyway that's just my opinion uh okay and i think this is going to have to be the final question james said are your kids going to school from home these days yes so my daughter who just came in earlier is studying fashion design and she was previously going into into the city to go well depended on you know the schedule what the particular term was but most of the time she was working from home anyway with her the way her course was set up and now they've gone entirely online and my son tom who is currently doing year 10 is currently 100 online as well and has been for a while so uh we've been really lucky that our kids are at ages where they can deal with this situation very well i know that a lot of people are having so much trouble with kids at home constantly and trying to get them focused and motivated and you know they're emotional side effects of being in the isolation that we're in at the moment but we've actually been really really lucky that our kids have dealt with it very well in terms of their temperaments and also the stage they're at and the level of independence that they have so that has been really good all right oh so ah thank you very much to pancake legend so that's andrew from the the local hackerspace also frank and gustavo for super chats i really appreciate it thank you very much uh so i am going to wrong one that one so i am going to call it a day uh i really i don't know this kind of went how i expected it wouldn't it kind of didn't i feel like there is so much more that i could talk about in terms of the way this lab is set up and two plus hours has gone and i still have more to say but oh well we can do it again sometime and the good thing is that now that i've got my camera working through obs i can use my mobile phone as a portable camera i'll have much more flexibility in future so on future live streams if something comes up and we want to talk about the microscope or whatever then i can just grab it and we can go portable instead of being fixed with this camera that i've been using up until now so thank you very much for coming along and visiting my lab and have a fantastic week make sure you jump on discord if you want to talk about any of the things that we've been talking about today and i'll stick a link in to discord oh the main camera is the only lagging one yeah i have a feeling that this there are probably synchronization issues because i'm using the radio mic and the camera through hdmi capture and the other one is on the video stream it's all a bit of a mess i need to work on my my streaming setup a little bit so yes as james says go and make something awesome thank you very much i'm going to eat the coconut ice that my daughter brought in earlier and go and get some lunch so thank you very much for coming and i will see you all either next week or in the discord so see ya go and make something awesome you

Channel: SuperHouseTV

Views: 11,501

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Id: Ka0DFshIPpg

Length: 137min 1sec (8221 seconds)

Published: Sat Sep 05 2020