Building Project: Library/Guest Room Sofa-bed with Cedar Chest Headboard

Whew this was the most complex project I’ve attempted to date, it has a bunch of engineering elements to it, and more requirements for precision. The goal for this project was to build a custom sofa-bed that would fit in the corner of our guest room/library and allow a queen sized bed. I also wanted to provide storage for blankets inside a cabinet in the headboard and also storage under the seat. Finally, I wanted to make it relatively easy to extend and then to put back.

You can see the design drawings that I made below:

The first project was to build the triangular cabinet which fits into the corner of the guest room between two book shelves and provides a head board for the bed as well as storage for bedding and other woolens inside. Note that we’re going to also put USB charging reading lights on top, one on each side. This was challenging to frame because the sides of the triangle aren’t the same length so the angles were 90, 42, and 48 respectively. Cutting these odd angles was challenging as was getting the dimensions just right. Because the case was so large I made it so that it could be built in the shop and then disassembled and then finally assembled up in the room. I’ll say that it is quite overbuilt as it has an internal frame of 2x4’s that are skinned on the outside with 1/2” sanded pine plywood and on the inside with chipped cedar paneling to form a cedar chest. The next project that I do I’m going to try and work on lighter simpler structure, but this is my skill level at the moment and it works for me. I put leveling feet on the base to allow it to sit nicely on the carpeted floor. I primed and painted the plywood panels before assembling them in the room and then I just finish-screwed them on and filled the screw holes and sanded/touched up those areas.

Cutting the hole and fitting the door for the cedar chest was some new router skills that I still need to work on. It came out ok, but I definitely need more practice cutting clean accurate holes and counter-sinks with the router.

Here’s the construction sequence gallery for the headboard:

The second project was to build the fixed base for the sofa bed. This is a U-shaped frame that sticks out from the headboard into the room. It provides the support for the upper part of the bed when extended. The lower end of the bed rides on a trundle that rolls out of the fixed base on one-way industrial casters. This part was relatively easy to build since it was all right angles. I did get a bunch of practice cutting panels out of sheets of plywood using a combination of hand held circular saw and the table saw. I got a lot better at it over the course of this project and I feel much more confident with this skill. I also shifted from painting the panels with a brush to painting them with a 7” roller and that was a huge improvement in both time efficiency and quality of finish. My next project, I’m going to sand the piece after the initial coat of primer since it raises the grain on the plywood and I think I’d get a smoother finish if I did this. However, it doesn’t look bad at all unless you really get close to it and compare it to the professionally built book cases in the library.

The next step of the project was to build the trundle that rolls out of the fixed base and extends the bed. Again this wasn’t too bad in terms of framing. The only complexity was that it is shorter at the back than the front to allow for it to pass under the stretcher that helps keep the base from bowing outward. It is also set up at the height of the casters, about 3 1/2” above the ground. I put in three one way casters on each side. Since they are in the same line they actually help make the trundle move straight in and out. The side panels are full height to hide the casters and make a uniform front on the sofa bed when it is closed. I put recessed handles into the front of the trundle to make pulling on it easier. There is a 2x2 cleat around the inside bottom of the trundle to support a plywood bottom making the interior into a large drawer for storage. The seat will hinge up at the front to allow access.

Finally I built the slat frame that hinges and supports the mattress ( on order, it takes a while to get one…). This was straightforward and constructed out of 1 x 4 pine stock. It attaches to the fixed frame at the top using some nylon webbing ( like what backpack straps are made of ) to allow it to be tethered in a flexible way when folded up but also to not slide off the base when extending or closing the bed. It is tethered in a similar way to the trundle and the back allowing the panel to act as a cover for the drawer that can be opened with the bed extended or folded. It is very firm and stable when deployed or folded and I’m really happy with it. It handles my considerable bulk without too much flex or movement.

I have a few things left to do. Once the mattress shows up I need to do any adjustments to accommodate it ( the mattress is a memory foam replacement sofa-bed wide queen mattress 60 x 72 ). There is currently and issue with the height of the trundle relative to the height of the fixed frame that makes it difficult to extend and close the bed smoothly. I have two adjustments I can make, there are leveling feet on the fixed base which I can adjust and I can also add a spacer under the caster bases to change the height of the trundle. I may also add some small guide wheels inside the fixed base front to help guide the trundle straight when you’re closing it.

I’ll install the reading lights last so that they’re not in the way in case I have to move the headboard case around or do any adjustment there.

I’ll post some final pictures when I do all of that!

Building Project: Shop Expansion

As I mentioned in my previous post I have a furniture project coming up to build a custom convertible sofa bed for our library/guest room. Before that I needed to add some new tools to my shop and give them someplace to live. One important feature is a sliding compound power miter saw station where the front of the bench provides the infeed/outfeed support for the miter saw. The bench will also have a ruler and an adjustable stop for the infeed of the miter saw. Because I was going to build new benches and such I also decided to add more storage. The storage is drawers, shelves, and pegboard to give everything I have a place to live, plus some extra capacity. I’ve never built or installed drawers before so this was also a skills upgrade. See the design drawing below for an idea of what I was shooting for…

Side, top, and front views of new bench design…

The first challenge was ordering all the stock and hardware for the new bench. I had two problems with my order. One was self-inflicted, I ordered the wrong length 2x4s due to clicking on an adjacent item in the online ordering system. The second one was the store’s problem, they omitted half my plywood and that was after a one day delay. The good news is that now I can go in person to the store and so I went and picked up the missing plywood and a bunch of additional 2x4s.

Some of my order…

I set up a temporary miter saw station and my new table saw in the garage which is attached to the shop. This is probably where the table saw will always be used just for space reasons. I got a folding and roll away table saw so it can be out of the way when I’m not using it. Also, the car needs to go in the garage most of the time.

Temporary miter station and table saw station in the garage

The first part of the build was to build the frame of the bench. I actually built it as three independent units and then connected them. Note the lowered section in the middle to allow the deck of the miter saw to line up with the surface of the bench. The miter saw made all the repeated cuts so easy and quick. Also it makes perfect consistent square cuts where I would probably have some “variation” using a hand held circular saw.

One unit of three…

Three units framed and connected… ooh and my first drawer…

You can see my very first drawer in the image above. It was so cool to have a table saw and be able to rip all the sanded maple 1/2” plywood to the right dimension and then to length on the miter saw. I also made the dado in the drawer sides using the table saw, just putting each piece of stock through with the blade set to about 1/4” height and shifting it 1/16” for three passes. I was able to cut the drawer bottoms by just ripping the panels to the right width ( the inside width of the drawer plus 3/8” so it sits inside the dado). I used a very simple butt joint with glue and pre-drilled countersunk 1” screws. The drawer slides are nice 24” full extension slides so it’s easy to get to everything in the drawers. I intentionally set them back from the front of the unit so that there are still clamping surfaces and to protect them from getting sawdust and such into them. You can also see the bench tops which are two layers of 1/2 plywood.

All the drawers installed and the miter saw in it’s new home…

The next part was to add the pegboard on 2/3 of the bench to hang up tools and some shelves on the last 1/3 of the bench to have some open shelf storage. There is also a shelf under the miter saw as well and floor storage under that. I also installed and set up the other tools: drill press and sanding station.

All the tools installed on the bench top, pegboard and shelves as well…

After putting stuff in the drawers and hanging up a bunch of tools, I installed the miter saw adjustable stop and ruler. I built a jig for my router and carefully routed a channel to install it after doing some work to level/flatten the infeed side of the bench. The stop came out great and it largely removes the need to measure and mark when I’m cutting multiple pieces.

Miter saw stop and ruler…

So that’s the whole saga… It took about five days or so end to end and I think it is a good representation of my original design. I’m very happy with the functionality, the machines, and the storage. I’m reviewing my design for the bed project and I’ll probably get started on that in a week or so.

Miscellaneous projects...

I’m about to start a new construction project and it reminded me that I’ve done a few random projects and not posted about them at all… So, here’s a rundown of the small stuff…

Fixed the dimmer that didn’t work well for 20+ years…

In our dining room there was a weird dimmer switch that had a touch plate that was supposed to adjust by sliding your finger on it or something. It didn’t work right for two reasons. First, if you tapped it it was supposed to just turn on the light, it would often fail at this or leave the light flickering on and off. Second, I could find no reliable way to control the dimming with it, it either went full on suddenly or off to flickering… We lived with it since we moved into the house and I kept meaning to have and electrician replace it. Finally I got the courage together to replace the damn thing. It was actually very easy and the instructions for the new dimmer were very clear. The new dimmer is the proper rating for the LED lights in the fixture and had a normal on-off switch and slider for dimming. The hardest part was finding the circuit that this light was on, it wasn’t on anything labeled in our box as “dining room” and turned out to be on the circuit with the basement and some of the outlets in the kitchen ( wtf? ).

A normal functioning dimmer for the dining room…

Fix the split in the front foyer door

Our front foyer door developed a split in the wood near the door knob a few ( 10, 15, who knows… ) years ago. And I attempted to glue it in the past and failed and had since just had some masking tape over it to prevent it catching on things. Don’t judge me. Recently, I cut out the damaged wood, made a patch and glued and fastened the patch in place with brads and sanded it flush with the original door. I even painted it to mostly match.

Got the paper towel off the counter

For a couple of decades our paper towel in the kitchen has been on a vertical dispenser on the counter. I’ve always regretted that dispenser since it was always in the way or behind something. Also, it would move when you tried to pull paper towel off of it. I built a dispenser that could mount to the underside of the cabinet to solve this problem. It is better ( not perfect ) for one handed use, and it solves all the other problems. I used some old book shelf material I had in the scrap pile to build it and I painted it to match the cabinets.

Converted Dana’s bike to grip shift

Even after the complete overhaul and rebuild last year, the shifters on Dana’s bike weren’t working correctly and they were making it hard for her to ride. I got some off the shelf grip shifters and replacement brake levers and replaced the original Shimano stuff. They work great and I was also able to adjust the pull on the brakes to make them a lot more aggressive. The shifters work with any Shimano drivetrain as long as it is a 3x7 setup. I also finally understood derailleur adjustment and was able to dial in the shifting. I got these cool purple grips as well that match the bike frame.

Converted all of the lights in the basement to LED from fluorescent and added a bunch

I have wanted to add more lighting to the basement ( where my workshop is ) and had been dreading trying to lure an electrician out here to do a small job. One day I noticed that there was an old dead fixture up in the joist bay and it was still wired in to the main light switch in the basement. I removed it and got rid of it and converted that wiring to be a switched outlet. I then got these cool four foot LED shop lights that can daisy chain. I was able to add a bunch of them with no issues. Now I can see what I’m doing in the workshop which is wonderful.

I also replaced the old fluorescent bulbs in the existing fixtures with LED conversion bulbs

Next project, shop expansion to do the next next project

After the hall cabinet project I realized that I needed some additional tools to do nicer and more precise projects more easily. I said that I would wait until I came up with a plan for another “upstairs quality” project and then I would expand the shop to do that one. The next next project that came up was to build a custom folding bed/couch for the guest room/library upstairs. It will have a storage chest as the headboard to store bedding and other linens and such. I’ve got the design drawn up and it will allow us to move from a “full” size futon bed to a “queen” size bed in our library. This will be nice for guests and for us since sometimes when one of us has a cold we sleep in there to let the other one get some rest. I’m also going to build some storage into the base as well.

But first I need to expand the shop so I got a nice sliding compound miter saw, a table saw on a folding rolling stand, a drill press, and a belt and disk sanding station. I’m going to build a miter saw bench that will also support the drill press and sanding station. The table saw folds up and gets stored across the room and most likely used in my garage since it won’t be much use in my shop space.

Picture a bench under these tools with a pegboard behind them and eight drawers underneath them ( I really need the storage ) and a nice 30x30 work surface at the end. The front edge of the bench will be kept clear and the miter saw recessed so that it’s deck is flush with the bench top and thus will form the infeed and outfeed for the miter saw. I’m even going to put T-track into the bench top with a removable stop and an embedded ruler on the infeed side for quick measuring and repeated cuts.

Ok, that’s the update, I’ll post about the shop project soon… I’m waiting for materials to be delivered today!

Computer Gaming: Oculus Quest 2

Since I retired I’ve had the time to return to some things that I enjoyed as a kid, one of those is computer games. Specifically VR games using the Oculus Quest 2 VR headset… This thing is impressive, it generates a very immersive visual, tactile and aural experience all in a wireless headset. The hand tracking, environment tracking and responsiveness is incredible.

My eye-hand coordination and reflexes are much slower than my arcade gaming days. This means I need to find games that are fun for a old slow guy. My favorite so far is Gun Club VR which allows you to shoot various kinds of targets in tactical scenarios with all kinds of various guns. The fidelity of the shooting experience is great ( I’m not a firearms person or expert but it feels right to me ) and since there isn’t too much moving around in their scenarios it’s good for an older person with less twitch available. You gain money to buy different guns and to customize them with better ammo, more capacity, stability improvements like suppressors etc…

My second favorite is Robo Recall , in this one you are a representative from the robot company who has to go out into the city and recall ( shoot, blow up, tear apart, throw into a collection vortex ) robots that have gone rogue and are attacking their former customers. This is a very nicely rendered game, the robot characters are really elaborate and the game physics are deep. You can grab robots and tear their limbs and heads off, steal their weapons throw them at each other, use them as a shield sometimes take over their workings and use their built in weapons directly… Huge fun… I’m a little too slow for this game but it is so much fun to play that I honestly don’t care that I’m doing poorly. Sometimes I just go re-play some of the challenges just to enjoy trying different things.

My third favorite is Space Pirate Trainer which someone likened to being a VR version of Galaga/Galaxians and I agree. This game would probably be easier to play if you have a big empty room to play in because you need to be able to duck and dodge a bit without smashing something. I make do in my office with a smaller play area and my scores show it… Each wave of training robots that attack the space platform you are on get harder and harder. There are multiple weapons and power-ups that you can use that help with the more powerful of the bots assuming you have them at the right time. They have a good restart from level function that lets you skip forward to the range of your highest achievement. At least for me it takes some experimentation to figure out which combination of weapons and defenses are going to work so I do end up playing some levels multiple times. But like Robo Recall it is just fun to play the game and the sequences are somewhat randomized so you don’t end up being bored doing exactly the same thing over and over.

I’m working on one other game that is called Apex Construct. I don’t know if I like it yet, it is a story based game and it is fairly difficult and at the moment I don’t know if I’m interested in investing that level of thought to a game in order to solve the puzzles as well as fight the robots… But, it is very pretty and the world is detailed and interesting… I'll report back after I spend more time with it.

Finally a completely different type of game Eleven Table Tennis which is an excellent table tennis simulation. They have AI players that are fun to play with or you can invite friends or find human players on the interwebs to play. I don’t play well with others so I like the AI players just fine. It is a nice workout and you can play it in a reasonably constrained space without anything bad happening. I’m up to the medium AI opponent and I really enjoy it.

I’ve bailed out of a few games along the way. Population One which I’m told is like Fortnite was much too multi-player-multi-tasking-ADHD-get-killed-all-the-time-while-people-talk-about-you for me… perhaps I’ll go back in years to come or not. Arizona Sunshine was frustrating because it was very easy to get overwhelmed and killed by the zombies just because the weapons operation was kinda awkward for me. Also the story was repetitive and boring. Probably won’t revisit this one. Shooty Fruity was a fun concept but the world physics seem broken to me, I’m a great shot in every other game and I suck in this one. If they fixed that I would probably continue to play it.

It’s fun to have some time to spend just messing around with computer games again and it is a great outlet for environmental stress ( you know what I’m talking about).

Electronics Project: (epilogue) IR Light Source for Time Lapse photography

I was able to build a battery pack using two three AA modules wired in parallel ( when you wire batteries in parallel they keep the same voltage but they sum their runtime at a given current ). I got a waterproof junction box to keep them safe outside and I mounted that on the back of the original light source case. I ran the wire through a hole between them and soldered them to the battery leads from the old flat rechargeable battery that was in the light originally which I had removed. The two boxes are screwed together with a couple of 3mm x 5mm (or so) screws with nuts and washers. I also sealed around the box with latex seal/adhesive so it is very secure. Here’s what it looks like inside:

Here’s what is inside the battery case… I attached the battery strap to the case with a small screw

With the batteries out to show the wiring holes and screws…

So, as usual with engineering, simpler is better. I ran a test over night last night and the light source ran all night and into the early morning, plenty of time for what I want to do. When I get an interesting video I’ll post it.

Building Project: Weaving note desk

My lovely wife Dana took up weaving a little more than two years ago. She is making more and more complex fabrics on her rigid heddle loom. She often needs notes available to follow the complex pattern and she asked me if I would make an add-on for her loom that would hold them in a convenient position. The constraints were to not be permanently attached to the loom and to not be in the way of any of the weaving or the mechanism of the loom.

I came up with a design where would clamp the desk to the leg of the loom stand and have a standoff that kept it away from the knobs and such on the side of the loom. I measured her usual working angle and matched that with the desk surface, about twenty degrees. I created a clamp out of three pieces of plywood and a t-bolt and knob, two of the pieces slot into the front piece and then the t-bold goes through them and pulls them together against the leg. The front plate provides a mounting surface for the standoff and the upright of the desk. I tripled up the plywood ( maple cabinet grade plywood I had left over from another project ) and created a mounting block at the top. I cut that at twenty degrees and screwed the desk surface to it. I added a bottom edge stop to the desk to allow for a tablet to be placed on it in addition to paper notes.

I made a chipboard template of the clamp parts and cut them on the bandsaw, the slots I cut with the forstner bit and a coping saw and finished the fitting with a wood rasp. I used screws to attach everything in case I needed to make additional adjustments in the future. I sanded all the edges and surfaces and put some paste wax on everything to protect it.

It got a test run tonight and it worked great!

Electronics Project: IR light controller for time lapse camera (part 1)

I’m a software engineer, I’ve had no training in electrical engineering other than hanging around my electrical engineer brother more than thirty years ago. This has not stopped me from attempting to hack an electronic solution to an issue that I was having. The problem was that I bought a time lapse camera which was supposed to support shooting in darkness with infrared light. Which it does. However, it doesn’t have an infrared light source, so you have to provide one. Getting a battery powered IR light source that will last all night is more expense than I wanted. I found an inexpensive IR light source from Polaroid however it has a one hour run time. I noticed that the camera had a port on the side that looked like a flash control cable port… it was labeled as such in the documentation but there was no mention of how to use a flash, how to enable the flash, etc… writing to the company produced no response. I thought perhaps the cheap light source would last all night if it was only on when I was actually taking a picture.

So I got a cheap flash control cable and cut one end off and stripped the wires and using a multi-meter I found that indeed there was a signal there that was in sync with shutter. I remembered that a transistor could be used as a switch and I wondered if anyone made a module for that which I could just trigger using the output of the flash control wire. And thanks to all the STEM classes and such there is such a module and I was able to wire it up between the battery and the light and make the light go on and off using a 9v battery. However, the voltage from the camera trigger was 1000 times too weak to turn on the MOSFET so I then I remembered a thing called an OPAMP which could take a small current and multiply it by a gain. I got one of those and put it between the camera and the MOSFET. I needed a 5v or better power source for the OPAMP so I put two blocks of three AA batteries in series ( which gets you to 8v ) and the OPAMP board had a handy constant 5V out so I could power everything downstream off of that. This also converts the light into having replaceable batteries instead of internal recharging which is faster and easier because you can use one set and charge one set with no waiting.

I could show that the light was going on now when the shutter ( well really focus and shutter ) signal was on, which was great. I was so proud of myself. Then I did a test. I put the whole rig in sealed up box (no light) covered all the red/green led’s on the boards with a small cover box and set up a time lapse with IR of an old mechanical watch with hour minute second hands. I got…. complete blackness. Turns out that the signal to the flash turns off before the shutter actually opens, makes sense because flash units have a specific flash timing to be on for an amount of time after the trigger.

So, I needed a way to keep the light on after the trigger. I thought about perhaps a discharging capacitor? But it seemed like it wouldn’t have time to charge before the shutter? I searched around and found a cool universal timer module that has a trigger mode. It will turn on it’s output and keep it on for a programmable duration, exactly what I need! And it appears it will replace the MOSFET in the circuit I have. I’m waiting for it to be delivered to try again.

I’ll write up the results in part two.

Cheers!

P.S. I’ll share the parts and where to get them etc… IF I get this to work…

Building Project: Weaving work bag stand

My lovely wife Dana has taken up weaving and now spinning. Both activities require having a bunch of small tools and supplies near at hand. Dana came up with the idea of a collapsible work bag/work table that could sit next to her when she was working and then be closed up for storage. She asked me to make it for her and using some measurements from things that she was already improvising to do this I made a measured drawing to figure out the design.

I had some nice 1/2” cabinet grade maple plywood scraps from the cabinet project so I was able to create a chipboard template for the legs and trace them onto the scrap. I had a nice length of 1” dowel that was long enough to make the handles and pivots. I had also just bought a set of Forstner bits and had a 1” one already.

I cut out the legs on the band saw and they came out perfectly. I cleaned up the notches for the stretcher and drilled the through holes and partial holes for the handles and pivots. I clamped my belt sander in the vice and used it to do the rough sanding and knock off the edges, I’m still learning finesse with power sanders but it is getting better. I did the finish sanding with my palm sander and applied a nice wax finish to all of the wood. I assembled the frame with small screws and wood glue. I’m thinking I need a brad nailer because even the smallest screws are a risk for splitting thin material like this especially into the end grain.

Dana made a cool bag out of the top of a pair of recycled jeans from the collection of fabric she keeps for projects. She also made a canvas platform to provide a removable table top for holding tools handy. I created a simple hook on the band saw that rotates on the handle and keeps the bag closed when it is stored.

All in all I think it came out pretty well.

Building Project: Hallway Cabinet...

I was struggling to get up the enthusiasm to write some code for the Robot Project so I figured I probably needed a different kind of project. I have been looking at the empty alcove in our side hall off the kitchen for years thinking that the space could be much better used. I decided to build my first ever “upstairs” quality cabinet. This would mean having trim and doors and handles and getting painted… a lot of stuff that I just have never done. I sorta knew how to do it from years of watching carpentry shows, but there is a great deal of difference between theory and practice.

I made measured drawings of the whole project and compiled a spreadsheet with a complete cut list and list of hardware and other supplies for the project. I put in a big order from a local hardware store and then waited a week for delivery since everyone is doing home improvements during the pandemic.

I got started in earnest two weeks ago on Thursday with the minimal demolition I needed to do, removing an old shelf and the cleat that held it up and the old hanging bar that was under the shelf. I also threw out a bunch of dusty stuff that was hanging out there. Friday all the supplies came and I got started with building the frame for the cabinet. I now completely understand the face that most contractors make when they see the age of my house, I make that face now. A couple of right angles in that alcove and the rest not so much. It’s fun trying to frame something to be square and plumb so that doors and shelves will work in a wonky parallelogram of a space.

I got the framing done in a couple of days. I had started making lots of noises due to all of the muscles that apparently I don’t use in my other activities complaining. I don’t have a table saw so I had to cut the panels for the interior of the cabinet on the floor in the garage. My knees and back did not enjoy that activity. Also it is not so easy to cut a nice straight line even with a guide using a circular saw and trying to reach across a 4x8 sheet of plywood that is trying to sag and bow to grip your saw blade.

I built a cool jig to drill all the shelf pin holes so that they’d be uniform, I saw the trick on a wood working show and it worked very well. I drilled two panels at once for the facing sides of the cabinet so that they’d all be lined up. I was very scared that I’d have all my shelves wobbling or canted at some random angle. In the end it came out very well.

The trim was pretty straightforward. I did make one significant miscalculation, I bought stock that was about a half an inch less than the top and bottom trim needed to cover. Fortunately in my pile of lumber left over from professional woodworkers who have worked on the house I had some belly molding and was able to use that for the top and bottom trim. I think it adds a nice detail, just like software when you turn a bug into a feature.

The doors, wow, I did not think through the doors enough. I decided that I would do inset doors with concealed hinges because I liked the way that looked. I do not recommend that style of door for your first cabinet project. There is no hiding, it has to fit perfectly and have a consistent gap all around. It takes years of practice to make that kind of door with hand tools and hand held power tools. And most professionals wouldn’t do it that way in any case, they’d have table saws, power miter saws, a router table etc… In the end I made the doors as simply as I could with mitered corners cut by hand and a panel recessed in using my 20+ year old router for the first time. I struggled to account for the amount lost to the saw kerf and ended up with one door slightly small and one slightly big due to overcompensation. I was able to trim the big door on my band saw, the small door I just have to live with a slightly inelegant gap around it.

Painting, I hate painting, I did the sanding, priming, painting, patching the wall that forms the back of the cabinet, primed and painted the wall. I still hate painting, and technically I’m not done, I need to put water based polyurethane on the cabinet interiors when it gets warm enough to have all the doors and windows open while it out-gasses.

Concealed hinges, JFC, there are more flavors of these than grains of sand in the Sahara desert. I ordered one set only to realize that I needed a special version specifically for inset doors. The second set I ordered was even more diabolical, I had ordered three pairs not knowing if I’d need them for these largish doors. I grabbed one set of the three at random and was using it to mock up the installation and nothing was right according to the manufacturers cryptic guide documentation. I realized that they hadn’t sent me the hinges that I had ordered. I said “fuck it” and I created spacers to just make them work. Using an installation jig I got the mounting plates on the cabinet with my spacers. I was about to install a set on the door side and happened to take a second set out of the bag and noticed that they were different. Hinge sets two and three were the correct ones. I had to remove my spacers, recalculate where to drill the mounting hole ( wow Forstner bits, so cool). Fortunately the mounting plate distance was the same for both versions of the hinge. I got the doors mounted and adjusted to reasonable tolerances.

I made the shelves out of recycled shelves from years of old Staples book cases that we’ve since replaced. The band saw made quick work of cutting them to size and I grudgingly painted them.

So, I learned a lot doing this. For example, I now know the names of all the tools I’m going to buy before my next cabinet project. I also have a visceral understanding of the nuances of wood working that my shop teacher Mr. Hill was trying hard to get across to me way back in high school. I’m happy with how it came out and it fits into the house, fortunately I have an old slightly crooked house, so a rustic slightly crooked cabinet doesn’t look out of place.

Art Project: Berlin Blues

This is my second digital art project, with some images, words and music… About ten years ago I commuted to Berlin to manage a team there. I really fell in love with Berlin and I learned a lot there and I miss not being able to visit it. I’m getting better at the tools for doing the audio. I especially appreciate the auto-ducking feature that smoothly fades out the music to allow the spoken word track to come through.

Enjoy…

This piece was inspired by my time working in Berlin ten years ago. Just based on how much I think about it and respond emotionally to the pictures, it had a big impact on me. I wanted to mash up the electronica vibe of Berlin with the blues to try to express the feeling of being an alien there but also weirdly feeling at home.

Art Project: I remember every day

I’ve been working on combining images, words and some improvised music into a digital presentation… The whole process is a WIP but I thought I’d just share what I come up with as I go. I’m still figuring out the tools, the workflow, quality, etc…

This piece was inspired by a theme that I think about a lot, memory. I was looking through images I captured while I was commuting by train. The words came to me while I was looking at them. The music is a set of changes that I heard and then modified and a melody that I played while I was watching the sequence of images.

UPDATE: I thought it needed a bass line so I added one in, I like this version better:

Management: Things I won't miss...

I’ve been writing a series of posts on management based on my experiences. If you’re starting with this one, you may want to have a look at: https://www.jlgoodwin.com/words-pictures/2020/9/17/management-the-job-of-a-manager

Introduction

I’ve been retired now for ten months after a thirty-nine year career in the software industry. I’ve had pretty much every role from software engineer to vice president of engineering. Overall, it was an enormously rewarding career and I’m honestly not bitter or angry about any of it now that it is over. I’ve certainly had periods of bitterness and anger over the years, and there are definitely things that I think are systematically wrong with the industry that I found myself struggling against (especially as a manager). It can be a great career for anyone as long as you know what you’re getting into. Here’s the list…

Being between the team and upper management

I will not miss: 

• Waking up every day thinking about some executive’s expectations of me and my team, the problems I should solve, the deadlines I should pay attention to, the people I need to wrangle, my performance measured against an invisible changeable ruler.

• Having to get people to do things that they don’t want to do for reasons I don’t entirely agree with (or in some cases completely understand). Negotiating the “merely goofy” vs. “the actually stupid and evil” to figure out how much political capital to spend on any given act of inquiry, redirection, or resistance.

• Trying to deduce, from a cloud of barely differentiated requests for my time and my team's time, which actions will actually be valuable to the business if we do them. This is where actual management happens, and actual decisions, and actual risk… Some folks completely avoid this, but they tend to be crap managers.

• Facing my email with dread, waiting for the next capricious turn that will invalidate all of the planning and understanding and work me and my team had done for weeks or months before. Our decisions, supported by a lot of work and thought, undone by the sudden “pivot” supported by a rambling semi-coherent e-mail. 

Human frailty

I will not miss:

• Having to listen to other folks’ emotional outpourings, worries, freak-outs, paranoia, sadness, grief, anger, you name it. Having to absorb and understand that emotion and not respond in kind, and then talk them around to some productive direction that keeps them getting paid and us all doing what we get paid for. Hard to do and still have some personal integrity…

• Changing my entire mental focus an average of ten or twelve times a day… and not being able to focus afterward on anything that I want to pay attention to.

• Having people who pay me a lot of money for my experience and knowledge ignore or contradict my advice. The worst version of this is when they come back and tell me “You know, you were right…” after the debacle/or resisting me tooth and nail.

• Having to fire people either for something stupid that they did or failed to do or because the company did something stupid or failed to do something. Fortunately, if you are breathing in and out and have a good story about being a software engineer you can get a job in this industry. Believe me, I’ve reviewed a LOT of resumes and interviewed a LOT of folks, so, generally I don’t worry about people I’ve fired, It’s more the emotional impact of the moment that I won’t miss.

Male dominance behavior

I will not miss having to step on the neck of male bullies in the tech leadership because it's the only way they’ll “respect” me. This is one of the worst things about the industry, and it stems from overwhelming and systematic male dominance, and by this I mean, only hiring men into leadership positions, only listening to men, only valuing particular male styles of communication, having to dominate other people to show how “good” you are in a male recognized sort of way. Even in the very best of companies I was frequently confronted with men telling me about how women engineers were “too junior,” “didn’t communicate directly enough,” “didn’t communicate clearly,” or “weren’t organized.” What they actually meant was “They’re not aggressively suppressing all other ideas in favor of their reductionist linear version of what to do.”

All, and I do mean all, of the monumental software project failures that I’ve witnessed in my career were led by aggressive, opinionated, and actually under-qualified, men. They all went off the rails because these folks couldn’t allow consideration of alternatives or even whether the project had useful results. Their egos wouldn’t allow it; their entitlement wouldn’t allow it.

I never fit into male culture very well even as a child and male culture knew it. I was frequently the focus of a lot of aggression and bullying. I figured out how to survive by using my intelligence (and low animal cunning), and I never developed any sympathy for my abusers. In my personal life, I avoid folks who behave like that and now that I’m an older, bigger, more affluent man, they tend to avoid me too. 

I did my best to be an ally for folks who weren’t aggressive men during my career. I used my power and influence to counteract the default narrative and get more women into higher positions. It was a fucking struggle, even when overtly these same companies had “diversity” goals. I have to say that announcing “diversity goals” is mostly talk, because I did the awkward thing and actually hired the women and others. Most of my peers didn’t. I would provide them with excellent candidates who I vouched for; they would invent a reason not to hire them. They would be happy about my team improving the stats but they weren’t interested in helping.

Meaningless technical debate

I won’t miss having to explain why I don’t want to include all of GraphQL for one tiny feature because someone thinks it’s “cool.”

I also won’t miss Java, JavaScript, the C++ Standard Template Library, browsers as the worst runtime environments of all time, vim, emacs, the Windows API from any century, distributed object systems of any kind, micro-services and other overused flavor-of-the-year one-size-fits-all architecture patterns that substitute for actual architecture design, Big Company drive-by-do-nothing-take-no-responsibility software architects, the new language to end all languages (Golang, Rust, etc.)… I could go on.

The fact of the matter is that good engineering is good engineering and you can do good engineering in Assembly language if you have the skills and the discipline. And good engineering means that what you are engineering is appropriate to the problem you’re solving, the economics of the business you’re in, and is reasonable for the talent you have access to. You can even build good things out of imperfect pieces (and you often do for economic, social, and political reasons).

All failed software projects fail due to one or more of: poor goals, poor leadership, a bad business model, a lack of customer value, poor analysis of requirements, outrageous scope vs. capacity, and human frailty. Of course, the least valued skill in the software industry is management, and it is the skill that is required for success. 

Business travel

I love to travel for pleasure; business travel is the opposite of that. I won’t miss being forced to fly to places I’d never go on a bet, to talk to people I don’t know, about stuff none of us are interested in, followed by tiresome forced socializing. All of this happens in a dreary business hotel or some kind of function hall or closed down public venue or worst of all a fucking golf resort. Business trips often are scheduled so that you are “ON” for twenty-four hours a day and constantly in large groups of people you only slightly know. This is the very vision of hell for an introvert.

Even in the best case, where I got to go someplace I really wanted to and had some time to myself, the logistics of traveling efficiently so you don’t waste your own time and also have time to do the work ruin a lot of it. When I managed folks in Berlin, I visited about every five weeks. To assure I still had time for myself and my family, I would fly out late Sunday night, arrive on Monday morning, work all day, go out in the evening until my normal bed time. That first “day” was thirty-six hours long and by three o’clock in the afternoon local time I was almost hallucinatory. I made some great friends there and in the end it was worth it, but the travel was a huge drag.

I really hope for everyone’s (and the planet’s) sake that, when the pandemic is over, people realize that most business travel is just posturing and a meaningless, inefficient display of wealth and entitlement. It’d be great if folks would recognize that business travel isn’t a perk for an introvert; if you’d like to give us a perk, we’d prefer some free time on our own.

Finally

I sincerely hope that the other allies out there will keep working to reform the industry. It was a great career and I loved a lot of it. I’m glad to be done with these particular things.

Robot Project: Treat dispenser installed on robot

Huge progress on the robot and treat dispenser! They are connected and working together! Thanks to a very helpful suggestion from my wife I was able to implement a simple fix for the clogging problem. I cut some thin flexible plastic from the top of a takeout sushi container and cut one end into fingers. I attached it so that it reaches about one “treat height” above the belt. The fingers brush back extra treats that would get carried forward as a stack due to their stickiness but they don’t allow them to get jammed by the fingers because they are so weak and flexible. You can just see the fingers in this picture:

Detail of anti-clogging solution…

The fingers also make the kicker servo and armature more effective. I added a zip tie around the kicker servo to make it more stable and to transfer more of the energy to the treats. This works good and having run multiple full hopper tests I can confirm that it successfully clears all the treats without jamming.

The next thing I needed to do was to mount the dispenser on the robot and as part of that mount the servo controller and the servo batteries somewhere. I got some nice 1.5cm x 4mm standoffs and drilled and countersunk some holes in the treat dispenser base plate and mounted the controller behind the left side servo. I was able to cut a couple of slots and mount the battery pack using a velcro strap next to the controller.

Controller board mounted using standoffs and the battery pack for the servos mounted using velcro strap.

Two new tools made a huge difference in this process, I got a set of small metric wrenches and a set of coarse and fine files. The wrenches allow the tightening of these tiny fasteners so much better and more easily and the files allowed me to drill out the slots and then remove the rest of the material by filing to create nice clean slots without cracking/burning/destroying the acrylic.

File set, not an expensive one but it works great, the small files on the right are perfect for making slots or fitted holes in acrylic. Just use the brush regularly to clear the file when working with plastic. Also, go slow to not melt the plastic with friction.

Tiny wrenches apparently usually used for working on carburetors. The metric ones are wonderful for tightening the tiny nuts on the robot without mangling them.

I was able to use some of the existing holes in the upper deck of the GoPiGo robot to finally mount the treat dispenser on top of it just behind the camera. Handily it also centers most of the weight of the treat dispenser over the drive axles and it doesn’t seem to make the robot more prone to tipping. I was worried because this particular robot only has a single roller caster in the back.

Using the existing holes in the upper deck of the GoPiGo robot to mount the treat dispenser.

I ran a test with everything integrated this morning and the robot was able to move, turn, use it’s sensors and dispense treats with no problems. Here is the video of the run:

I’m really happy with the progress so far, the next step is to make the software part of this project more usable. After messing around with trying to make the robot autonomous I have decided that it just isn’t up to it in terms of sensors, steering and maneuverability. So, I’m going to implement a dashboard and keyboard controls so I can directly control the robot and treat dispenser remotely via an ssh tunnel.

Robot Project: Treat dispenser acrylic version powered test

I got the servos installed after some back and forth. During powered testing to find the right position for the servos I managed to have the servo lever arm push on one of the axles. This popped the entire feeder body off of the base breaking the CA glue free. I had suspected that it would have a hard time holding on that long narrow seam on the bottom with torque and a big lever arm. So you’ll see later that I fabricated a couple of aluminum mounting brackets and screwed the dispenser to the base. This is much stronger and I realized it may be useful to disassemble this to clean it at some point.

I figured out the range for each of the servos to power it’s part of the driving sequence. I wrote a little python program to just run through four cycles. I tested it with real treats. For the most part it works fine and the ramp inside performs as expected, it can clear all the treats now. However, the narrowed area where the ramp is causes the treats to bind up there. They are a little moist and stick together enough to get suspended in that gap. I’m going to have to put another small servo with a kicker somewhere in that area to twitch the food to keep it moving. But, overall it has been very sucessful.

Here is the video of the test run:

Next up is solving the clogging problem then mounting it on the robot somehow.

Robot Project: Acrylic treat dispenser

Over the holidays, after evaluating alternatives for cutting the acrylic and aluminum, I got a bench top band saw.

It has allowed me to make all the parts for the feeder quickly and reasonably straight. I even figured out how to make the treat ramp inside to keep them from getting stuck. I used CA glue to bond everything. That was a little learning curve. My new clamping surface plus some masking tape to avoid gluing the parts to the bench worked great. So, here is the assembled unit:

I'm very happy with how it came out. Next is installing the servos and getting it running under power. The placement is going to be tricky.

Robot Project: Treat dispenser cardboard mockup

I’ve been working on a mock up of the servo driven treat dispenser for my robot. I wanted to build a mock up to look for any design problems before I commit to cutting aluminum and acrylic sheet. Here is a quick design walk-around video:

I also did a test with real treats that went well, here are the videos of that:

So far, so good, I’m a little worried about the size and weight of the treat dispenser but I think my next step is to try to get to a powered test of the mechanism.

Jazz: What would I recommend...

I made this list about 9 years ago and I just came across it again. I realized that I should put it here so it’ll be more accessible than in my FB feed. I don’t mean it as any judgement on things I’ve omitted, this is just a starting point to find the path through the huge world of Jazz that you belong on.

Relatively frequently I get into a conversation where I mention that I am a Jazz fan, and that I play Jazz piano, and someone asks me: "So tell me what to listen to in Jazz...", at which point my brain locks up and I stammer, forget everyone's name... so I made a list and I'm sharing it here FWIW:

(Artist * means important -- Suggested recordings -- not in any order, not really grouped at all, just my opinion from my listening so far )

*Ahmad Jamal -- The Legendary Okeh & Epic Recordings

*Art Blakey & The Jazz Messengers, Art Blakey Quintet --

*Art Tatum -- Piano Grand Master 1-3, The Tatum Group Masterpieces

Anita O'Day -- Anita O'Day Live in Tokyo

*Bill Evans -- Portrait in Jazz, Sunday at the Villiage Vanguard

Bix Beiderbecke -- Bixology

Bobby Timmons -- This Here is Bobby Timmons

*Bud Powell -- Paris Sessions

*Chick Corea -- Piano Standards

Chucho Valdes -- Fantasia Cubana Variations on Classical Themes

*Clifford Brown & Max Roach -- At Basin Street

*Dave Brubeck Quartet -- Time Out, Time Further Out

*Freddie Hubbard -- Red Clay

Gonzalo Rubalcaba -- Inner Voyage

*Herbie Hancock -- Corea Hancock (Live), Maiden Voyage, Speak Like a Child

Hiromi -- Spiral

*Horace Silver -- Song for My Father

*Jelly Roll Morton -- Greatest Hits

*John Coltrane -- Afro Blue Impressions

*Keith Jarrett -- The Koln Concert, Standards Vol.1, Standards Vol.2

Louis Armstrong -- Hot Fives and Sevens

Mary Lou Williams -- Live At The Cookery (Live), Marian McPartland's Piano Jazz with Mary Lou Williams esp "What's Your Story, Morning Glory"

Les McCann & Eddie Harris -- Swiss Movement

*McCoy Tyner -- Soliloquy, McCoy Tyner and the Latin All-Stars

Mose Allison -- I Don't Worry About A Thing

Nina Simone -- Feeling Good - The Very Best of Nina Simone

*Oscar Peterson -- Night Train, Oscar Peterson Et Joe Pass A La Salle Pleyel

Ramsey Lewis -- Ramsey Lewis's Finest Hour

*Sonny Rollins -- A Night At The Village Vanguard

*Stan Getz -- Captain Marvel, Sweet Rain

*Thelonious Monk -- Thelonius Monk Quartet with John Coltrane - At Carnegie Hall

Tony Bennett -- Tony Bennett and Bill Evans (two albums)

Vince Guaraldi Trio -- Jazz Impressions of Black Orpheus

*Wayne Shorter -- Adam's Apple

Robot Project: Audio In/Out, Cat Treat Feeder, Refining the Patrol code

Whenever we’re away for a long time we worry about our cats. There are people who come in to feed them, play with them, and change the cat box, but still we worry. Over the years I’ve developed more and more technological solutions to allow us to check in on them remotely. Now, before we go I set up multiple wifi cameras around the house, each of which is in a likely cat activity space. I can reposition the cameras remotely and they capture based on motion and save up a nice movie of all the activity broken down by hour. They have infrared cameras and so we get twenty four hour coverage. This works pretty well and reduce worry a lot.

There was only one gap in this system, sometimes the cats decide to be completely outside of the view of all of the cameras for many hours. Being an engineer I felt compelled to try and build a solution to fill this gap. I decided that I would build a robot rover that could do the following:

1. Autonomously roam one or more rooms of the house

2. Take pictures during it’s patrol and upload them

3. Record sounds

4. Play our voices calling for the cats and offering treats

5. Dispense treats

6. Allow me to take over and control it’s functions manually over the internet

The theory would be that while a robot would likely make the cats wary, something that sounded like us and dispensed tasty treats would make them get over that and come close to be seen on camera somewhat on demand.

Now that I have the robot assembled and I’ve figured out how to program it, I’ve been working on the patrol code. It is still a work in progress but I’ve managed to get ten probes into a room and not get stuck, I have some ideas on how to get to the next level. Along the way I’ve discovered some interesting edge conditions in the python api code, for example in some locations where they convert from degrees to a number of intervals from the wheel sensor they use integer math. Not in general a problem except when the division comes back as zero in which case the onboard controller takes that as meaning “turn on the motors until you’re told to stop” instead of “stop after some number of wheel sensor signals" So, every so often everything would be going well and then the robot would need to turn a small amount and it would just start spinning in place until it hit the code to go forward which at that point was in a random direction. There was a similar issue with the code to go forward a certain number of centimeters resulting in running right into whatever wall was in front of it.

I’ve got all of the safeguards in my code now to prevent those conditions now, and it has been interesting debugging both in the code and physical world. One of the mechanical things that I ended up having to fix was that I had originally mounted the servo on the front and the ultrasound sensor on the lower deck of the robot ( they didn’t say you shouldn’t and it was out of the way of the camera .) Turns out, that you don’t get full range of motion of the sensor on the servo because the circuit board hits the upper deck. More importantly for something that rolls around the floor it was easy for the low mounted sensor to miss things that would interfere with the top half of the robot. So, I moved it up to the upper deck. I just pivot it out of the frame when I use the camera.

I also learned that you shouldn’t operate the motors and take a picture at the same time, the ribbon cable ( not shielded ) for the camera runs right past the power circuit for the motors. There is a lot of RFI when they’re running and so you get some pretty funky images as a result.

Robot showing amplified speaker, microphone, and new placement of the ultrasonic sensor

I got a very cheap USB microphone dongle to use for audio input… bad idea… the gain on the device was terrible, it worked but the audio was barely audible over the noise. The noise was because all of it’s circuits were yes, you guessed it, right near the motor controller board. I ended up using a nice USB microphone via a USB cable clipped to the side of the robot, that worked like a champ and had enough gain to pick up a cat vocalizing.

I also got a tiny rechargeable amplified speaker to plug into the Raspberry Pi’s headphone jack and that worked fine. I got a 90 degree adapter to keep the wire away from the wheels and mounted it to the back with some double stick tape. Using the pygame module it is easy to play any audio file so we should be able to record ourselves calling to the cats and use that.

Design for cat treat feeder…

The final item is the treat dispenser, this is an entire project in itself. I have a design that I’m working on and I’ve created a prototype of the dispenser mechanism. I have been using components from the Lego Technic collection of parts. The great thing is that they have all kinds of shafts, bearings, gears, wheels, beams, etc… that are all compatible with each other. I’m not qualified to machine anything or even do a competent job designing something to be machined. So, these are a godsend and have allowed me to build the core mechanism of the treat dispenser and get it working. The power for the treat dispenser will come from two additional servos one on each side which will push a peg on a drive wheel, they are set 180 degrees apart. (see video for demonstration in the prototype) Fortunately the folks who make the robot provide a kit with an add on servo controller board that can control multiple servos and it comes with a couple of big servos that should work. It also has it’s own batteries and so it won’t be dependent on the robot’s power.

You can see the up and down action of the servo being translated to rotation to drive the belt.

I’m going to make the case for the treat dispenser out of 1/8” acrylic sheet and I’m going to have to cut these parts a lot more cleanly that the last one because I intend to glue them together. My Dremel has a straight cutting bit and a guide collar and I think that would work with the panel clamped firmly to a sacrificial piece of wood and pressing the Dremel against a guide fence. I’m going to be experimenting soon.

That’s where I’m at for the moment.

Robot Project: Adding pi camera and making a mounting bracket

I’ve started hacking away on a prototype program to have the robot drive around the room and investigate the objects it finds with the ultrasound sensor. Part of that was to take a picture, so I needed to get a camera. Raspberry Pi makes a nice add on camera which just comes with a ribbon cable and the camera card. You can just let the ribbon cable anchor the camera to the upper deck of the GoPiGo robot, but it seemed to be too low so that you’d always take pictures of the ultrasound sensor and also not well anchored so when the robot drove around it would flop back and forth. So I needed to fabricate a bracket.

I decided to make it in two parts, a lower right angle made out of .032” aluminum and an upper mounting plate made of the same 1/8” acrylic sheet that the rest of the body parts are made of. I made the cuts in both the acrylic and the aluminum using my Dremel tool and a cutting disk. It worked pretty well just needing to take my time and not heat the acrylic up too much. The only downside is that there isn’t a way to use a guide ( or shall I say I haven’t figured that out yet ) so the cut edges are a bit erratic. The resulting bracket is charmingly imperfect, but completely functional. I secured it to the upper deck with 8x3mm screws, nuts and a compression washer, the mounting plate is attached to the aluminum angle in a similar manner. I almost had an issue because unlike everything else on the GoPiGo the camera board has 2mm holes. Fortunately I had a couple of 8x2mm screws and nuts and I was able to use them to attach the board to the mounting plate. Because of the inaccuracies of my fabrication I had resigned myself to crooked pictures, but due to a happy accident, my inaccuracies canceled out and the camera ends up quite level.

Now back to debugging my patrol code and adding in the image captures.

Robot Project: Assembly and programming

Back in July of 2016 I guess I thought I’d have some time on my hands to play around with robots… that didn’t happen… but I did buy a GoPiGo kit from Dexter Industries along with some accessories. It has been in my office drawer for four years until this week when I got it out and put it together. It is a nice kit and targets kids 10 years and older and is really quick and easy to assemble. I would say that the youtube videos are the documents of record on how to assemble and get started with the GoPiGo. The robot is a simple rover powered by a Raspberry Pi and a Debian Linux distribution called Raspbian for Robots. It also has servos, cameras, and ultrasonic sensors that you can add on. There is a simple python api for programming the robot and interacting with the servos and sensors.

The version that I have is the GoPiGo 2 and the current one is GoPiGo 3, they have an archive of all of the software and documentation for old versions and the YouTube videos for the old ones are also still there. I got it assembled with only one mishap where I cracked a small Plexiglas part by over-tightening a fastener, I was able to mend it and continue. The software setup was equally easy, just plugged in an Ethernet cable, pointed a browser at it and they have a vnc based desktop where you can configure WiFi. Once it is on the wifi network you unplug the cable and you can just log on to the robot where ever it is via WiFi.

I created a github project for my programs and using git I can just pull them onto the robot. That way I can code on my desktop and just move things over via git. You can power the robot for programming purposes using a USB power adapter so that you don’t deplete the batteries while you’re debugging. I’ve successfully shipped over a couple of test programs and tested moving the robot and also manipulating the servo and reading the ultrasonic sensor. Now I’ve just got to think about what my first substantial robot project is going to be.