fub | Entries tagged with craft

One of the things that needed some re-thinking was the lighting in the house. (I almost wrote “new house” here, but it’s now the only house we own, it’s where we live. Therefore: “the house”.) When we bought it, there were fluorescent tubes against the beams running the length of the space, hidden behind ochre yellow boards. That wouldn’t do, so we removed all those. We made an inventory of which wall switch worked on which ceiling connection and where the cables led — something we also needed to keep in mind when the wall for the bedroom came in! And extra isolation was put against the ceiling, so all the original standard light pots were replaced with tubes with the wires coming out. Luckily we can screw light fixtures to the wooden beams, but it required some improvisation in a few cases.

One important part of the house where we lacked proper lighting was the kitchen. The main part of the kitchen is about 2m70 long, jutting out from the outer wall into the room. It also doesn’t help that the countertop is black, so there was very little usable light when cooking. Clearly, we needed something there. But I wanted something that could be bright when needed, but more dim and ‘warm’ as circumstances allowed — to have a bit of ‘mood lighting’. This is important, because the kitchen is a large part of the space, and the lighting there affects the other parts of the space as well.

I had discussed the possibility of putting in smart lighting with my builder. He had experience with a certain platform and he showed me a brochure of it. Nice stuff, but very expensive and it required a connection to some cloud instance and an account… That does not fit my requirements: everything has to stay within my house, on my own network. So I did some research and settled on Home Assistant, an open source project for smart home. It has some integrations itself, but there is also a large community that make integrations that can be hooked into it. So one evening I took a spare laptop and installed Home Assistant OS on it. I didn’t have anything concrete I wanted to automate at that exact moment, but someone had made an integration with the heatpump we use, and the whole Enphase solar panel array was automatically discovered(!) and added to Home Assistant. Now I have historical data of power consumption, which will help in balancing our power demands in the future.

But that didn’t fix my kitchen lighting issue. For that, I got a set with a 2m LED strip, an adapter and a Zigbee controller. I also got a LED driver that I could hook up directly to the mains to replace the adapter — there’s no power socket there. And I also ordered some profiles to put the LED strips in, so it would look a little nicer instead of the ‘raw’ LED strip.

First step was to get a 2m70 lath and paint it black to go with the countertops.

We screwed the included ‘profile holders’ to the lath and attached the two 1m pieces of profile together with tape and clicked those into the holders. We drilled a hole through the lath so we could bring the leads from the underside (with the LED strips) to above, where we’d install the controller and driver.

With the LED strip installed in the profile. You can clearly see the two colour LEDs and the resistors. The set came with connectors and all, no soldering required!

The cover for the profile is milky white, to hide all the electronics and diffuse the light a bit more.

The smaller white box is the Zigbee controller. On one end it has the three leads that are connected to the LED strip on the underside, the other side has a power connector. The power comes from the LED driver that’s above the controller: 230V AC goes in at the top (we got a nice power cord for it, covered in braided fabric) and at the other end out comes 24V DC to feed into the controller. This is going to be hooked up to the fixture connector in the ceiling.

So far it was a breeze, but hanging the lath level above the kitchen, suspended from the wooden beams in the sloping ceiling required a bit more work. We used steel washing lines with a rubber covering — easy to work with, but very sturdy.

Such bright light! This is the cool white light at maximum brightness.

The work surface is illuminated very brightly, so much better than trying to cut your veggies in the dark!

We got the official Home Assistant Zigbee USB stick (which you have to connect through a USB extension cord because Zigbee uses the same frequency as wifi, which means it’ll get too much interference if you keep it close to your hardware…) and the light was automatically discovered, along with its capabilities. Here is a clip of me controlling the LED strip with my phone through Home Assistant.

But it soon became apparent that controlling it though the phone was a bit irksome. I was ready to buy one of those control panels when we remembered we still had a spare Ikea Tradfri 5-button controller lying around… Tradfri uses Zigbee as well, so connecting it to Home Assistant was a breeze. Scripting what needed to be done required a bit more work, but that’s all working now too. We have the button lying on the other countertop, ready for use. Super convenient. Here is a clip of me controlling the LED strip with the Ikea button.

We’re very proud of the result, and it’s now a pleasure to cook at a well-lit area — and then turn the light to warm and dim it a bit when the cooking is done and we want a more cosy lighting.

Crossposted from my blog. Comment here or at the original post.

Current Mood: pleased

There is a ‘creative entrepreneur hub’ in the city, not far from where we live. It’s located in one of the old industrial buildings, which are all being repurposed, so the workshops tend to move around a bit. Big machinery gets shared, which makes it possible for smaller workshops to take on bigger projects they would otherwise could not.

Some of these workshops presented themselves on a “Maker’s Market” some time ago, and one of those was Suzan Doornbos, who makes objects from turned wood. This was something we had been curious about (there’s a shop in Arnhem that has all kinds of woodworking stuff, and we had been peeking through their windows at several occasions) and when I saw that she offered workshops, I took one of her cards to check it out.

So yesterday we went to her workshop to learn the basics of turning wood. There were three ‘students’: me, klik, and someone who had been making furniture for some time and who wanted to expand her repertoire.

(Also, I like the Dutch word ‘draaibank’ much better than the English ‘lathe’. ‘Draaibank’ literally means ‘turning bench’, which is so much more descriptive.)

We started off with a rectangular block of wood. Determine the center and then clamp it into the lathe.

An overview of the ‘turning station’ I used. When rotating the block by hand, in order to see that it would not bump into the ‘tool shelf’, I noticed that the rotation speed (the four-number display on the left) was measured independently from the motor input — it counted the rotations I did by hand. That makes a lot of sense, as you don’t have to calibrate motor input so carefully.

Safety first! I look so fashionable in this…

Using a very coarse chisel, we chipped off the square edges to make the block round. Hard work, but once you got the feeling it wasn’t so bad.

Still a bit uneven, but we’d use a much smaller chisel with much finer control to fix that. And really, you only can get fine details in once the block is rounded. The trick is to let the chisel glide across the wood, and you can’t do that if it’s not rounded off!

Action shot.

With a much finer chisel, we made the block much smoother and more even. I had one little spot that still was straight. That was pointed out repeatedly, but I thought it would be cool to have one spot that reminded you that it all started out as a rectangular block of wood. (Spoiler: when finishing up the piece, I had to turn quite a bit of wood from that spot and I think it’s now completely gone. Too bad!)

Then we learned how to make a deep cut. Not too deep, of course, otherwise you’d have two pieces instead of one… We used pencil lines as guides.

And another cut made! The cuts can’t be straight down, because then the chisel gets too much friction from the sides of the ‘groove’ it is cutting, so you have to make smaller cuts next to it to give it room to go deeper.

Then we learned how to ’round off’ one side. The movement is kinda tricky, so this first side is kinda straight. And once the wood has come off, you can’t add it back!

The other side went much better! And it was not just me, everyone’s second side was better. Still, amazing how fast you can learn something like this. The cuts to the left and right are still rough, but of course I’d finish that up later with a much smaller chisel.

Working very concentrated on getting the round shape right…

Then we learned how to make a ‘hollow’. This was much harder, and my chisel ran away a few times. That left deep grooves on other parts of the block, so I had to carefully turn those away again, to make it smooth again. You can see that the cut below the round part has been smoothed out too.

All the heavy lifting has now been done. The piece is still a bit rough around the edges, so I took a very fine chisel to finish it up.

The end result: this is as good as I was going to get it. Next was the sanding, with grit 180, 240 and 320 respectively. After the sanding it was really nice and smooth!

This is how our work came out of the lathe. Because there is always a bit of wood where the center-points go in, the ends are never smooth — so these candle holders are still wobbly! That would be fixed with a drill though. And there would also be a metal bit inserted at the top to hold the candle, so that the wood would not burn if the candle burned down too low! My work is on the left: I decided I wanted the round part on top. Klik’s work is on the right, and she wanted the hollow part on top.

This is the finished work of all the workshop participants. Mine on the left, Klik’s in the middle. The other participant had shaved her piece too far down to have the metal candle holder drilled all the way into the piece, as it was wider than the narrow part on top of her rounded part, so the metal bit sticks out.

It was a lot of fun, and I am amazed at how quickly you can learn the basics! Suzan also offers a second workshop to learn how to turn a wooden box, and that might be something for the future…

Crossposted from my blog. Comment here or at the original post.

Current Mood: happy

It’s been a while since I posted. It turns out that in the tail end of our holiday in Denmark, we caught COVID-19. Who could have guessed that not having any precautions in place and pretending that the virus is gone, would result in people catching COVID-19? And so that happened.

We felt quite miserable and had to cancel the second half of our vacation plans, but luckily we were through the worst after a week — but still we tire quickly.

And then on July 4th, I started my new job. It’s fully remote, which I really, really like, but that has its quirks in onboarding etcetera. But most things got resolved quite quickly, and I’m getting up to speed with the product, the people and the way of working. There’s enough to do, and it’s exciting to be part of a product management team again.

Most of the team are in the UK, which means that regularly scheduled meetings are also on a UK schedule. I was used to starting early and then ending my working day early too, but that just doesn’t work with the agendas. I have shifted my workdays a bit, and operate on a mostly GMT schedule now. This means that instead of going to the supermarket in the afternoon, right after ending my workday, I now go in the early morning. It took me some time to work out how we should adapt our schedule, and we’re still in the early stages, so things might change again.

Klik wanted a loom for her birthday, and it finally arrived. Luckily she is very handy, because it came as a flat-pak with lots of assembly required, but now we are the proud owners of an eight shaft loom that can hold fabric up to 80 cm wide. It’s small enough to fit on the table, so that’s where it is sitting right now.

I might have to write an app to help with counting and determining the next shaft positions, based on the patterns, but that is something for when we have a bit more experience with it.

Crossposted from my blog. Comment here or at the original post.

Current Mood: tired

Of course, with everything moving so quickly, we didn’t have time to make extended vacation plans. It’s only three weeks anyway before I start my new job, so it wasn’t worth it to go somewhere far away. But my sister, who lives near Copenhagen, had invited us over — and we hadn’t been there in years, so it would be fun to stay with them again. They now also have a vacation home, and the shed there has been converted into a glass art studio. After a few days in Copenhagen, we moved to the vacation home and my sister visited a few times to help us make a glass project!

I have been really interested in the glass ‘dots’: drops of glass that you stick to a transparent piece of glass. It’s what I used for the Estus flask. But instead of firing it very hot for a ‘full fuse’, where the dots melt completely and you get left with smooth glass, I wanted a cooler firing so that the dots remained domed. My sister gave me a circle of transparent glass: a reject from a commission she’s working on right now, but perfect for my purpose.

I did not have a pre-set plan and just went where the size and colours of the dots took me.

This was the result of an afternoon fiddling with tweezers and glue. The dots are glued with normal hobby glue — that will burn off in the oven, but at least prevents things from shifting around before then. I may have used too much glue in places, but it did not cause problems.

Of course, if the dots would not melt fully, then there would be space in between them. With stained glass windows in mind, I asked my sister what to do, and she suggested using black glass powder. With a small brush, I brushed that in between the dots. Because it is much finer (really glass dust), it would melt at much lower temperatures. I had to wear an industrial mask — you don’t want to breathe in glass particles. Trust me on that.

It takes about 24 hours for a firing to be complete, as the glass has to stay at certain temperatures for a certain times for proper annealing. And then it has to cool off slowly, otherwise the stresses in the material can cause the glass to shatter. And since the oven uses electricity (and a fair amount of it), it pays to wait until midnight to start heating up the oven — the computer has a ‘waiting stage’ in its program.

That evening, we had arrange to meet up with some of my former colleagues with whom I still play RPGs, and we were back very, very late. So the oven had cooled off enough to open! We were too tired to do anything else than to take out the fire-proof tray with our projects, put in another tray that had been prepared, and turn on the oven. I took a quick snap of my project as it came straight out of the oven.

This is the next morning. The dots act as tiny lenses and refract the light. I do think the black glass in between adds something important. It’s not as nicely spread as I would have wanted. I might have brushed too rigorously because I did not want to run the risk of some specks of black dust getting stuck on the dots themselves and diminish the luster.

You can see how in some places, the black glass did stick to the underside of the dots. But it all has melted while the dots retained their shape.

On this side view, you can see clearly how the dots remained ‘dot-shaped’.

It also works against a darker background. That really brings out the different colours.

This is what it looks like from the ‘back’ of the project. That has a whole different feel to it and shows the ‘stained glass’ effect a bit better.

The dots act as tiny lenses. Here I held it against the carpet in the ‘sun room’, and you can see it reflected/refracted in the dots.

My project used up a lot of dots, and my sister is working on a huge commission that also requires quite a few dots. So I felt a bit responsible and decided to help make more dots.

The cool thing about glass is that when it completely melts (at around 815 Celcius), the surface tension makes it want to become 6 millimeters thick. It will form drops of that thickness, and when it cools off again, those drops harden — that’s what the ‘dots’ are! And with glass being so hard, it is almost impossible to cut round shapes in it: you basically approximate a curve by chipping away smaller, straight pieces. Which means that if you need a lot of different-shaped pieces, you get left with lots of very small pieces.

So the trick of making dots is to collect those pieces and fire them at a high temperature. It takes a hot firing in the oven (and thus quite a bit of time) but it is a great way to recycle what would otherwise be waste material.

The plates that go into the oven are hard ceramic plates, sometimes with a ‘slurry’ on it as a releasing agent. You want to keep some space in between the pieces, so that they don’t melt together.

It is a nice little job to simply take the pieces that are available and arrange them. Very satisfying to see the area get filled up, and to find the best-fitting piece for a particular spot.

This is how the plate goes into the oven. The heating element is embedded in the (heavily isolated) lid. The little black bit on the right on the inside is the temperature sensor, and the box on the right of the oven is the firing computer. Close the lid, create the program, and then just wait until it’s all cooled off enough. With the heavy insulation, even cooling off takes a long, long time!

And this is what greeted us when we opened the oven! Some of the pieces turned out to be too close together so they melted together, making a multi-coloured dot. Some dots got weird shapes because of that too, but that is maybe also a charming effect.

Have some dot glamour shots! I put them all in a plastic, lidded container, so they can be poured out and sorted when needed.

Crossposted from my blog. Comment here or at the original post.

Current Mood: enthralled

My sister has been making glass art for a few years now. She has three ovens (one of which is in their vacation home) and has been making all kinds of things: sometimes figurative, sometimes abstract, sometimes purely decorative but also things like trays and vases.

She was coming to the Netherlands for over the Easter break, and she brought the smallest oven and some of her supplies. We went there on the Monday to work on some projects!

The material to work with

She has worked out a technique to make ‘murini’, small rods of glass with a pattern. These can be used to make things like ‘millefiori’ (literally: thousand flowers), something that Murini, the glass-makers island of Venice is famous for.

I had thought long and hard on what to make, and I decided on making a little Estus flask, from Dark Souls. It’s the healing item, and it’s a flask filled with a yellow and red glowing liquid. My sister cut out a flask shape out of transparent glass, and I would put all kinds of dots and smaller pieces of glass on there. By baking it really hot, I’d get a ‘full fuse’ and get a single sheet of glass with all those colors in. Then on a second firing, the flask shape would be made round so that you could set it upright.

I’d pick up a dot and glue it in place with a tiny, tiny bit of hobby glue — that would burn off in the oven anyway, but the important thing was that it would keep in place when handling the unfired item.

Work in progress.

It requires a bit of concentration, but I got the routine down. We had some smaller pieces of glass left, and we made a few ‘dots plates’ and other items too.

Some of the other items we made that day.

It’s kinda weird to have a thing that gets to 800 degrees Celcius on your living room floor, but the oven is quite well insulated so it doesn’t get stupidly hot outside. Firing the glass takes about 24 hours.

My Estus flask after the first firing. Apparently there is a spot that got ‘devitrified’, and my sister didn’t have the tools with her to rectify that, so the item is now in Denmark for that. There will be a second firing to make it round, too.

I like how it looks, but I think I should have used a lot less green and blue. But maybe there will be a second one in the future…

One of the little ‘dots plates’ we made. I like how it’s a little colourful mosaic, but since it was fired on ‘full fuse’, it’s all smooth.