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2024-06-01

Last modified: 2024-06-01 15:15:09

< 2024-05-30 2024-06-04 >

Emma's lamp

This is the wood we've started off with:

The plan is to turn the pieces down on Ruari's lathe, and screw them together with threaded rods, and fit a lampshade & battery-powered bulb at the top.

I've cut the square pieces down to octagons to save time on the lathe.

Then into CAD to plan the design of the upright bit:

We settled on:

And a 3d-printed template for reference on the lathe:

Machine building

Finally got the gantry bolted on:

The holes almost lined up perfectly, just had to drill out 3 or 4 of them to 7mm.

Next up is motor brackets.

The short version of the motor bracket does not work on the X axis even with the coupler pushed all the way in. The long version does work on the Y axis.

I've transferred the hole locations on to the gantry & baseplate. I'm not sure how accurately they're going to end up being positioned. I can use the brackets as gluing templates so it should be fine, or failing that I can make new brackets with slotted holes.

I was having trouble screwing long bolts into the M4 inserts, so I cut one in hald:

It is cross-threaded in the middle!

They have obviously tapped it from both ends independently, without regard for alignment (???).

I've messaged the seller on eBay, but assuming they can't fix it, options are:

Slide scanning

I looked at digitising Grandy's old "slides" using the scanner, but I didn't have much luck.

With the lid shut they are in colour but too dark. With the lid open they are black and white! And regardless, the quality is too poor.

I worked out that they're black and white with the lid open because the scanner illuminates and captures the red,green,blue channels independently, but with the lid open they're all backlit permanently so you get the same brightness on all 3 captures.

Next ideas are buy a dedicated slide scanner, or try to rig up a Raspberry Pi camera in a box with a backlight.

< 2024-05-30 2024-06-04 >