I Love Lamp

 Stuff I Made  No Responses »
Mar 242022
 

I like these gooseneck desk lamps a lot and I’ve had this one for more than 10 years.

For the past 2-3 it’s had a E27 socket to AC adapter powering a USB charger powering a bare ESP32cam dangling out of the head as a really lazy security camera rig. It ran esphome and piped to hassio.

I finally got a wild hare to make it less obviously lazy and popped in a raspberry pi zero W with a camera and a relay controlling the head light The raspi runs motioneyeos and pipes to hassio. The relay fires from the motioneyeos UI and I finally got it to fire from hassio by a shell command switch that uses ssh to run a gpio script on the pi.

I had to remove the base weight to get all the electronic in and that left it a little top-heavy, so I just hot-glued in a half-pound or so of bismuth pellets because I am a person who owns a startling quantity of bismuth for reasons that are probably explained elsewhere on this site.

Requiem for Watermeal and Silicone Lights

 LEDs, Watermeal  No Responses »
Mar 082022
 

I felt compelled to address the fact that I stopped posting about silicone lighting stuff and watermeal stuff.

I think I can say the silicone thing has run its course. Unfortunately the balsa dioramas didn’t hold up that well after a year. The clear silicone gets a bit cloudy, not unbearable but mostly it just never stops curing so it shrinks up and air bubbles grow and things shift whatnot. The smaller tubes still look okay but still not as good as they did at first. I have a few more ideas involving LEDs and stuff suspended in clear stuff, but I think if I ever get to them I’ll use epoxy or two-part silicon so if I do that we’ll call that a different project. I think I’ve explored the potential of acetoxy silicone to my satisfaction.

The watermeal… well- the population I started with lasted about 3-4 months before they finally all died. The sugar press mud idea was a total bust, but I still think watermeal could be pretty useful crop. The main problem is I overestimated how much of my one bedroom apartment I was willing to sacrifice to enclosures that leak pink light and make liquidy-bubbling sounds 24/7. Also there was a slight odor from all the wet plant stuff laying around. So I’d still love to mess with watermeal but I’m going to have to put that down unless\until I have a more appropriate living situation.

So that’s a season and\or series finale on those little story-arcs. I’ve been trying to tone down the DIY project compulsion and focus more on writing so hopefully there will be more of that sort of thing for a while, but who knows.