Laser Cutter #002 - Dice Tower 02 (Summer 2023)

After making and using my family's first ever dice tower, we decided we wanted an upgrade in style. I cut out this lovely castle inspired one and my family enhanced it beautifully. Photos below.

Humble Electronics #002 - Decorative LED Light Boxes (Summer 2023, long post, project prototype)

This was an idea inspired by Big Clive's "Supercomputer" that he has in the background of his YouTube videos. He talks about it here in June of 2020. Then learnelectronics did one with quick flashing colored LEDs in September of 2020.

I found slow flashing RGB LEDs on Amazon and got my hands on a 100 pack. Its a 2 terminal device because its got a microcontroller the size of a pepper flake embedded in it that changes the colors. Basically, this circuit is many pairs of resistors and LEDs in parallel so they all have 5V across them. The slow flashing is more my speed and casts a nice glow I can run all the time. I had a lot of 360 ohm resistors because Amazon was out of 330 ohm. Maybe I didn't search hard enough. I really need to start buying from Mouser.

I finally got around to working on it this summer (2023). I ran the concept on a breadboard for a while to see if I liked the effect.

It didn't look too bad there so I moved onto some prototype board.

Laser Cutter #001 Dice Tower 01 (Summer 2023)

My family got a new board game and since we have a  laser cutter I thought I'd go to Thingiverse and find a dice tower to cut. We have never used a dice tower before. I found this simple, no frills, but functional, dice tower

Our laser is an Xtool M1 enclosed 10W diode laser. I downloaded the .svg file from the download section and cut it out. I glued it together and we tried it with the dice our new game came with.

Humble Electronics #001 - Dice Tower 02 (Summer 2023)

This is a project I finished recently. Many of the other things, I've done this summer, I will post in the coming weeks. 

We own a 10W diode laser cutter and I absolutely love it. One of the things I've cut is a dice tower . I cut out a basic one to see if we wanted one at all. Everyone, in my family, liked it so I cut out a fancier one. This one was really nice from Thingiverse and I changed the flexible cuts to bend better (more on that in a laser cutter post). It was a good base so my husband took it and spray primed it gray. Then he used colored UV resin in the windows. Finally, my daughter did the texture and details. The windows looked great but you couldn't see them very well so I thought I'd add some lights to it.

 

Life gets too busy for blogging

I know everyone is doing the You Tube and TikTok thing now but I can't bring myself to make videos. Maybe one day. I have some great ideas for some really good ones. For now, I'm going to keep on blogging.

To briefly explain my 6 year absence from blogging, I attended college and obtained my degree in EE. It was a dream I didn't realize I even had. It was so much hard work and stress but I obtained what I wanted, to have a basic understanding of what all this electronics stuff is. I also had some unexpected crazy personal challenges going on that took up my free time.

Catching up: Eclipse Photos

 Wow! Its been 6 years since I've posted so let's start with the photos I got from my eclipse viewer. This is from an older phone so they might not look the best.