Author Archives: Jim

Drawbot string plotter

Posted on November 2, 2017 by Jim

The Drawbot, a ‘polargraph’ 2-string plotter inspired as a junkbox project by Bill Paulson at Workshop 88 in April of 2013, has been under on and off development and improvement ever since. While there are still a couple of upgrades … Continue reading →

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Fridge water leaks and stuff

Posted on October 26, 2017 by Jim

We’ve had a lot of instances of water leaking into the basement from the fridge.  This details the latest instance, with what I can recall of others.  All the problems could be stopped dead by disconnecting the water line that … Continue reading →

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Basement Watchdog Big Dog transformer failure

Posted on October 24, 2017 by Jim

We got home from Heartland 10/15/17 to BWD beeping.  When I went down to look at it, I saw the red LED for Power Failure on, but my first goal was to stop the damn beeping.  Unfortunately, the alarm wouldn’t … Continue reading →

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Shapelock protective case for Laur’s Prius fob

Posted on October 3, 2017 by Jim

We had a quite unpleasant and mysterious problem with the Prius’ alarm sounding (lights and horn) when we parked in a quiet neighborhood front of some friends’ house.  (For a square dance.)  We got stuff out of the trunk, but … Continue reading →

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Fixing a krubow RF Remote receiver

Posted on October 1, 2017 by Jim

The USB cable of Les’ RF receiver broke one of its wires to the PCB inside, and resoldering it was difficult/beyond his skill.  He bought a new one (his 3rd!) and brought me the carcass. The cable had pulled out … Continue reading →

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Focaccia slicer

Posted on September 11, 2017 by Jim

Lauren wanted to made sandwiches out of a round focaccia loaf for an unusually long square dance session.  The question was how to slice it in half neatly.  Plan A was to firmly support both ends a long knife horizontally … Continue reading →

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Kidde P3010CU false alarm

Posted on August 25, 2017 by Jim

Our Kidde P3010CU combo smoke/CO detector started to beep and speak “Fire” this morning.  A pretty thorough search of the whole house revealed no smoke, no fire.  Still a little spooked, I considered apologetically calling the fire department, but noting … Continue reading →

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Hot melt glue gun timer

Posted on August 12, 2017 by Jim

I use hot melt glue a lot, but the warmup time is a problem.  I turn the gun on, go away to do something else while it warms up, and may or may not remember the pending glue job.  I’ve … Continue reading →

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Repair attempt of Grohe Quick Coupling

Posted on August 2, 2017 by Jim

While in the middle of repairing the kitchen sink drain plumbing, I noticed a fairly significant leak under the sink.  OK, I’d failed to tighten one of the new plastic drain couplings in between repair sessions.  Fine. But that didn’t … Continue reading →

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Resurrecting Pogo HA server (and replacing a BGA chip!)

Posted on April 24, 2017 by Jim

I got a watchdog email shortly before we left for the April Adventure weekend (email: 4/20 6:45P) about datafile and camera pic being older than the 1260 sec threshold.  I couldn’t get it running the morning before we left, so … Continue reading →

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