Staying in the theme of this basically being a junk build CNC, I wanted to spend as little on the enclosure as possible. Not having anything suitable around the shop, I headed to one of my happy places. Habitat for Humanities ReStore.

And as luck would have it, I found something that might work on my first visit, and with a $16/25% off tag. A bargain at twice the price.

Barback V2 design files have finally been cleaned up! The project was plagued with tons of DAG errors and cyclical dependencies. With burnout from the big push last November, the hardware basically working, the firmware still needing a lot of attention, and being actively asked to pour at events… Time for this part of the project was hard to find. But with that last part, actively pouring drinks, we’ve come to find many short comings in the current design.

Needing some storage bins for the garage I came up with the idea for self-aligning stackable bins. Cut from 3/4" ply, the trick is the 45deg on the bottom panel and inside edges. My first attempt was a quick hand drawing and somewhere along the way I ended up with misaligned pieces. So in order to ensure my dimensions made sense I figured I’d FreeCAD it up. It’s pretty simple but still parametric, able to adjust for material thickness and inner dimensions. Plus, I figured if the design did work out (so far it’s looking good!) I could CNC batches of them, that would only need the 45def chamfers routed and final assembly. Would also update to include hand holds.

Barback relies heavily on pumps. Might even say they’re required. And pumps need motors. You can probably guess where this is going… motors need drivers.

I’ve been self hosting email for at least three years now, and since the start I’ve been wanting a particular feature. Many may remember years ago when Google announced how Gmail would start prefetching and locally serving up images. A feature that was announced as privacy protecting, but in Google classic fashion really just meant they wanted to increase the value of you data, by preventing other from also tracking it. Googles awful privacy track record aside, it’s still a pretty good idea. I wanted that feature. I wanted Dovecot to automagically fetch remote images to a local server and rewrite the URLs. This method had one particular downside, running a server and a small risk of someone randomly guessing image URLs. What I did end up settling on was… instead of serving them from my own server, I’d simply inline the images with base64 encoding, attached as a multi-part section.

The Barback was a smashing success for fact it was banged out over little more than a weekend hackathon. It’s been to dozens of parties, served countless cocktails and has been on several bike rides. It’s never been recharged, the straps are falling off, in addition to always having been a bit janky, and the code has barely been updated. So it’s time for Barback V2.

I’ve been working the design for V2 for quite a while but never felt ready enough to move onto CAM. The whole thing is designed in FreeCAD, using a combination of Part Design workbench and Assembly 4. This combo works really well for my design and fabrication style. All my parts are ‘flat pack’ designed, where everything is oriented the same way, as if it will be cut from plywood…. because it is going to be cut from plywood.

Luck, patients and Craigslist saved searches have built my workshop. This project began no differently.

On a fine Friday morning I woke up to an ad for a cheap CNC. $275 if I recall. Couple of bad pictures showed at the very least, there was probably $275 worth of drivers, steppers and ball screws at the least, plus a pretty dusty desktop mull and what looked like a decent CNC conversion. That alone was a time saver enough to justify the price. The owner had inherited machine but never ended up using it, and decided it was time to free up the space in the garage. I’d apparently missed a CNC Lathe a couple days earlier!

This research deep dive was inspired from using my Dust Collector Remote. It works great, but after a year using it I’ve found the delay to connect pretty annoying. On bad days with a router misbehaving the 4 or 5 second delay while I’m waiting to turn a tool on can get frustrating.

This started getting me thinking about how it could be handled faster. I’ve used ESP-Now a handful of times and have appreciated it’s quick boot to ‘do something useful’ time. But in past projects, I’ve mostly used it as a raw socket and formatted my own messages. Wouldn’t it be nice to have MQTT infrastructure without the setup latency of WiFi or the complexity of BLE/GAP/GATT? I also spent some time dabbling with CoAP a bit this year and while it seems common to treat it more like HTTP, but when using features like Observe Resource it looks a lot more like MQTT or BLE Notifications.

Once you get to use a dust collector remote in someone else’s shop, your dust collector will not be the same. For me it was in a well maintained woodworking shop in a co-working space in Oakland, every time I was back in my shop at the museum I was irritated to not have it, frequently just leaving the dust collector whirring away contributing to my tinnitus and wasting power. Now that I have a decent workshop setup in my home it was something that had to be addressed, not just for the table saw and other tools but I wanted it to be able to be controlled by the CNC.

As I’m deploying more LoRa nodes I find myself needing a more capable debugging system. While at home I simply use an SDR connected to my desktop to ensure devices are transmitting as expected. In the field that is a loftier goal. I’ve tried using an SDR connected to an Android phone with limited success, this seems to just kill the battery more than anything.