Magic, Magic, Everywhere

Lacey and I have been playing Magic the Gathering for years – so it was only natural that eventually I would look for designs for deck boxes. 😉

The first one is for Commander Decks – which I think is 100 cards:

I printed a second one for Lacey’s friend – but something went wrong, and the hotend of the printer ended up smacking into the edge of the print at the top, so I wasn’t able to get the final 5 layers that would allow a lid.. Bummer! (After 8 hours of printing!)

I printed a second one, from a neat set of patterns on Thingiverse:

What it’s supposed to look like

My experience printing this was that the lid was a LITTLE bit too big, and didn’t fit snug enough for my taste.

3D Printing brings peace…

I saw this cute design on Thingiverse for an Automatic Zen Garden and thought – I can do that! The picture was very enticing:

What it’s supposed to look like

So I figured up my printer, opting to print the bottom in brown, and the rake in black:

But then came the more challenging part – hooking up an arduino to drive the 28BYJ-48 rotary motors that turn the rake around…

Not wanting to commit a full-size arduino Uno to the task, I started with an Arduino Mini-UNO, only to find out that it can’t drive enough power. (After much googling).

Then, after switching to use a regular sized Uno, I found out that the motors I had bought all appeared to not work — or I was doing something stupid. Back to Amazon the motors went, and I have ordered a new set of motors that come with LEDs that show which signals are being sent to activate the motor.

To Be Continued…