DIY & Stuff blog

Hello all fellow travelers. This is a blog of mine where I'm documenting my various projects that I have time to do. I'm not limiting myself to any particular area of tinkering, but mostly the project will linger around technology projects and vintage computer related stuff, like old Commodore computers. I bid you all welcome to share this cauldron of useless information with me =).

Projects:

Easy Vacuum former (WIP):

This particular device is quite handy when creating fancy stuff to your DIY projects. This Vacuformer is intended for medium sized objects (~30 x 30cm).

So I have a ton of junk lying around my house. Usually useless stuff, but now and then you have these moments of clarity and pieces seem to fall in place. Well this was one of these revelations that I had. SO I was thinking that I have and old tabletop electric Grill, old vacuum cleaner and a worn-out table. I also had this to do list, and one of the list items happened to be an DIY vacuum former. Hey.. Aren't these pretty much what you need to build and vacuformer? But of course they are: Grill to heat the plastic, vacuum cleaner to create the vacuum and a table with drawers to create the vacubox. Easy as 1-2-3! Off to build the bugger then =)

First of all I had to create an box for the vacuum. Easiest way to create a perfect box was to take one of the drawers from the old table, measure a saw a fitting piece to fill up the drawer, and voila, we have a box! Obviously the box was not air tight so I had to seal the seams with duct tape. A LOT OF DUCT TAPE =). The outcome wasn't pretty but it worked.

After the furious taping session I measured a grid on the top of the drawer. The spacing of the grid was 2 x 2cm. Then it was time to drill a bunch of holes. I wasn't too careful on the alignment of the holes since to me it makes no difference if the holes are perfectly aligned or not. The vacuums going to work even with some inaccuracies exist. After this it was time to drill a bit bigger hole for the vacuum cleaner tube. I measured approximate diameter of the tube and selected a drill bit and drilled away.

Since the match for the drill bit and the the vacuum tube wasn't perfect, I added a hefty amount of duct tape around the vacuum cleaner tube so that the joint was airtight. Wadda ya know; we have vacuum! =) The next step was to create the frame to attach the plastic material...

The frame! Well, I managed to create a frame for the former, but it was a bit too low, so It did not work cause the plastic was too close to the grill and it didn't heat evenly. Well off to build another one from 1" x 4" planks and that did the trick.  Time to get the former a proper test!

1st test run was done with a scrap plastic sheet that I had lying around in my storage room. Black and dirty stuff it was and extremely thin. I think that it was something around 0,2 - 0,5mm. I cut a fitting piece to my former frame, stapled the sheet to the frame and turned on the grill.
Since the sheet was thin, it heated (and melted) quite rapidly. After about 30 seconds the sheet was almost bubbling, so I grabbed it (with my bare hands!), turned the vacuum on and tossed it on top of the vacuum box and wadda you know. The bugger worked!?. I did a second test with 1mm polycarbonate sheet, but that turned to be a bit too thick, at least to the small molds that I was using. But not too bad.

SD2IEC Vintage case (WIP):

After months of searching I finally was able to purchase an old Commodore 128 computer with an old 5.25inch floppy drive. Unfortunately I messed up the floppy drive so bad, that I was unable to revive it anymore. Ok, maybe this wasn't a bad thing in the end since old 5.25" floppies are really hard to get by these days, and it's really hard to transfer data from your PC to the floppies anyways. So I decided purchased a MMC2IEC card reader from ebay to be used with my vintage Commodore 128 computer. This neat device supports modern MMC cards up to 2Gb's of storage, and it can be connected directly to the existing ports on the C128/64. The only downside was that the device comes without a casing. Well, that got me thinking that wouldn't it be cool to make an downscale version of an Commodore 1541 floppy drive to serve as a casing to the device. Why not! =)

First I needed to get the dimensions from the original Commodore 1541 drive. After a short searching session from google I found the critical measures for a 1541C model: 374 mm x 200 mm x 97 mm (L x W x H). Perfect! To get suitable scale I decided that I would use the 5,25" floppy vs. 32 x 24 x 2mm MMC dimensions as a divider to the scaling, so that the MMC card would just fit in to the scaled slot in the drive just a floppies do in the original.

  

So I created a mock up of the 1:4 scale model measuring 90 mm x 48mm x 23,5 mm. Out of cardboard of course! This was only to provide me a good sense of dimensions and give a clue on how much I could bring the size down, so that all would fit in still. Below a few pictures =).

 

 

After fiddling around with the first mock-up version, I decided to scale the model a bit more. This version was going to be 1:5 scale version measuring 67 mm x 36 mm x  17,5 mm. Now I could start crafting an actual model that I could use in the Vacuformer. After a brief pondering session I decided to use MDF as a material for the mold.

I sawed a rough piece of MDF to the measurements, and started grinding the piece until it resembled the 1541 drive. I sawed the molded MDF piece in half in order to get the both parts to the Vacuformer. I even added tiny feet to the bottom piece to add some detail =). Below is the 1st version of the 1:5 scale model. Almost ready for vacuformer:

After a few tweaks, I turned on the grill, placed the molds carefully on top of the vacubox and.. uh oh. It seems that the thin 0,2 - 0,5 plastic produced beautiful details from the molds, but it was too thin and fragile to build a case from. The 1mm polycarbonate was then too thick and the forming didn't work. On top of this, I found out that the case was also too small to fit in all the gimmicks I wanted in =(. Oh well, back to the drawing board then... One thing that was obvious to me was that the case must be in the 1:4 scale. 

While trying to find a suitable switch button to my SD2IEC boards disk-switch , I found an old transformer from my junk box that caught my eye in a "special" way. It seemed to be quite the same shape as 1541 drive and the dimensions seemed to be quite acceptable for my case. The height was just right as was the length, but the width was not. However the case seemed to bee wide enough for the SD2IEC so I decided to give it a go. It didn't take too long for me to see that this is the box that I'm going to build my case!

I started the meticulous process of dismantling the transformer, filling the existing holes in the box and creating new wholes for wires & the aforementioned disk-switch button as well as creating a 1541 style face plate that would serve as a mounting point for the SD cards. I also drilled two 1mm holes to the face plate, so that I could install two optical fibre leads (I bougt an cheap toslink cable to scavenge the optics from) from the PCB to act as the led's from the original design. 

 After the case was re-shaped to my liking it was time to paint it, fit in the PCB and voila. It's done!

 Commodore 64 DTV hacks:

  

The C64 Direct-to-TV, called C64DTV for short, is a single-chip implementation of the Commodore 64 computer, contained in a joystick (modeled after the mid 1980s Competition Pro joystick) with 30 built-in games. My hack effort was to connect the DTV to actual Keyboard & original 5.25" floppy drive. The actual hacking is pretty simple on the DTV since all the leads you need are clearly marked to the PCB. 

Since there are several places where you can find the instructions on how to make this hack, I won't be doing yet another "how to" chapter on the issue, but instead provide links to the places that I found to be the best source of info. So here you are, thank you very much =):

1. DTV Hacking Wiki: http://picobay.com/dtv_wiki/index.php?title=C64_DTV_Hacking_Wiki

2. Excellent source for many different DTV hacks by Richard Lagendijk.  http://www.richardlagendijk.nl/cip/article/index/-/en

3. Daniel Kahlins DTV resource page has plenty of neat stuff to expand your DTV experience. Highly recommended! http://www.kahlin.net/daniel/dtv/

Project roster (to be done in the future):

Raspberry PI Mediacenter & custom case:

Raspberry PI (http://www.raspberrypi.org/ & http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Raspberry_Pi) is an amazing little and inexpensive full featured mini computer that is used for various purposes. My upcoming project is to add the Pi to my TV as a media center and to add IPTV functionality to the TV. Currently my Raspberry is still in order, so this project is on hold until I get the long waiter parcel... Stay tuned for updates. 

Simple & affordable CNC machine:

The holy grail of all DIY people. Imagine the power of creation in your... workshop =).

 © Sami Korpela 2012