Lighthouse wire sculpture

hackaday.com is one of my goto blogs to see cool projects others work on. This project was inspired by a Circuit Sculpture Contest they had hosted on there website. I had bought all the materials in preparation to enter it into the contest, however 1 month after the contest ended I had not even started CAD'ing the sculpture. Nevertheless the project was completed and managed to mesh it into the ongoing home automation project.

The sculpture is, if not obvious, a lighthouse. There is a power circuit and a 555 timer circuit triggering a transistor controlling a BIG led. The intent was to make it fade in and out, but it really just blinks.

The second part of the project is how the sculpture is integrated with the home automation server. Currently it sits on a shelf I made out of spare pallet wood and lumber from the farmhouse table project. I painted and stained it to match the coffee table. And light the coffee table it has a RGB led strip on the back for some ambient lighting. I used a Magichome RGBW Light controller reprogrammed with Tasmota software to control the RGB led strip, then wired the extra white output to a barrel connector which plugs into the circuit sculpture. Look at my earlier RGB light controller post for pics and info on the led controller I used.

Future plans will be to create a set of openhab rules to turn the lighthouse sculpture on when some event happens. Could be a phone notification, phone call, ISS flying overhead... TBD

3d Printer Enclosure

This whole project began because my 3d prints were failing to stick to the glass printer bed. I think its only happening in the winter because I keep the apartment on the colder side and that doesn't treat the printer well. So to help with that you can build or buy enclosures for your printer. I pretty much followed these instructions:

https://blog.prusaprinters.org/cheap-simple-3d-printer-enclosure/

Using these thingiverse files to print the enclosure pieces:

https://www.thingiverse.com/thing:2864118

I went with 3 white IKEA lack tables and printed the pieces in white as well. After everything is complete, i think it turned out nice but would have preferred the wood finished lack tables.

https://www.ikea.com/us/en/p/lack-side-table-white-30449908/

Below is a pic of the Led strip light controller, 2 rows of white led's and the controller are fastened to the bottom of the top table. A wemos controller is used to receive MQTT commands from the openhab/mosquitto server so lights can be turned on/off and the temperature inside can be reported back. I used a 1-wire ds18b20 temp sensor, b/c thats all I had.

I cut a hole in one of the tables, ran the wires through, and added some 3d printed brackets to hold the 3d printer controll box.

Overall turned out well, but the printer is still a POS. It will be upgraded in the future.