New Designs for 2026

After being out of the country for Fall of 2024 and just not feeling it for 2025, I'm finally back in the workshop designing out some ideas for new Schwibbogen. 

I added Eri and Goro to one of my plates. 

Batesville Christmas Bazaar 2023

 

Another good year at the local Christmas bazaar hosted by Beta Sigma Phi.

The comments we received this year:

• Your prices are too low
• Oh, D&D. I'm not interested.You shouldn't have lead with that. *puts monster book down and walks away angry*
• Can you make this with other colors? (Yes, got a few custom orders to make over the next few weeks.)

We sold every Schwibbogen I made and a few extras I need to make. We only sold 2 of the weinachtpyramides, but I got a message after the show to buy 2 of them.

New Posts over on BurningSalmon.com

 I've been doing laser cutting and have been selling items at our local fall and Christmas fairs.

https://www.burningsalmon.com/

Reddit Secret Santa 2014

Jenn and I participated in the Reddit Secret Santa this past Christmas. We got matched and sent out our gifts. Jenn got her giftee a poster of the stadium that her giftee liked the team of, a copy of the Cosmos book, and then crocheted a team color stocking. I got mine some a couple signed comic books from an artist he liked and a copy of "A is for Armageddon".

We then waited for our gifts.

And waited.

And waited.

And got nothing.

I was put back into the pool and got re-matched instantly. Jenn's Secret Santa had marked that they shipped, but nothing ever showed up. She marked that she didn't get anything but wasn't re-matched this time.

Yesterday, I got the first of two boxes that my re-match sent.

Oh no, Johnny Five! You've been Empire Strikes Back C3PO'ed.

Opening up the box, I found... a... disassembled bluetooth speaker. Hrm, Jawbone Jambox  I managed to plug it in and got the most loudest hiss ever and the speaker angrily buzzed and was just horrible.

On the workbench

I don't have a bluetooth speaker and having one on my workbench would be nice. Having to fix my gift isn't really a problem, I was just hoping it was fixable. With as loud as that static was, this would be a great speaker to use while I work.

So, I did a little futzing around and came to the idea that the non-removable battery probably died (as a lot of people on Jawbone's website complain about). I disassembled it the rest of the way...

1.21 Gigawatts later

It looks like the battery was spitting out 3.3v. So, I desoldered the original batter and put on my own. I have a USB->Serial board that I have been using to load some ESP8266's with that puts out 3.3v from USB plug. So I hooked it up and it worked fine. Now, leaving it plugged in this way kind of defeats the purpose of being a portable speaker, so I started looking for a replacement and realized that it takes the same battery as...

Now you are Playing with Power!

The Nintendo DS.

I have a few of these batteries spare from repairing systems, so I soldered it on and let it charge.

The speaker works great. Now I just need to reassemble it.

Reassembled

And now it has been reassembled and is playing music via bluetooth on battery power.

Hi from Batesville

I am waving at the passing Google car.

Earlier this year, Google caught me on film just outside of the Hill-Rom manufacturing plant. Hello out there in Internet-land.

Lain's First Week of Summer 2014

Feeding

Building

Sliding

Drilling

My patent application!

Oooh! A patent I helped on with Klaffenbach at Bausch and Lomb got submitted. I got to make a sweet GUI as well as the microcontroller for our prototype of this.

Ophthalmic multiple wavelength laser illuminator with a graphical user interface

The GUI interface for it

The link to the patent application: http://www.google.com/patents/US20140128686