Making – Systems Lab

June 23, 2025May 18, 2025

Finishing Old Projects 2 – Bioshock Pistol

This second project is the pistol from Bioshock, it is primarily 3d printed with some extra materials thrown in. I picked up a toy pistol, cleaned out some old cans, and printed off some of the pieces to mod it into the fully upgraded pistol from the game. Except the problem is I never got further than painting a few of the printed parts, no assembly was ever started, so now it’s time to fix that.

June 2, 2025May 13, 2025

Finishing Old Projects 1 – Adafruit Gas Mask

I have a number of old projects I started years ago and never got around to finishing. Some of these have electronics in the plans, others are just 3d prints. Many of them I purchased parts for, or printed parts of them, but I just never managed to finish them. So I plan on getting them done, cutting a few corners to do so, but it’s better than not doing them at all.

May 26, 2025May 28, 2025

RC Mini Bot

I’ve been watching some YouTube videos featuring 3d printed battle bots recently. One of the form factors that looked neat were the antweight robots (150g), due to their small size and small price for components. I decided to design and build something similar (though no weapon) just to drive around for fun, tormenting the pets, and practicing some design work. I figure I’ll design it so a tail can be tied on with feathers for the cat to chase (the dog will chase it just because it makes noise).

May 19, 2025May 14, 2025

Catomater

I saw this model while looking for some type of laser toy for a cat. It looked neat, integrated with home assistant, and it didn’t require many parts, so I figured why not try and see if my cat would be interested with it.

January 6, 2025October 12, 2024

Bambu Lab X1C Poop Bin

I’ve printed a few multi color prints with my bambu printers and yet I still have no way to collect the filament poops other than grabbing them off the floor. How about I try to fix that.

December 16, 2024December 3, 2024

ESP32 not Accepting OTA Updates

I started running into issues when I began using ESP32s instead of 8266s, I could do the initial flash over serial, and follow it up with some configuration. But the moment I tried to OTA update with further configuration, it would fail every time. The errors were always the same vein, connection reset by the ESP before the update could complete.

December 9, 2024December 3, 2024

Custom Printed Keycaps

So far I’ve been using relegendable key caps for my macro pads and ESP Decks, but I’ve recently found another way. There is an open source keycap generator that can create multi color key caps that can be printed on my Bambu printers. There are a lot of pre-generated caps included with the repository, but I’d like to be able to generate my own custom ones too.

October 28, 2024September 14, 2024

Ultimaker Door

I have wanted to put a door on my ultimaker for a while now, to help stabilize temperatures inside and keep prints from pulling off the build plate. I feel like it’ll also give the machine a bit more of a professional look which is always fun.

September 30, 2024September 21, 2024

Cramming Smarts into a Bluetooth Speaker

I’ve had a Bluetooth speaker in my drawer for a few years that is problematic. It doesn’t charge, or turn on consistently, and has other issues as well. Now that I have the ESP audio kit though, I have a need for a good speaker to plug into it. This speaker needing a new control board is just the right candidate for the procedure.

September 23, 2024September 23, 2024

Custom Squeezelite ESP32-A1S Speaker

Since I found the ESP32 audio kit and it’s support for squeezelite, I decided to try making 2 small 3w speakers with it. One of them I’d use an existing speaker as the base and the second I’d custom build. This is my little custom built squeezelite speaker unit with its two built in 3w speakers.