Custom picture frames are expensive

I bought a 20 dollar world map a while ago and never got around to framing it until recently. The map is approximately 45" by 30" so it's safe to say that an off the shelf frame isn't going to do the trick. There are a couple custom framing shops around town but I knew Michaels had an extensive framing department and with my 55% off custom framing coupon firmly in hand I rolled out to one of my favorite stores confident I could grab up a sweet frame and not break the bank. And since the map was already laminated with it's own border I could forgo the matting and glass/plexi to save some dough. I truly thought I could step out of the store minus somewhere in the vicinity of 75 to 100 dollars. And yikes! I was way off. Even after the coupon, the least expensive option was about $250. I think it's safe to say I didn't buy a frame that day.  And $250 was pretty bare bones. You're not getting a fancy wood stain or two tone metal frame for that. Michaels, I still love ya but I'd have to pursue other options for my framing needs.  What was I going to do?

Let me start by saying that my wood working skills are minimal at best. I am aware of the necessary tools but own few of them. I had the cordless drill and screwdriver, needed to borrow the miter saw and router from a neighbor and had to buy a couple right angle clamps.  The clamps were only a few bucks at home depot and totally critical if you want to properly align the segments as seen in the picture to the left.  I also borrowed a router bit (1/2" rabbet) from work which was key because those suckers can be expensive.

You can find all the materials necessary to build this frame at Home Depot. I went with a 1x3" maple board for it's attractive grain pattern and light color. The color makes a difference when deciding on the stain color that suits you. I chose Minwax Red Mahogany 225 because it looked great and would be a close match to the furniture already in the room. You'll want to test the stain on a scrap piece of wood to make sure the color is what you want. For the protective coating, I went with a Minwax Semi-Gloss Polyurethane. I thought the gloss poly was a bit too reflective for my taste. I already had the wood glue, filler, sandpaper and assorted screws from a previous project but all can be purchased for under 10 dollars.

Before you start cutting, identify the portions of wood you want to face the outside world. And kids, remember the golden rule in woodwork...well, construction in general. Measure twice, cut once. Getting the measurements right when cutting and matching up 45 degree angles can be tricky so take your time. Don't worry if they aren't perfect, mine weren't.  This is where the wood filler comes in. A little goes a long way.  Check out the picture, looks dead on doesn't it. After you have glued screwed and clamped the four corners, apply the filler where needed and let dry. The frame actually looks pretty good at this point but looks even better when you hit the whole thing with some 220 grit sandpaper. Be sure to go with the grain and be careful around the joints. At this point the initial plan was to just tack the backer board to the rear of the frame but I decided to route out an 8th inch deep half inch rabbet instead to inlay the backer. Looks more professional from the front this way. BTW, had one of the guys at the Depot cut the backer for me. Saved me a bunch of time and trouble.  If I ever make a frame again, doing the routing before assembling the parts is totally the way to go.  I ended up having to freehand it.  The result was far from perfect but it's the back of the frame so no one will see it.

When it comes to applying the stain, follow the instructions on the can and you'll be just fine. I do have a couple tips though. I prefer foam brushes over rags. They are cheep, you can use them for multiple coats and they do a better job of getting into corners.  And mineral spirits between coats of stain and polyurethane are essential. Dust is not your friend in this situation. Use a sandpaper in the high 200 grit between coats of stain and something like 320 before the last coat of poly. That will give you the nice glass like finish you're lookin for. All that's left after that is to glue on the backer and tack on some wall mounting hardware and you're done.

We have some other picture frames in the room from Crate and Barrel that have a similar style so this fits right in. I could have used the router to round off the edges or cut some sort of decoration into the wood but thought something simple and understated was appropriate considering the look of the map it was framing.

The basement smelled like stain for a few days but that was worth it when I think about the couple hundred dollars I saved in the process. The overall cost came in at a little under $40. Take that Michaels!

Always drink to world peace

I've been gearing up to brew some beer at home for some time now, so when Maz and White Noise asked if I wanted to make a batch at Shenandoah Brewing Company I decided to join in figuring it'd be a good place to ask some questions. Indeed it was. SBC provides everything you need and takes you through the whole process from deciding on a recipe to bottling.  They must have a few dozen different varieties to choose from. They range from ales to lagers to hefeweizens and they'll gladly work with ya if there's something you'd like to experiment with. We decided on a India Pale Ale (IPA) made primarily with Centennial Hops. I don't have much information about that particular strain of hops other than it hails from the pacific NW and it's popular as well as tasty.  As you can probably infer from our label, we brewed this IPA on Groundhogs Day.  Boy, that hog sure is dramatic.  Took a bit of photoshopping, but I think the labels came together nicely. I Lifted the "Gobbler's Knob" right off a picture of the actual Punxsy Phil sign.

The brewing was pretty straight forward. The only part of the process that was prepared for us was the wort.  Wort contains the sugars that will later be fermented to make the all important alcohol content of the beer.  As I understand it, wort is made by steeping a mixture of ground up malted barley and grain adjuncts. The steeping creates an environment favorable for enzymes to convert starches into sugars. Apparently to make home brewing easier, malted barley extracts can be added to the grain tea mixture in lue of embarking on the malting process yourself. Good to know.

We started off by precisely weighing each stage of hops and gathering them into bowls. We took the bowls over to the kettle where the next hour or so of boiling would take place.  The wort is added to the boiling water first followed by the various stages of hops at predetermined intervals.  Boiling the wort accomplishes a few things.  It sterilizes the mixture, coagulates proteins and stop enzyme action.  Basically kills all the stuff living in the wort while extracting the desired color and flavor. The hops are added in intervals to balance out the taste and aromas.  Resins in the hops are broken down slowly and add bitterness to the taste while the oils from the hops evaporate quickly and add aromas. Adding the hops had to be done slowly because they threatened to boil over if done without care. A little bit of kettle tech came in very handy here. Instead of having a single heating element at the bottom, steam is funneled into jackets surrounding the kettle to add energy more evenly which gives you fine control over the temp of the kettle contents. There was no problem backing off the heat at any point because you can regain your previous temp very quickly. After the boiling is complete, the liquid is filtered and run through a heat exchanger where the temp is lowered to a point that is not hazardous to yeast cultures. We added a packet of yeast and rolled the plastic keg around on the floor for a bit to oxygenate the mixture.  Around 6 weeks later, we came back to bottle up our creation and take a taste test. The yeast gobbling up all the sugar will create a little carbon dioxide but a little more was added to give it that extra carbonated kick.  It was recommended that we store the beer in a dark place for at least two weeks before cracking one open. This gives the beer a chance to settle down and balance out after being carbonated.

Turned out to be a pretty typical IPA. Crisp and hoppy but not overly bitter. It's gonna be nice to drink on a warm spring day. The one major takeaway from this experience is that the world of beer brewing is immense. There are just about a million factors that go into the taste, smell, alcohol content and look of a beer. The hardness of the water, temp of brewing, species of yeast, type of hops, variety of grain adjuncts, process of malting, and a host of other factors all really matter. Kind of intimidating at first glance. Don't think that's gonna stop me though. I'll most likely try to recreate the Knob at home with my own equipment and see how that goes. Can't wait to blog about that.

Monkeying Around

My neighbor throws a pretty mean jungle themed party every year and I like to participate whenever possible.  Which is pretty much every year since this party is not to be missed.  I've wanted to go ape for a couple years now but didn't have the tools til recently. I could have bought or rented but it's kinda of expensive and what would I have learned?

Having a sewing machine is key when putting together a large costume. It made short work of the long seams necessary in what turned out to be a basic jumpsuit made out of fake fur. I got a vintage '70s pattern from ebay for around 3 bucks and the fabric from Jo-Ann Fabrics for less than $30.  Where would my hobbies be without ebay? The picture on the left is a part realization of the initial concept which involved the ape suit and my wife dressing as Jane Goodall.  The trucker hat would have said something like "I'm with Goodall".  We scrapped the Goodall portion but I made the trucker hat anyway. I went with something slightly vulgar for the hat epigram to fit the anticipated party atmosphere.  I borrowed the mask from my friend Otto for the few minutes during the party.  Good thing too, the costume/mask combo got quite hot.  I could never be a real gorilla. 

I learned a few things about following patterns and judging size and fit but I still have a way to go if I want to put together a more form fitting ensemble.  I'll just have to keep on practicing.  It's a good thing I have plenty of time before the next Santa suit bar crawl.  The wheels have already begun turning on that getup.

Collaboration

Making fun little lighting projects is just one of my hobbies.  Interjecting my unsolicited opinion on the design of other people's projects is another.  My neighbors embarked on a basement remodel a while back and, like a moth to a light bulb, I fluttered about living vicariously through their ambitions.  I'm pretty sure doing something similar or anything more than hanging a well framed painting on the wall of my rented townhouse is some sort of lease violation. I said, "those are some nice shelves".  They said, "thanks".  I said, "you know what would look cool".  They said, "do it".  They have obviously read my blog.

The shelves are 16" cubed, built into the wall, made out of sheet rock and painted white.  I wanted to light'em up and I knew just what to do.  The trick was finding a RGB LED worthy of the job.  DealExtreme is a tad sketchy and based out of China but pretty much my only bet for 3W RGB's at anything close to a reasonable price.

The construction of the circuit board was pretty straight forward with only one notable addition.  Along with the 3.3V power supply, LED driver chips (CAT4103), and obligatory PIC micro-controller (PIC18F2510), I used a Lantronix XPORT Ethernet to Serial module to accept commands from any network attached device.  It was agreed that I would leave all the software design up to the neighbors.  After all, they are the professionals.  My board reads in a command packet, writes the LED intensity registers and creates a pulse width modulated (PWM) signal to update the RGB LED drivers.  When I design any board, I like to make it as versatile as possible in the event I decide to add any features after the fact.  There are only 7 shelves but I built the board with 12 drivers just in case.  Two boards can also be stacked to drive a total of 24 RGB LED's as you can see in the picture below.  Turns out we'd need all 24 but I'll tell you more about that later.

So I finished the hardware, installed my custom firmware and performed the least amount of testing it took to convince myself that there was a chance it could work.  My neighbor Mark was designing his visualization software in parallel with only a loose discussion of what the command packet should look like to go by.  The idea was to get together once each part was done and spend way too much time debugging the inevitable problems. That is until it worked right out of the gate.  Sometimes the lighting of a single indicator LED can stir up a bevy of emotions in the average geek... imagine the lighting of an entire bank of shelves.  I'll have to admit, Mark's software is pretty impressive. My favorite part is the connection with iTunes.  While a song is playing, it gathers frequency information on the fly and displays it on the shelves in a variety of ways. Check out the video at the bottom to get a better idea of what I'm talking about.

If working solo, I may have called it a project and moved on.  However, the neighbors had a vision and a suspicion that I wouldn't leave them hanging.  They installed 20 overhead can lights in the drop ceiling and four wall sconces in the theater section.  24 extra LED's huh, yikes!

The hardware wasn't a big deal cause it was pretty much done already.  LED installation and firmware development... Now that was a bit tricky. The room lighting was already wired up for 120Vac so the LED's had to be installed in such a way that proper light diffusion was achieved within the housing and the housing itself wasn't altered in a severe way.  The blue socket protection cap provided as close to a perfect solution as we were going to get. The cap was meant to fit snugly into the existing light socket so I just mounted the LED to that and attached a strain relief on the side. Neat and tidy.

So for the ceiling and walls, that is 24 RGB LED's which makes 72 (24x3) discrete sources of light.  To drive each LED at different intensity levels, I switch them on an off at a set frequency and vary the percent at which each LED is on during a cycle period.  If it's on half the time, it appears to be half as bright as a LED that is continually shining.  For this project I chose a refresh frequency of 60Hz with 32 levels of intensity.  Therefore, I have to update each of the 72 LED's 32 times every 1/60th of a second.  In other words, I have 520 microseconds to update 72 LED's.  With a 16MHz oscillator, the instruction cycle on my micro-controller is 250nS. So, the update period divided by the instruction cycle time divided by the number of LEDs gives me a total of 26 instructions to preform everything needed to decide whether a given LED needs to be on or off.   I ended up needing 22.  Just squeaked it in there after a bunch of tweaking and a little luck. 

The shelves and ceiling have a refresh rate of 30Hz and can generate over 30 thousand colors per pixel.  A pixel is a single shelf or can light in this case.  Not bad for a few bucks and hours of spare time. Best part, Both the shelves and ceiling consume less than 50 Watts when fully lit. And less than 10 on average when in visualization mode.  That's around the power draw of an incandescent night light.  Saving the planet one disco basement at a time.

I'm pretty psyched about this install.   I mean, it's what I'm really passionate about and, if I could toot my own horn for second, I may actually be getting kind of good at it.  What do you think?

Here are more videos for your viewing pleasure.  Thanks Mark.

SCUBA Evan

Thought I'd share an actual adventure with you for a change.  Deb and I went to Sandals Montego Bay for our honeymoon a few months back agreeing to find some much needed relaxation there.  That lasted all of about one day.  I've always been a big fan of snorkeling and decided before the trip that I wanted to try scuba diving while down in the Caribbean.  Deb, always up for an adventure, was in as well.  The only prior knowledge of the different accreditation levels I have before sauntering up to the dive shack was "resort training" and probably something more involved than that.  Apparently you can get learned up to three ascending recreational classifications while at the resort.  They are: resort, supervised, and open water.  They made a pretty good case for taking the open water course and we, after some deliberation, anxiously signed up.  The open water certification allows you to  rent equipment, request air fills, and dive without any higher supervision, provided ya do so with a buddy.  Now, it did cost a little coin and it did involve four certification dives over three days with a decent amount of coursework and studying but afterward we totally agreed it was worth it for a bunch of reasons.  Most notably, our life long certification allows us to dive where ever we want without an instructor and we got to do our dives in 85 degree crystal clear Caribbean water.  Beats a freezing flooded rock quarry in Pennsylvania any day. 

If you're thinking about doing something like this, there are a few things you may want to be aware of before hand.  Our swim test was 400 meters in the pool.  Probably a good idea to warm up first or make sure you didn't imbibe too extravagantly the night before prior to embarking on this non-trivial task.  Moving on to coursework, be prepared to invest a few hours reading and taking practice tests during your down time.  We were given a video with a non-functional dvd player.  The book would have to do.  When it comes to the actually diving, don't psych yourself out.  Breathing while submerged under 40 feet of water is not a natural environment for humans but the equipment is safe and thanks to your redundant regulator and your buddy's redundant regulator, you are never without air.  

Now for the fun stuff.  Diving is truly a unique and exhilarating experience.  You get to witness the beauty of the underwater kingdom firsthand and observe the colorful and interesting creatures within it living and playing in their natural habitat.  I think I'm hooked. 

This card box runs firmware...

And lights up of course.  One minor detail in the vast expanse of wedding preparation is the acquisition of some sort of receptacle to house cards or envelopes that may get lost in the shuffle of larger items on the gift table.  I suggested to my soon to be wife that I could handle the task of building such a thing and she happily accepted knowing full well what the outcome would be.  I appreciate her willingness to support my hobbies and obsessions.  And so it began.  Don't forget to watch the video at the end, not bad for iPhone video huh.

Among the design considerations I mulled over, I felt color scheme and an interactive element took precedence over the rest.  Sure, the box contains a few old tricks but incorporates enough new (to me) tech to satisfy my desire for an original product.  Most of the time my designs are influenced greatly by the available materials and tools at my disposal.  This project was no exception.   How hard is it to find a lightweight and inexpensive yet sturdy cylindrical box big enough to hold approximately 70 large envelopes?  Too hard, I basically had to make my own out of two hat boxes, tape, some brown utility paper and a lot of glue.

Let's start with the new stuff.  Our wedding colors were purple and green so the box had to match the particular shades we selected as close as possible.  Probably could have done it with paint but decided fabric was better for a few reasons.  On the top of that list, Deb got me a sewing machine for my birthday so I was itching to do more than hems and patch jobs with it.  Plus, fabric does a great job of hiding blemishes and rough edges.  Turns out there were plenty from the aforementioned hat box mod.  And the fabric store had plenty of colors and patterns to pick from.  A little too many perhaps, it was hard to decide. 

Since people were going to be interacting with the box by putting cards into it, I thought it would be a good idea to provide some feedback.  Oddly, I've never worked with photointerruptors before but it was obviously the perfect way of sensing something entering the box.  When a card blocks the infrared light between transmitter and receiver, a signal is send to the microcontroller.  I thought it appropriate that the micro respond by flashing some green lights.

The focal point of the card box is of course the etched plexi with our logo on it.  As you can see from the previous posts, we kind of liked it.  I etched the plastic in the same manner as I have in the past but finished it in a different way by bending it to match the contour of the round box.  I think it ties in quite nicely. 

This was a fun project.  I learned a few things in the process and everyone at the wedding seemed to get a kick out of it.  I guess it's my silly way of saying thank you for all the gifts. 

Just Married!

Ok, so this project is a big one.  A happy and healthy marriage for the rest of my life.  Totally doable.
 

Deb and I got married in Virginia Beach over the weekend and I couldn't be more jazzed about it.  And the first thing that I was ever early to happened to be my own wedding... bonus!  Check out the gobo and the lighting.  Nice huh.  Props to Mary and Rhett for the picture.  There were a few missteps along the way but that just added to the charm of the event.  Deb was beautiful, our guests were a blast and Blue Steel Lighting rocked the reception out.  I have a feeling these memories are gonna stick around a while.  Now we're off to Jamaica.  Can't wait to post about that.