Kitchen bench

We bought a nice, loungy corner bench for our kitchen about 6 years ago from Möbelum. Very solid construction, all solid beech. Sadly, the faux leather coat startet to disintegrate a few month ago.


Not ready to buy a new one, and in the certainty that a professional job would cost more than the bench, we bought the material to make the new coving ourselves.

The material we bought is a brown course weaved mix out of linen and polyester, coated with Teflon for added dirty resistance. We bought about 10 square meters.

My father has some experience with furniture coatings and together we got the work done, stretched over 3 evenings and mornings (maybe 8 hours in total).

The result is better as one could expect, seen that neither of us ever did such a big job. We messed up the top connection between the short and the long piece (folded each side the other way round), buts thats mostly it.

The really tricky part was the corner and I think we did that admirably! :-D

More space

After thinking about it for three years, we finally got around to install a wall mounted shelf in the living room. It's a Vitsœ 606 and I love how configurable and easy to install it is.

I configured it myself, but the interior designer at the Vitsœ shop had lot of helpful suggestions. I suggest to everyone not to take their offer to set up the shelf for you, because you will miss out on the joy of experiencing good design firsthand. It was really fun building this.

Electrified living room table

We were lacking a living room table for some time now and stumbled upon a sale of 'Vika Veine' tables in our local IKEA. It's designed to be a small folding desk and does that job quite nicely. It even has a hole for running cables inside.

We didn't like the legs IKEA offered for it and bought heavy 40cm black ones at a hardware store. They are kinda cool as they come in different length but all have the same screw-on base. So we can just change the legs and use it as an extension for our kitchen table.

Anyway, I wanted to store all my game controllers and remotes inside. I really wanted to charge them in it as well. I could use the useful hole in the bottom of the plate to run a extension inside whenever I need it, but that would be awkward and boring. So I did what everyone would do - ripping an old vacuum cleaner apart!

The automatic cable reel I found in its guts is perfect for putting in a corner in the table. It's the kind that has a pushable brake to prevent reeling the cable in (as opposed to the kind where you pull a little bit to loosen it). I fastened a short lanyard on it and modified a 3-outlet adapter to work as a small power strip. Sadly I messed up and put it to close to the hydraulics. Oh well...

The table has enough space for all my controllers and other related stuff. I can charge everything inside and when done, just pull on the lanyard and reel the power cord back inside and out of the way. Very cool result for 50€ in parts and an old vacuum. =)

2x PS3, 3x X360,  2x OUYA, 2x Wii

 More pics here.

Will 'art' for cash

I don't like works of art that were made for the sole purpose of making money. I think true art always comes from the top end of Maslow's hierarchy of needs and never the bottom. Self preservation (aka making money) can be a later side effect but should never be the initial driver to create.

This point of view can be easily disputed as it disregards a lot of pieces that are getting displayed in fancy national or private art galleries as merely high quality handicraft. But I am an idealist in such things and doesn't let reality get in the way of my opinions. Needless to say I had quite some angry discussions with friends ("So you say Michelangelos 'The Last Judgment' in the Sistine Chapel is not art? omgwtf?!!"). 

Thinking about this again as I was looking at a few Banksy stencils I hadn't seen before, I had the idea to this: A piece of Art, created for the sole purpose of creating money. Literally!

Mounted on a rosewood panel, inside the baroque gold-plated frame (thanks Bele!) is a small computer and four specialised computing units producing Bitcoins, the most known and used cryptocurrency. The small display shows the current rate of calculation and the exchange rate of Bitcoins to Euros. I took special care to mount the hardware and wires in a pleasing, clean way and removed all casings to show of the technology. 

The hardware is able to calculate ~1.3GH/s. At the current exchange rate that amounts to around one Euro a day (simplified, bitcoins are complex business). Not quite in the same range as Jeff Koons but at least I don't need to fuss around to find a buyer. 

My feelings for the piece are therefore split (as intended). I have all the pure joy of creativity, of bringing an idea to life and expressing an emotion. The other feeling is greed, being akin to the corrupt artist, thinking about the wealth it will bring me. 

As a project it was awesome: Idea to finished product in less than a week. That's how I like it. =)

Technobabble

I used ASICminers for the rig and they are really something. The system has the same hashing performance as a PC with four high end GPUs, but at under 300€ project cost and under 10W of power it beats the traditional rig hands down on cost. And noise (none). And size.

The ASICminers radiate quite a bit of heat, thats why the red heatsinks are still in place.

The Raspberry only coordinates the data flow to the miners and (idles most of the time) uses most of its power to run bitcoind to help the bitcoin network and verify transactions for everyone.
Every 60 second it updates the display with current hash values and highest/lowers trade values from the biggest Bitcoin exchange Mt.Gox.

Hardware: 

- Raspberry Pi Model B

- 4x ASICminer Block Eruptor 

- CSL wireless usb stick

- class 10 sd-card

- powered usb hub (LogiLink)

- 16x2 hd44780 display 

- button
- 5V, 3A power supply 

Software: 

- Raspbian Linux

- cgminer 3.1.1
- bitcoind (to help the network)

- python script to handle the display and shutdown button, mostly taken and adapted from here


<update - 09/08/2013>
I modified the python script to switch the lower line between the Bitcoin exchange rates and the current balance of the target Bitcoin wallet every 60 seconds. I will publish the modified script on Github, I just need to clean it up a bit...


<update - 09/11/2013>
The cheap power supply melted in the wall socket. It was specified for 3A but could not handle that full time. Well, I've got my refund from Amazon and bought a Phihong PSA15A-050P which is build like a tank. The display has now a lot more contrast, too...

Useful links

http://learn.adafruit.com/piminer-raspberry-pi-bitcoin-miner/initial-setup-and-assembly

http://www.daveconroy.com/beginners-guide-to-turn-your-raspberry-pi-into-an-affordable-bitcoin-mining-rig/

http://coincafe.net/2013/07/06/how-to-run-bitcoin-qt-on-the-raspberry-pi/

Pictures in large 

Lightcircle

I found another self made lamp in the flat! Again one that produces no usable light. ;-)

As we went to the big garden center to buy all the eucalyptus seed pods for this monster, I ran in this, a big 1 meter diameter iron circle with a simplified flower motiv. After taking it home without really knowing what to do with it, I got my hands on a few high quality Osram SMD LEDs.

After a few hours work, I've rigged all the LEDs to the circle using the frame as ground. Only one wire is necessary to every LED, the wiring is nearly invisible.

The light has a strange opaque quality. It looks a bit like frosted glas is right under the frame. Sadly in the last years the lamp lost one of its 'leafs' (upper right) which I ascribe to damaged wiring.

Kitchen ball lamp

I'm didn't realize how many lamps I made!

We wanted a cool looking lamp for our biggish kitchen and decided to build it ourself.

After getting inspiration in a big florist store, we bought a 40cm wooden ball made out of willow twigs and 5kg eucalyptus seed pods, found a strong brass chain in my fathers basement and got to work.

Thats the result shortly after hanging it up. The cables got sorted out as well. The photos show it with a 100W lightbulb which produced really awesome pattern everywhere but was sadly  completely unusable as a light source.

I installed a round fluorescent light instead, which produces enough light to light up the table below and does not throw shadows everywhere.

I think there is nothing in this flat (except maybe my girlfriend) thats more often photographed then this lamp.

I made the right one with my analog camera (Olympus OM-4 TI with 50mm 1.8).

A few more pictures and bigger resolutions...

Bathroom lighting

Our old mirrored bathroom cabinet had two halogen spot lights on top which where failing.
I love the light temperature halogen lights produce, but wanted to replace these lamps with something more progressive.

I took a 500x10x10 mm aluminium U profile and glued a cheap 12V white LED strip into it. Then I took two of these and used one of the old halogen mountings to fasten them to the cabinet. Done. =)

The light is a really blue white, and exactly the opposite I normally like. I think everything looks like a car commercial in this light. Maybe I replace it if I find something more my color.


Nevertheless, I like that there are no shadows anymore (good for shaving) and it really looks cool. =)

Material cost: 15€

35mm spiral lamp

I just finished a new lamp made out of a single long unbroken 35mm film strip.

After reading about something similar on Hackaday IkeaHackers, I went on eBay to get some old film. This (a trailer of Zathura for 5€) arrived this weekend and I got strait to work.

I used the transportation holes to sew the film strips to each other with fishing line. This was really slow work, took me over 6 hours to get it up to a height of 70 cm with an diameter of 22 cm.  I used an old Ikea Storm lamp that I had in the attic as the frame. The paper shade was torn apart and the first and the bottom two rings were reused as bottom and parts of the top.

The pictures were made with a 60W 'retro-style' lightbulb inside that produces quite dim and yellow light. The bulb has a long glow filament which produces these strange zigzag patterns on the wall. With a smaller, brighter light source or some well placed leds the pictures on the film could appear on the wall I think.

Its not really useable as a light source now. But thats ok, this thing is not meant to produce anything else then mood light after all.

I'm really happy with the result, I think it looks awesome!

I planned to make another, much bigger one but the sewing really takes ages. Maybe if I find a faster way to connect the strips I have a go again...

Oh and: Pictures are jpegs strait from the camera, no tampering with the colors, this is really what it looks. =)

Update: More pics!

Bathroom makeover

We have a very small bathroom (barely 4,5 square meters) and were sick of looking at the old plastic-and-glass thing that held our towels. So we went out to Ikea to get some ideas.

First we introduced a new carpet matching the tiling. Than we looked for a replacement for the ugly glass rack. The space is really tight and has the connectors for a washing machine in the middle, we needed some way around that.

More here:

http://www.ikeahackers.net/2011/03/bathroom-makeover.html