Get the latest tech news

The Danglepoise

Gratuitously complicated lighting

That led to the pleasantly zen task of routing all the tracks; quite satisfying, but I’m sure I was told back in the 1990s that this would be a fully-automated activity by now… anyway, after the usual feeling that I’d missed something important, but not being able to find out what it was, I sent the designs to the almost improbably helpful JLCPCB for manufacturing (and partial assembly of the control board). I wasn’t sure how effective this would be, but spent a fun afternoon on it anyway, coming up with a design that subtracted a swept helical tube from the surface of the cylinder to form a nice spiral groove (with appropriate lead-in and lead-out). I spent a bit of time trying to replicate this capability using IntelliJ IDEA (my tool of choice), but it proved to be too much effort for my then-extant levels of motivation - which were fairly low, as I’d hoped to be writing some actual firmware by this point.

Get the Android app