This thread is for anyone working on personal projects to share their progress, and hold themselves somewhat accountable to a group of peers.
Post your project, your progress from last week, and what you hope to accomplish this week.
If you want to be pinged with a reminder asking about your project, let me know, and I'll harass you each week until you cancel the service
Jump in the discussion.
No email address required.
Notes -
On the power side, I'd at least consider 3S LiPo battery pack, running the LEDs from that voltage, and just using one buck converter for ESP32 (which can be a tiny 5 watt one). That's only a nominal "12v", and really a 10ish-12.6 range, so you'll want to double-check the datasheet for your specific LEDs, but it's well within spec for the WS2815s. You can get 3S 18650 chargers cheap (eg here, not endorsed), though premade packs are so widely available (and tend to have much better low-current protection) that it's hard to justify building your own packs unless you need 5+ amp.
While series is generally pretty safe, never use LiPo in parallel until you have a very good familiarity with the technology and necessary safety precautions. Further instruction on that matter not available here.
On the circuit design work, yeah, part control is a Problem. As you get more experience you'll start to collect a bunch of standard parts and design with them around whatever your target is, and only need to order a handful of specialized things, but on the path there you'll end up with literally thousands of bags of stupid little components that are worth fractions of a penny and you'll never use again. And even once you have your 'jellybean' parts together, you'll always need something specific to a given project, or find that your old parts aren't available anymore, yada yada. Breaking projects into modules can help, but then you're juggling them, too.
There are some "MakerSpace Starter Kits" (and a much broader number of order lists) for component-level parts, but as you go from components to prebuilt boards they tend to get a more 'cheap plastic toy rather than tool' problems. There used to be some good lists of common sensor boards for educational uses that I'd cribbed from, but SnapCircuits and Cubelets et all have kinda cut the bottom out from that market; nowadays, you're probably better off just spending a birthday at a Microcenter or on Adafruit.
For 3d printers, yes, for FDM the entry-level ones (eg Ender3s) tend to be glorified junk that will need maintenance within days, if not hours, and owning them is an exercise in modification and repair. This can be a great educational experience, but it's also a lot of ship of thesus for a tool. You can pay a bit more and get a professional- or educator- grade one that can go hundreds of hours without as much work or a lot more and get an industrial-grade one that gets thousands of hours before serious repairs (eg, GenFabCo), but unless you want to Be The 3d Printing Guy, it's hard to justify the cost of either.
For small parts, resin printers are another option. They're still fiddly, because support material is even less of a solved problem, but they don't so much have maintenance schedules so much as they just have parts you replace, and even the absolute cheapo ones (eg Elego) tend to work just as a 'replace screen and bulb every few hundred hours' sorta thing. They don't scale well beyond about six-eight inch size parts, though, and they're very much not things to be used without proper ventilation.
If you're only needing a handful and had little or no interest in 3d printing, seriously consider various fabrication services, or local marker spaces (or some libraries), rather than buying a full 3d printer.
Laser cutters are ... iffy as a value proposition; they're extremely limited in both what they can cut or etch (some woods, acrylic, anodized coatings), and also how (both depth and angle). The big value proposition to a comparable CNC is ease of use and operating costs, but this is a very rough tradeoff. I'm very hesitant to recommend them for any structural component, just because anything capable of cutting deep enough into transparent plastic to make a useful part is going to be ludicrously expensive.
For flexible, light-weight, shaped transparent pieces with little 3d complexity, my go-to has been vacuum-forming. Big ones get surprisingly complicated fast, but for anything under a couple feet square you can get away with stuff you probably have in your house, and the big trouble becomes sourcing the right types of plastic.
I'd also recommend considering Traditional Manufacturing -- just as there's a lot of people 3d printing what could be made with a handsaw in ten seconds, you may well be engineering something that could be sewn together in a good half-hour. If you want something flexible and comfortable for long-term wear, sewing is kinda the way to go. You'll still want some boxes for the batteries and protoboards to provide impact resistance, but it'll give a lot more space to consider multiple small project boxes or such, and those are a lot easier to source.
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