Jackie Pease Zone

Notes - 3D Printing Tools Part 2

Sat, 21 Feb 2026 15:00:00 +0000

More on 3D printing tools for other tasks - this time for cording/ropemaking.

Why did I need to do this?

Late last year I put in a proposal for a data art project. I had recently run a Japanese braiding / Kumihimo workshop with Jake T, another member of the DoES Liverpool community, and I thought this could be a good way to show data — for example by including horizontal bars in the braids, like bar charts. We’d already used 3D printing and laser cutting to produce Kumihimo disks.

However, once the project started, one of the organisers told me about a system of knots and cords, called Quipu, used for record keeping by various South American cultures, including the Inca empire. This seemed made for the job, so I moved to using that.

My first step was to 3D print a small maquette, and to attach twisted cords, each made up of 2 colours — one representing place, and one the type of data collected.

I set to work twisting cotton yarn by hand (see “Making the Primary Cord” in the Lafavre guide), quickly realising that this wasn’t going to be a practical method for the project — either for me or the 10 - 11 year olds who would be creating the final cords with data.

There are actually quite a lot of options around, including hair braiders, embroidery and jewellery corders, and even using an electric mixer.

I knew there would be 3D printed versions and soon found this 4 hook drill attachment by @dreamingrobots, with a useful how-to video, on Printables. I printed it, and put it together with the addition of some cheap cup hooks from the local hardware store, and grease to reduce friction.

I used some of these suckers, which a member of the DoES Liverpool community had donated a while ago, to hold the other end of the yarn.

It worked excellently and produced a small number of really nice cords, before jamming and never working again.

Hint: don’t use PLA for fastish moving parts as it has a low melting point.

I printed another attachment, this time using PETG and a remix of the original files with added chamfers “to make them work better”.

and tried it out on various materials for potential use in my project:

This is a quipu in corded crochet cotton, reading “2026” (if you can’t wait until my next post, there are some simple instructions on creating Quipus on the Lafavre website):

Cording with thick strips of stretch polyester jersey (donated by Sanna King of Circular Arts Network LCR) created lovely tactile and colourful pieces):

This one was with wool:

Following this experimentation, I thought it might be safer to have hand wound cord winders when dealing with a large group of school children, and printed several of these - also a remix of the Dreaming Robots version.

I tested them on two 10 year olds who came along to a DoES Liverpool Maker Day, improvising a Rope Walk between 2 desks; neither took too long to create a cord.

The suckers did come unstuck, more than I’d noticed when I was using them, so I screwed them on to pieces of wood and ordered some plastic clamps to attach them to desks:

I had intended using unwanted yarn for the event, but it was difficult to get the quantity or colours that I wanted; I ended up ordering t shirt yarn, which is made from pre-consumer waste in the garment industry. It did vary in thickness which made some of the cords uneven and thicker than I’d wanted. If I was going to use it again I would try to get all of it in the same thickness, or cut it so that it was.

On the event day, creating the cords (and then using them as improvised skipping ropes) was the part that the schoolkids liked best. Fortunately I had printed 6 hand winders - all but one of them broke as I’d been unable to get the hex shafts to fit if printed horizontally and ended up printing them standing up, meaning they were weaker than they should have been.

The Saturday was Family Day, and with several excellent Liverpool University student volunteers to provide closer supervision, we were able to get a steady stream of children making thick skipping ropes using the electric drill attachment. Here’s Mark and Warren from DoES Liverpool, with their respective daughters and colourful t shirt yarn ropes:

What’s next?

Ropemaking seems like a really enjoyable activity for all ages; I’m hoping to run more workshops on it (and possibly Quipu too!).

I’d like to research what unwanted yarn is available and can’t be used for things like clothing e.g. carpet wool, which is rough and, prior to cording, not very strong.

I’d like to try out other materials such as plastic strips (I know you can hand twine plastic bags into “Plarn” but this has always seemed a bit labour intensive) and torn strips from unwanted fabrics like wornout sheets.

Mike G was able to print hex shafts horizontally and then sand them to fit - I’ll carry on using the current ones for the moment, if they’re stronger, but aim to try more variations e.g. This drill attachment version which uses metal bearings and an allen key instead of a drill bit.

Notes - 3D Printing Tools Part 1

Fri, 20 Feb 2026 16:00:00 +0000

I’ve found myself doing a lot of 3D printing lately, partly due to the 3D printer course I’m currently taking, but mostly to the fast and reliable Bambu A1 mini 3D printer that Chris Thompson bought for the space on Black Friday last year - thanks Chris!

Some of what I’ve been printing has been parts for finished pieces, but I’ve also been experimenting with 3D printed tools, particularly for linoprinting and cord making. This post focuses on linoprinting - I’ll share more about the cord-making experiments in Part 2.

I started by looking for a brayer holder, and found this one by Pete Proedoehl. The overall idea was great, but the proportions and weight weren’t quite right for the brayers I wanted to store, so I adapted the design in Onshape. I’m using this at the moment and will probably tweak it a bit further once I’ve used it for a while.

While browsing, I also came across these registration pins from the same designer. Registration pins are typically used to ensure that different colour layers in a multicolour print - whether reduction or multiblock - align accurately.

Metal registration pins similar to this are fairly expensive, so it felt like a perfect opportunity to see how well 3D-printed versions would perform.

I laser cut some frames similar to the ones I normally use and taped the printed registration pins to them to create a quick test setup.

Having now found two useful 3D print designs by Pete Proedoehl, I took a look at his blog, which goes all the way back to 1997 and covers a wide range of maker projects, including both 2D and 3D printing. There’s a post about the registration pins here, along with two posts about using a 3D printer to produce relief-style plates:

Using a 3D printer in this way really appealed to me - especially as a quick method for testing the registration pins in practice.

As it was just before Xmas, I quickly created an SVG file for a simple design that could potentially be printed onto a bauble. I printed plates for three layers, used the ironing function in Bambu Studio to smooth the top surfaces, and lightly sanded them afterwards to improve the finish.

Unfortunately, I’d misaligned one of the plates during preparation, so the layers didn’t line up properly - even with the registration pins. Here’s one of the better attempts, aligned by eye as carefully as I could manage:

Not bad, considering I was using some fairly random inks from Søstrene Grene and the printing cupboard at DoES Liverpool - but not really a good test.

I then took a trip into town and bought some Calligo Safe Wash inks from Vicki at Cass Art in what I hoped were suitably festive colours: Light Orange, Rubin Red, and Phthalo Green. The project then went on hold while I looked after Xmas guests and worked on a paid project (more on that in a separate post).

Fast forward to mid February, and I was finally able to complete a proper test. The Calligo inks were excellent - strong, vibrant colours and beautifully smooth to roll out. They did take slightly longer to dry and were a bit more involved to clean up than the water-based inks I usually use, but the print quality made it worthwhile.

I printed each layer one at a time, leaving roughly two days between layers to allow them to dry. To apply pressure, I used the heatpress at DoES Liverpool, an improvised solution but one which gives more consistent results than hand burnishing.

I also experimented with printing onto T-shirt material - following the instructions on the Cranfield website. I’m definitely planning to explore this further.

Even with the registration pins, some prints were still slightly misaligned. Next time, I’ll add an arrow to the plates to make sure they’re always oriented the same way up. I may also take advantage of the 3D printing process to hold the plates in place in the same way as the paper.

This was my best result, printed on thin card:

And here’s a misaligned print on rice paper, where the textured surface prevented the ink from reaching all the lower areas:

The final (outline) layer looks slightly uneven, probably due to minor surface inconsistencies in the 3D print, even after ironing and sanding. In this case I actually like the effect - it has a slightly medieval, woodcut quality - but I’ll experiment further to see how much I can refine the finish.

Overall, this has been a really fun set of experiments. 3D printing has been around for a long time and people have tried and shared a lot of ideas and print files, which are easy to adapt to your own needs.

I’m looking forward to having another go soon - perhaps with a more complex design, or a simple repeat pattern for a T-shirt.

Notes - Investigations into Sashiko and Kolams

Mon, 02 Dec 2024 16:00:00 +0000

While looking into ideas for a workshop, I returned to some Kugurizashi-ish samples I’d created a while ago (Kugurizashi is a form of Sashiko where designs are created by needle weaving thread through rows of running stitch). This has led down a bit of a rabbit hole of looking at other forms of surface-woven embroidery, specifically Indiam Kolams, and I think I’ve learnt enough stuff that it’s worth making a list of ideas and links for the benefit of future me and perhaps others too.

I think my interest in all this started during lockdown, when I was trying out some of the ideas in US teacher Annie Perkins’ #MathArtChallenge which is full of interesting and accessible ideas for Math Art. After looking at these Hitomezashi grids, I thought this could be a way of including sun-reflecting surfaces in clothing and put together this clutch bag with other members of Plastic Tactics (a CIC I’m involved in which looks at fun ways of recycling plastics).

This project was created from bubble wrap and carrier bags, heat pressed together and laser cut with a grid of holes. Monster Munch packets were sliced into thin sections and twisted to form a yarn which could be sewn in and out of the holes to form a Hitomezashi pattern (one thing we found out was that sewing Monster Munch yarn through small holes hurts your hands, so we only managed to sew it in one direction in the end).

I also had a go at hand-sewn Sashiko at a relaxing WI class run by Liz Taylor, and, looking for a faster result, machine embroidering Sashiko-style patterns onto heat pressed bubble wrap using the Sashiko Inkscape extension, which allows you to choose from a range of traditional Sashiko stitches.

I loved this result, but I felt other users weren’t sure about using a shared embroidery machine with plastic - it’s a great way to get small scale Sashiko-style patterns for fabric clutch bags though.

Next, and fairly accidental step forward - DoES Liverpool did a Textiles Takeover at Tate Liverpool X RIBA North gallery earlier this year, where one of the activities was Liz’s Sashiko. There was a concern that small children would want to take part, and not be able to use sharp needles, so I laser cut some square grids from decorative card, that could be used with blunt needles. No small children took part, and the grids didn’t get used! After the event, I sewed some of them with Kuguruzashi-style stitching.

I used the coloured examples on birthday cards. The grey one is sewn using conductive thread and works well as a capacative touch sensor. Stitching on card doesn’t give the pillowed effect you get on fabric, but running your fingers over the raised stitches is a good tactile feeling. Having given these examples away I had to make some more for this sample accordian book that I made for a potential workshop next year.

All this Sashiko-related experimentation then led me on to Indian Kolams, which researchers Anu Reddy and Alex McLean had looked at sewing on to Sashiko-style grids in the same ways as Kuguruzashi. I feel I’ve just got started on this topic, but here’s some examples I’ve created so far.

This is a simple Kolam woven into a Hitomezashi Sashiko grid. Kolams normally have rounded edges, but this comes out very blocky due to the grid.

Here I used a cheap LED strip (not quite long enough) on a plastic mesh, with cable ties to fix the Kolam in position. The result looks less blocky due to the LED strip being less flexible than the yarn in the previous example. I’d like to try this with LED noodles with light all round, although the dark patches are interesting.

Anu and Alex give instructions for producing a machine-embroidered grid on this page. Once I eventually read them I was able to produce the above grid and copied one of their examples to weave a Kolam into it. The result is very pretty and has lots of decorative potential.

I’m working on a completely different project this week but looking forward to getting back to some more of this, possibly including pen plots.

Week Notes - Comet Workshop

Mon, 03 Apr 2023 15:00:00 +0000

It’s been a while since I wrote any weeknotes, and although I’m just going to talk about one project - the comet workshop I did for Ryan and Andy at Wirral-based Convenience Gallery - it does cover a bit more than a week.

I applied to Convenience Gallery in February and they asked if I’d like to get involved with their CRAFTBAR programme. The programme aims to create “space to explore, experiment, play and learn about sustainable and circular making processes” which is definitely an area I’m interested in. After an initial meetup at Pink Sands Gallery in Birkenhead on 21st February, along with other CRAFTBAR participants, I agreed to create a collaborative sculptural build workshop using some of the techniques I’d learnt with Plastic Tactics for the programme launch at Pilgrim Street Arts Centre on 24th March.

I liked the idea of showing the workshop attendees how to make new material by ironing together pieces of waste soft plastic like carrier bags, something we do a lot at Plastic Tactics - once learnt it’s something that’s easy to repeat at home to make useful items like credit card holders and notebook covers. Also for Plastic Tactics, I’d begun looking into weaving with strips made from PET bottles, and thinking about how we could use some large pieces of PVC sheet left over from a shop renovation which had been kindly brought in to DoES Liverpool by Lauren from Little Chestnut Gifts. I also wanted to use addressable LEDs. A while ago Julian had brought a large quantity of addressable LED strips into DoES Liverpool. They’d been salvaged by someone at the Astral Ship in Wales from a temporary project in London. People often buy all new electronics for projects and it feels good to be able to reuse them - they’re also fairly expensive and it’s a privilege to be able to use so many in a project like this (I’ll do my best to make sure they get used again once this piece of work reaches the end of its life).

After considering jellyfish and squid as forms, I decided on a comet, with a woven PVC frame and addressable LEDs on the streamers and inside the frame, with the workshop attendees making decorative soft plastic panels to diffuse the light.

I used historical comets as inspiration, including the fiery scaffolding in the Bayeux Tapestry (photo public domain from Wikipedia):

and those in the Comet Book.

Finding out about weaving with strips was more difficult than I expected. I knew people did it, but didn’t have a good way to describe what I wanted to do to Internet search engines. So I started by cutting paper strips and experimenting. Firstly bidirectional weaving:

I love the 3d curve that this formed, just by gathering together the strips at each side. Tridirectional weaving turned out to be less intuitive, but You Tube helped e.g. this on weaving with pallet bands. The output is more constrained and doesn’t curve as much, but would make a good canopy for a jellyfish:

I found this nice weaving blog by Kim Winter, which led me to this 10 strip woven ball on Instructables - exactly the sort of thing I was looking for. Here’s one I made from polypropylene strips (using some of the polypropylene left over from the DoES Liverpool visor project):

I needed more help to cut the large PVC sheets into strips for a larger sphere - it was a quiet Sunday at DoES Liverpool, but luckily Will was there and willing to get involved. We made this temporary jig for the bandsaw:

Once I had the strips I’d say it took me around 2.5 hours to put them together:

This came out well, but didn’t have the same rigidity as the smaller shape which was constrained by the width of the strips, and it deformed when lying on a desk or suspended from its top. As it happens, Julian was working on a similar problem (he says) involvnng wrapping carbon fibre around cylinders, and was able to give me the correct ratios to drill holes at the crossing points of the bands:

Using these ratios I quickly laser cut some strips and made this polypropylene sphere, using brass paper fasteners to hold it together. It was much easier as the paper fasteners constrained the strips, building in the curve of the sphere - I’m hoping that this might form the basis of a future lampshade making workshop. Around this stage I also found out what this shape was called - it’s a rectified truncated icosahedron and in this variant the hexagons are triambi, which only have triangular symmetry. Useful to know as I’d been assuming they were regular hexagons and had just come out wrong!:

Mike brought in his table saw and we cut more strips out of this. The results weren’t quite as smooth as with the bandsaw, but it did have the advantage of portability and could be set up in a separate room, making cleaning afterwards easier (I’m relying very much on Veolia to burn the microplastics that were produced, so they don’t end up in landfill or in the sea …):

Mike and I disassembled the original PVC ball, drilled holes and put it back together again using M3 nuts and bolts, then I attached more strips of PVC as streamers. The comet was now ready for lights and diffusing plastic. Sanna came in and tried out some flame effects using the ironing technique with soft plastics, also coming up with a way to attach LED strips to the inside of the comet using some clear plastic that Mike and I had cut into strips:

To control the lights I decided to use the My Babys Got LED board, designed and assembled by Adrian at DoES Liverpool. It fits in well with the reuse ethos of this project as it’s been specially made to work with an old PC power supply. I had one board already that I normally use to power these flowers. Because there are a lot of LEDs in the comet, I ended up buying another one, and making a case for it from a piece of scrap wood I found in the space. Uma and Mike came in during the week and attached the LEDs to the comet and streamers:

Fortunately Andy from Convenience Gallery had a van as the comet has a diameter of approx. 77cm and length of approx. 2m 80cm (in any case my car was full of irons and soft plastic which Arthur had brought in from the Plastic Tactics workshop in Oldham place).

With the structure completed I laser cut some templates for the surface shapes, and we were off to Pilgrim Street Arts Centre in Birkenhead, where I was ably assisted by Sanna, Uma and Anne-Marie:

It was good to see that people enjoyed making panels and flames, learning about the shapes, and attaching them to the comet. They put so much originality into their work too - all the panels and flames are different:

All in all we had great time at the event and I was really pleased with the way the comet workshop went. Andy and Ryan did an excellent job of organising and I only wished I’d had time to join in Alison Bailey Smith’s jewellery workshop.

Thanks to everyone who got helped and those who participated in the event! And obviously I wouldn’t have done something like this without all the enthusiasm and expertise of the DoeS Liverpool community.

There are still several events in Convenience Gallery’s CRAFTBAR series of sustainable workshops - I recommend going if you get the chance.

What Next?

Well it would be excellent to have the comet completed and on display at Wirral Makefest and/or Liverpool Makefest. I hope that’s possible:

Wow @jackie_pease @ConvenienceGall this is a beauty! No doubt will do the #Makefest rounds this year! I know you said a comet but I obviously missed this beauty at our last meeting! 😍😍😍 https://t.co/qdqySl0W7d
— Caroline Keep (@Ka81) March 25, 2023

A bit of remedial work needs to be done on the LEDs as some of them didn’t work on the night (that might be the downside of rescued lights, but it didn’t really matter as there were so many), and some of the panels could do with being stuck down again. So far only about half of the panels and flames have been made, and I’m wondering if I should arrange another soft plastics workshop so that more people can take part - maybe at a Plastic Playgroup session.`

I’m hoping that I can keep the comet at DoES Liverpool for a bit, as I think it’ll make a good learning tool for playing with lots of addressable LEDs on a 3D shape and I think other people might want to do that too - it is quite big though …

Week Notes - My Bike's Got LED (Of Course)

Mon, 07 Nov 2022 20:00:00 +0000

If you know me, you might be aware that I’m quite keen on addressable LEDs, so, while I already had a light up backpack for cycling (a prototype for Peloton Liverpool’s Disco breastplates), I couldn’t resist buying a MCQN Ltd My Bike’s Got LED board after watching the flurry of activity here at DoES Liverpool as Adrian and Chris got the first batch ready - they were launching with Peloton Liverpool Joyride cyclists taking part in Katumba Drumming’s Halloween event.

It was a great night (more detail in Chris’s post here). I didn’t quite get my lights ready in time, but a few cable ties the next morning was all it took to finish the job:

How my bike might have looked at yesterday's excellent @KatumbaBloco #halloweenparade @PelotonLiv #joyride if I'd fitted my @MCQN_Ltd #mybikesgotled board in time.
Everyone else's looked fantastic though and mine is now ready for future trips.#weeknotes pic.twitter.com/6bPZrMqE2M
— Jackie Pease (@jackie_pease) October 30, 2022

The boards use open source WLED software, which makes it easy to control a variety of addressable LEDs (WS2812 in this case) via wifi using a phone app or your computer. At it’s simplest you can just set the number of lights, choose an effect, apply colour and speed settings and you’re ready to go. In this case, I had 2 rows of LEDs, divided into 3 parts each, so it made sense to put a little bit more work in and define segments.

This is just a case of telling WLED the starting and ending position of each segment - some of the LEDs on my bike are hidden under black heatshrink so I haven’t included them in the segments. Depending on the layout you can reverse the order that a segment lights up in, or even set it as a mirror of the previous segment:

I couldn’t easily use the mirror option as my layout wasn’t symmetrical:

That might be something to consider next time, although the Reverse Direction option has worked well.

It’s important to save all your settings, including segments, in presets, otherwise you’ll lose them when you switch the board off, and it isn’t difficult to backup your settings to JSON files either. From your browser, just type in the following 2 commands:

[WLED-IP]/edit?download=cfg.json
[WLED-IP]/edit?download=presets.json

where [WLED-IP] is the IP address of your board.

The good thing about WLED is that it’s so easy to get started, although there’s a lot more you can do if you want. I’m looking forward to some sound reactive stuff, as the group cycle rides organised by Peloton Liverpool nearly always have music; it would be good to be able to sync effects across the whole group too. I think Adrian and Chris have some of this planned for their v2 board.

Having the board makes things easy too - you could buy a dev board and source all the components yourself, but it’s good to be able to move straight on to the fun bit and know it’ll work.

Week Notes - You Win or You Learn

Wed, 26 Oct 2022 15:00:00 +0000

A quote from Nelson Mandela apparently. It’s been in my head recently as I spent several days working on an LED project I shouldn’t have agreed to do with too little time, too little experience with the tools I eventually had to use, and without ever getting to see the physical installation. It feels like I’ve learnt a lot though and I’m inspired to learn more. So here’s a few rough notes, so I don’t forget, and in case there’s anything useful to other people.

Sensors

Originally there was a plan to use a sensor to control the speed that the lights moved and their brightness. I experimented with several different inputs:

Potentiometer

I used this code from Sensing the City to make a light move along a strip of LEDs (it looks even better if it’s moving around a disk!). Sensing the City is a great site, with loads of other good ideas.

Capacitive Touch Sensor

I already had an Adafruit CAP1188 breakout, recommended to me by Chris E at the Friday night cycling group I go to. It was easy to set up following the instructions on the Adafruit site and worked well, although I didn’t go further than blinking the onboard lights on this occasion. It seems worth putting in a bit more time and investigating some of its other features.

Although I didn’t get to use the Azoteq pressure sensor originally suggested for the project, I did see an Arduino sketch that used it. It looks as though there’s more to set up, but apparently it is very reliable, so might be worth further investigation too.

Pressure Sensors

We’ve used home made pressure sensors a lot at DoES Liverpool, mainly because we’ve found them a bit more predictable than capacitive touch.

I refamiliarised myself with these foam/wire/Velostat sensors that we made for Laura Pullig / Lanacaster Univerity’s What Does Health Look Like? project:

Here’s @SoleRebelTapUK testing out pressure sensors @DoESLiverpool for ‘What Does Health look like’ with @davidaellis & @GAMONetwork pic.twitter.com/8pqFMPdOW1
— laura pullig (@Laura_pullig) February 9, 2019

They work well and can use similar code to the potentiometer.

Along with Chris T, I also refurbished one of these much larger, but functionally similar, pressure sensors from MCQN Ltd’s Play the Tree/Geometric Lights. There are another 3 of these at DoES Liverpool and we’re now thinking of new uses for them:

Mapping Irregular LED Layouts

The project involved a fairly large number of pixels, arranged irregularly. In the end some of the pixels weren’t added until the day before the project shipped, so they had to be laid out physically in the order they would light up. I did try out several tools that might help me do pixel mapping in future though:

xLights Generate Custom Model

I’ve tried this before, and I didn’t have any more luck this time. The consensus seems to be that you need a decent camera, so I think it’s going to be worth borrowing one, watching a bunch of YouTubes, and trying again. On the other hand, I did find out that you can now control WLED via wifi from xLights on your laptop, so all good.

This semi-automatic pixel mapper might also be worth investigating.

LED-Mapper by Jason Coon

This is great - you do have to use Google Sheets to create a layout first, but it then allows you “to generate and visualize maps for irregular and/or gapped LED layouts, for use with FastLED, Pixelblaze and other libraries” and “also generates coordinate maps for radius and angle.”

I used both a disk of regularly spaced rings (wired as a spiral) and an irregular spiral made from WS2811 Xmas tree style pixels, taped onto Correx. Both were good although obviously the more closely-packed disk shows the pattern much better. This Tweet shows the regular disk running Jason Coon’s example sketch:

Disappointingly I haven't got #xlights Generate Custom Model to work yet, so have been using laser cut PP grids, then switching on LEDs sequentially, in order to get them into the spreadsheet to start off with...#weeknotes pic.twitter.com/sp6eTwJbZE
— Jackie Pease (@jackie_pease) October 2, 2022

I used laser-cut polypropylene grids to work out the coordinates of the pixels, but Jason replied to the Tweet recommending this, which should be easier and more accurate.

I put together a quick push button circuit on the Arduino to help me identify the next pixel in line in the irregular spiral, and I can see that being useful again. The sketch is here.

Raspberry Pi as localhost with several ESP32s running WLED (or PicoWs?)

Another thing I didn’t get very far with before it became apparent that we weren’t going to use it, but I found some easy to follow instructions here and here. I’d like to take this further.

There are some alternatives to mqtt that might be worth looking at too - e.g. this YouTube shows how to make a lightshow with WLED, FPP, xLights and DDP data.

Arduino Mega 2560

This was what I finally wrote the sketch on, as there was one on site and I had one here. Memory was a bit of an issue, and because I didn’t get to see the final output, I wasn’t able to easily make amendments when things didn’t work as the users wanted (another lesson learned is that it might have helped to demonstrate the kind of effects that can be created at the start, and with what density of pixels).

Thanks to Adrian and Chris T for advice on C++ (the current spaghetti is my responsibility).

So I still want to do more LED projects…

Week Notes - All The Pens

Sun, 01 May 2022 15:00:00 +0000

Having done some maintenance on the pen plotter last month, I’ve mainly been experimenting with different pens and papers to see what effects they produce. I am aiming to use more refillable pens, but having been asked to produce a flower picture in the style of one of my earlier pen plots, it’s been more Sharpies, fineliners and gel pens recently.

I forgot to take photos of that picture before handing it over, unfortunately - one issue was that the sky in the background was quite light and came out uncoloured in the plot, which was a strong contrast to areas which were heavily filled with Sharpie and Uniball Eye fineliner.

I also had problems knowing how long pens would last, particularly Sharpies, and trying to guess where to restart the gcode from once one had run out was leading to doubled lines and missed areas. As a test, I plotted this picture (approx. A5) repeatedly until the red pen ran out, so now I know it’ll do about 2.5 of those (I like the version with less red ink best though). These also include a bit of experimenting with Pentel Hybrid Dual Metallic Gel Pens. My main conclusion is that although pretty, you need to go over the lines twice to get a good result and that uses nearly a whole pen for this size, so a bit expensive for this application.

I plotted the original picture on Pergamino paper, and I think the texture of the paper and the fact that Sharpie ink doesn’t soak into it as much makes this more successful.

It’s all been DrawingBotV3 and photos this month - the next thing I did was to produce a card for a friends new baby, Laelia. As I discovered from Wiki, a Laelia is a type of orchid, so I downloaded this photo of a Laelia Rubescens from Wiki commons and processed it with DrawingBotV3 Sobel Edges option. Some of my preprocessing decisions I regretted a bit afterwards, like dialling up the saturation to get rid of the lovely white in the flower because I was worried about having uncoloured areas in the final plot - maybe it would have worked ok like that.

Original photo by https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/user:Orchi:

This was the result, plotted on Fabriano Disegno 4 paper, using Sharpies and a 0.1mm Unipin fineliner:

I then tried the same gcode with a Unipin plus some Marabou Creabox watercolour pens from Lidl. I was expecting a nice line and wash effect - the Unipin has “Water and Fade Proof” printed on the barrel, and the website claims “Solid, pigment ink line can easily be used with watercolour as the ink will not smudge when wet”. However it didn’t stand up to a couple of hours of pen plotting (the paper did though, which is progress!). I do like the result - it reminds me of Batik:

Pen plot created using #drawingbotv3 Sobel Edges option. The black pen was supposed to be waterproof but didn't stand up to this - all good though#weeknotes #happyaccident pic.twitter.com/V5wgrgOzIg
— Jackie Pease (@jackie_pease) March 27, 2022

One more experimient with the orchid gcode - I plotted on the reverse of some photo paper with Marabou Creabox Sketch Pens, also from Lidl. I don’t like the result as a whole but there are some interesting parts. In general the first layer comes out fainter than on normal paper e.g. the pink areas, but where there is more than one colour in a region the new ink tends to push the previous one around. Not good for reproducing what’s in the photo, but could work for something more abstract:

Here’s a detail:

Then it was on to another photo-based plotting project. I took a bike ride along to Westminster Road to take photos of this historic former police/fire station:

And then I started plotting from them (DrawingBotV3 SobelLines and Sketch Squares options).

This plot was with Uniball Eye pens (blue and pink), 0.1mm Unipin fineliner (dark grey) and 0.3mm Rotring pen with yellow Diamine ink(as the only other yellow pens I had were Sharpies). I love the way the sky has turned out, but the building shouldn’t look as grey. The Uniball Eye pens are very fine so often last for a couple of prints.

I increased the amount of red using the DrawingBotV3 preprocessor and tried again, using these Uni-ball On Point One Dream Gel Pens - expensive, but they do claim to be fade proof and this 3 pack actually has a useful colour range:

I used a 0.1mm dark grey Unipin as key, but it ran out so I went over it with 0.5mm. It doesn’t look as pretty but the result is easier to read ( 0.5mm was specified in DrawingBotV3):

Here’s a couple of plots I did of the Liver Bird on the corner of the building, firstly in the Uni-ball Ones plus a UniPin 0.5mm in dark grey, then in black and light grey 0.5mm Unipins:

The light grey Unipin didn’t seem to have the same quality of ink as the black one, and the tip seemed to deteriorate during the plot (also the grey pen must have been knocked during plotting …).

I do have a few non-pen plotter related things to mention (it has been about 6 weeks since my last blog post after all).

Snoof showed us how to make these paper flowers at DoESLiverpool makerday:

Some of the flowers that I (and others) made at @Robotorium impromptu paper flower tutorial yesterday @DoESLiverpool makerday - thanks Snoof!#weeknotes pic.twitter.com/LVA8ZoyJeV
— Jackie Pease (@jackie_pease) April 10, 2022

I started looking into making something sparkly for summer using waste plastics at Plastic Tactics Plastic Playgroup:

Prototype "sashiko" in crisp packet "plarn" on ironed-together plastic bags with laser-cut holes. @PixiesInSpace, who did the sewing, said it made her hands hurt though, so I need to think of some improvements before Sunday afternoon's @plastacs #plasticplaygroup.
Ideas welcome! pic.twitter.com/0ieCpkrbFE
— Jackie Pease (@jackie_pease) April 21, 2022

Also for Plastic Playgroup, I talked a bit about making the Plastic Flowers in this radio clip (worth listening to for Arthur’s explanation of why he set up Plastic Tactics and what he hopes people will get from it:

Here's the clip, and a pic of the award we made, for those who couldn't listen live to the @bbcmerseyside piece by @chamiltonbbc about their experience at the #PlasticPlaygroup https://t.co/nBRo2QbRoz pic.twitter.com/J0VTNnvaM9
— Plastic Tactics (@plastacs) April 27, 2022

Speaking of the Plastic Flowers, Michael Dales took a really good photo on a recent visit to DoES Liverpool:

And finally, on this Friday’s Peloton Liverpool ride, we got the chance to find out more about the work of Wheels for All Merseyside and try out some of their bikes:

A pleasure joining up with @PelotonLiv last night. Lovely to have a ride together with some of our inclusive cyclists, and to show the group what we do every day of the week across Merseyside https://t.co/7yrPDvWb64
— Wheels for All Merseyside (@WFAMerseyside) April 30, 2022

Week Notes - Solidarity in Neopixels

Mon, 14 Mar 2022 19:00:00 +0000

A month since my last “weeknotes”, so quite a lot to write about. Firstly Mike G replaced the original power cables we’d used for the Plastic Flowers with white ones. We covered these with netting tube known as “millinery crin” which we’d first seen when makers from DoES Liverpool were involved in this project for Batala Mersey drummers with Uma and Mandy from Brouhaha International.

@batalamersey drummers with backpacks by Mandy and Uma from @Brouhaha_int - #neopixel spirals (not switched on yet) by @zarino, me, and lots of other people @DoESLiverpool #MakersHour #weeknotes pic.twitter.com/ejHZwvLkpZ
— Jackie Pease (@jackie_pease) May 16, 2018

Here’s a link for millinery crin, in case it’s useful to anyone who wants to tidy up some cables, and here’s another picture of the Plastic Flowers, now with new power cable (any excuse):

Thanks to Mike G for attaching a new white lead to my #plasticflowers (so it doesn't show up against white surfaces), and mending a couple of broken stems. #weeknotes pic.twitter.com/dZ7tOMowK0
— Jackie Pease (@jackie_pease) February 26, 2022

I was pretty convinced at the time of my last weeknotes that the issues we were having with McGraw, the DoES Liverpool pen plotter, were finally resolved, but this turned out not to be the case, and quite a lot of time has been spent on this in the last few weeks (and not just by me).

Firstly Pablo 3d printed an attachment to keep the penholder more steady (McGraw used to be a laser engraving machine, so wasn’t designed to cope with the friction between pen and paper):

More pen plotter testing today. Pablo printed an extra wheel attachment for the @doesliverpool penplotter, McGraw, to stabilise the pen holder.
There are still some artefacts in the print though - the next thing to try is cleaning the belts and bearings with IPA#weeknotes pic.twitter.com/hedIwXW5sj
— Jackie Pease (@jackie_pease) February 27, 2022

I then took the plotter to bits, replaced the upper belts, and cleaned the bearings and track with IPA:

Cleaning McGraw, the @DoESLiverpool pen plotter and replacing some of the toothed belts. It definitely needed it!
Lines seem a lot smoother again now, but there's still a bit of work to do.#weeknotes pic.twitter.com/nbg1BdrSWp
— Jackie Pease (@jackie_pease) March 6, 2022

After putting it back together, the limit switches didn’t work, so thanks to Ed Saul for noticing that the Nano controller wasn’t seated properly…

A few pictures from this week: Emre and Fatih heat pressing garment vinyl, Nathalie with tote bag, Ed and Mike debugging McGraw the pen plotter, Karen ironing sheets of soft plastic#weeknotes pic.twitter.com/HwqRvoDJ6a
— DoES Liverpool (@DoESLiverpool) March 13, 2022

So now the plotter is working fine, and we can get on with using it.

Back to LEDs then - the “disco breast plates” I helped create for Peloton Liverpool had been displaying the same pattern since they were delivered in November. Danny got in touch to say he’d like them to show the colours of the Ukrainian flag:

Joy ride tonight with students of University of Liverpool. On the last one we had 7 countries represented.

If you see us, give us a friendly beep.

Thanks @jackie_pease for reprogramming our lights. pic.twitter.com/myGRze2sPD
— Danny, part of the Peloton (@PelotonLiv) March 2, 2022

You can’t stop a war with LEDs, unfortunately, but it did spark conversation about the subject at Friday night’s Joy Ride cycling group, and passers-by were interested.

Finally, last week, I used a Pico with Pimoroni Pico Unicorn Pack that I already had to make this Pomodoro timer I saw featured in MagPi magazine. A quick and simple project and a potentially useful output - the Pomodoro method aims to improve productivity by breaking up your work time into 25 minute tranches with 5 minute breaks. I’ve attached it to my work computer and will report on any positive changes.

Week Notes - Straighter Lines

Mon, 14 Feb 2022 18:00:00 +0000

I’ve spent some time this fortnight trying to install the latest version of the WLED firmware on the My Baby’s Got LED board which controls my #plasticflowers (each flower contains a ring of 8 WS2812 RGB pixels, so I’ll be able to use the new grid feature to set them up as an 8 x 45 grid and light them up individually). This has proved more challenging than I’d hoped, so I’m putting that to one side for a while (they do look ok as they are).

I have made more progress with pen plotting though. A conversation at DoES Liverpool’s maker night led to the realisation that most of the wobbliness of the lines was due to dirt on the the bearings. These have now been cleaned and the plotter is working a lot better.

Better results from @DoESLiverpool penplotter "McGraw" now the wheels have been cleaned (picture in orange is "before", although it looks like my phone has
straightened the wobbly lines).
Still looking at a small amount of movement where the penholder is attached #weeknotes pic.twitter.com/jdn1KFSryC
— Jackie Pease (@jackie_pease) February 14, 2022

There’s possibly still a bit of movement where the penholder is attached, we’re looking at adding another bearing to counteract that.

I’ve also made some pen storage, using one of the parametric designes at https://www.festi.info/boxes.py/. I’ve sized this one for thicker marker pens, and will probably make one with smaller holes for thinner pens, and one for ink:

Stackable pen storage for pen plotter supplies, laser cut from a parametric design from https://t.co/oSn10YAFnB - a really useful site, often used @DoESLiverpool to make boxes for electronics etc.#weeknotes pic.twitter.com/R7CyK0eZIw
— Jackie Pease (@jackie_pease) February 13, 2022

Now I’ve got the right paper and pen combination, a more accurate pen plotter, and storage for some of the pens, it’s probably time to start thinking about some new things to plot!

I also found out last week that some gears I’d printed in August for the tattoo parlour in the same building as DoES Liverpool were now in use. They’re in old bubble gum machines being used to dispense tattoo designs:

I've finally seen the machines in situ, in working order dispensing tattoo designs! #weeknotes pic.twitter.com/EBQuJOnnge
— Jackie Pease (@jackie_pease) February 6, 2022

Good to be able to help bring these old machines back to life.

And last but not least, I’ve been doing my bit towards publicising DoES Liverpool’s Boost membership scheme, to help widen access to this amazing coworking and maker space. If you know anyone in the Liverpool area who might benefit, then please tell them about it…

We're accepting applications until the end of February for our second cohort of free Boost members. Find out more here:https://t.co/vczCHrcWYl pic.twitter.com/GOMNEfy4tl
— DoES Liverpool (@DoESLiverpool) February 13, 2022

Note: I’m just going to call these weeknotes now, however often I do them (it’s been two weeks this time, which does make it easier to find something to write about).

Fortnight Notes - More on Plastic Flowers

Sun, 30 Jan 2022 18:00:00 +0000

At the time of my last blog post, the Plastic Flowers had been carefully positioned in the base grid, a difficult job as they’re pretty fragile, so thanks again Sanna!:

As you can see, that still left a lot of wiring to be done. Mike G again volunteered to help with this, a task which apparently made him feel nostalgic for his time wiring up telephone exchanges:

We also made a box to hold the My Baby’s Got LED board and the PC power supply it runs off, based on one Arthur made for the Electric Liver Bird:

The My Baby’s Got LED board lets you easily set up addressable LEDs to be controlled by WLED software. You can run WLED from a phone app over Wifi, so once it was set up, it didn’t take much to try out different effects:

Afternoon spent wiring up the LEDs on my #plasticflowers with Mike G at @plastacs #plasticplaygroup @doesliverpool
They all seem to work - just the back to tidy up now and make a box for the power supply#wled #ws2812 #mybabysgotledboard #weeknotes pic.twitter.com/xLWVUJ5Wli
— Jackie Pease (@jackie_pease) January 23, 2022

Left to do:

Update the My Baby’s Got LED board to the latest version of the WLED software (I’ve had it for a while now, and a lots happened with WLED in the meantime). This will let me set up the flowers as a 8 x 45 grid (there are 8 LEDs in each flower), so that each flower can be a different colour
Look into the sound reactive option in WLED as well, so that the flowers can react to music
Mike has suggested redoing the cables from the vase to the power supply in white so that they don’t show up against white table cloths at events (it seems like they might be the sort of think people would want to use at events, and you could even get them to match your bridesmaids’ dresses if you wanted…).

In other news, the paper I ordered at the end of December eventually arrived (after a complaint), and Ed at DoES Liverpool lent me some lovely old technical pens, so I did some more experimenting with pen and paper options for the pen plotter. One of the pens was 2mm, so puts down a lot of ink, meaning that the paper stays quite damp. This seemed like a good test.

Bristol board didn’t really stand up to the task, with quite large areas of damaged paper:

Fabriano Disegno 4 drawing paper, marketed as “extremely resistant to erasing, scratches and scrapes”, unsurprisingly did a lot better, with only small areas where the surface was slightly damaged:

I’d definitely recommend the Disegno 4, and I won’t give up on the Bristol board yet either; it seems to be what everyone in the pen plotter community uses so I’m sure I’ll be able to find out what works with it. The overlapping lines from the thicker pen, and even the ink-saturated and scratched surface are things I’ll look at using again too.

While I was doing these experiments, Pablo, a new member of the DoES Liverpool community, came over to take a look at the pen plotter, and has some ideas on reducing the amount of wobble in the lines. So that’s what we’re going to be looking at next Sunday afternoon - and hopefully I’ll have some excellent new pen plots for my next WeekNotes.