September 24, 2016

Wall rack for laptops - an Ikea hack

The need:

At work we have WiFi everywhere. If you go to a meeting you take your laptop with you. If you go to do some work at someone else's desk on another floor, you take your laptop with you. If you need the bathroom, well you will probably take your laptop with you, but where do you put it?

The solution:

Enter the Hack Rack.



Given an idea, a 24 hour company hack-a-thon, a team of keen hackers, we set out to design, build and install 13 laptop racks around the office.

This is a modified Ikea Spontan magazine rack. I'll cover some of the steps we took to make it.

We started with the base Spontan.


The Spontan is made of metal (with an enamel coating). While it is designed for magazines and newspapers, it is quite strong, and can hold a laptop fairly easily. One of the problems though is that the metal surfaces may scratch the body of our precious laptops. We needed a padding solution.

We want padding on the "inside" of the rack, so the part that you can't see. This must extend down to where the bottom edge of the laptop will rest.

We also need padding on some of the front facing surfaces, as the laptop will rest against these as well.

Enter Reverse Garbage. Reverse Garbage gets industrial discards that are useful for re-purposing. Perfect.

My first find was a roll of high density foam that is self adhesive on one side.


This is the edge of a larger sheet (presumably). The roll I picked was about 15cm wide, and several metres long. The white part is removed to reveal the self adhesive backing. We cut pieces of this to size, and stuck it on the "inside" surfaces of the rack.


For the front facing surfaces my first thought was to find some kind of thick fabric. I ended up with 3 great purchases from Reverse Garbage.

The first was an offcut of a roll of "event carpet". They had 3 colours (blue, pink and green) of which I grabbed some blue. The roll was about 2m x 4m, which set me back $10.


Next was a book of fabric samples for chairs. I figured we could cut up each sheet into 2 strips, which would make an interesting design. Here's are a couple.

 

Third was a sheet of polyurethane. These look like offcuts from making thongs (flip-flops). They are quite thin (2-3mm) but provide enough padding so that a laptop won't scratch.


Attaching the covering to the front facing surfaces ended up being more of a challenge than I had expected. I researched glues that would stick to metal, and 2 part epoxies like Araldite seemed to fit the bill.


The problem of course is that with 13 racks to build and mount in 24 hours, mixing up and applying a 2 part epoxy is going to take a lot of time.

We experimented with hot glue, but it didn't stick well to the rack.

We ended up getting some sandpaper and roughing up the front facing surfaces that needed padding, and then using the hot glue. I wasn't totally satisfied with the bond, but there won't be a lot of lateral pressure, so it should stick pretty well. I think if any need re-sticking I will use Araldite.


Of course beware that hot glue sets fairly fast. You need to glue in sections.

Here's our first prototype with the green polyurethane on the front.

 

The chair covering ended up being more fiddly than expected. I was quite proud of the finished product, but we only made one.


In the end the blue "event carpet" was our favourite.


I thought mounting the racks might be a challenge. The rack weighs about 1kg. With 3 laptops attached the total weight could be 5-8kg. We needed to attach the racks to plasterboard (drywall). On the advice of my good friend Mark I investigated various attachment strategies on YouTube. It seemed like some kind of toggle screw would be the best.



The toggle sits sideways inside the anchor screw. You screw this into the wall. It has a sharp point and is self drilling. Then you place whatever you want to mount in place, and screw in the holding screw. As the holding screw goes in, the toggle flips sideways inside the wall, and tightens against the inside of the wall. Each screw can hold 20kg, so more than enough for what I need.

All that's needed now is some testing...


And a label so that people know what these strange racks on the walls outside the company bathrooms are for...


So how did we do? For our hack-a-thon we were awarded the non-technical prize! Thanks heaps to Alex, Malcom, Ricardo and Yuting, and especially for Alex and her video production work for the presentation!

September 08, 2016

Thanks to Petersham Public School

Thanks to the year 4/5/6 students at Petersham who made me this fantastic thankyou present:

May 15, 2016

XBox retro games emulator part II

In this section I connect up the front panel socket for the game controller to a USB plug, so that it can plug in to the Raspberry Pi USB port.

For this I bought some USB plugs and some 4 conductor wire. The plugs have a little groove where you can solder the wire on. You can also get USB plugs with wires already attached, which might save you a soldering step. Note that normally USB cabling has red, black, green and white. I am using a telecoms cable here, so I will need to be careful with the colours.


With the wires soldered, it's time to assemble the plug. Remember that this end of the cable will connect the controllers to the USB port on the Pi. If you used a standard USB cable, make sure the correct colours go to the correct pins. (e.g. Check the Wikipedia page on USB.) For me, I just had to make a note of which colours I used, so that I can connect the other end of the cable easily.


Now for the other end of the cable. The ports for controllers 1 and 2 go to a common header that connected to the motherboard.





I am taking a gable here in guessing that the XBox does use the standard colours for USB cabling. As can be seen elsewhere, the yellow cable for the controller is not used for USB.

I cut the plug off here, stripped the red, black, green and white wires, put on some heat shrink tubing, and soldered the wires together. If your USB cable was standard colours, then connect red to red, black to black, green to green, and white to white. (Yellow is not connected.) Shrink the tubing over the solder joints to insulate it.


May 11, 2016

XBox retro games emulator part I

I wanted to build a retro gaming system. Simple enough idea. I have a spare Raspberry Pi lying around, so why not install RetroPie on it?

Again, simple enough, but of course games are not so easy to play using a keyboard. I really need some game controllers, as well as some kind of case for the Pi.

Why not get an old XBox? The controllers can interface to USB, it has a power supply, and plenty of room inside the case presumably.


Vky commented "So you're using the biggest console ever to house the smallest pc ever?" Like I said, plenty of room.

Opening up the case shows that it is full of all this XBox stuff though!


I'll need to get rid of some things. That hard disk can go for starters.


As can that DVD drive. What were they thinking?


There's still a big circuit board I don't need. Out it goes.

Actually the mounting brackets for those drives might be handy. They can go back in.


Now to put back the Xbox drive tray cover. 


Perfect.

Stand by for chapter II as I start to wire in the new bits.