I’m Ade, I live in Morden and I have no idea why I didn’t try to find a maker space around here before, but suddenly something just made me search, and well, here I am.
I’m a software developer by trade, I started with a spectrum (like a lot of people onf my age!) and had a few different computers before I properly fell in love with a computer, namely the Acorn Archimedes, I’m a self taught programmer (on the archimedes I learned BBC basic before switching shortly after to ARM assembler).
I’ve written commercial software that ranges from medical instruments to car suspension systems to CAD to contactless payment systems, along with my business partners we’ve built a company up that creates radar hardware, although I’m not trained in electronics, it’s something I have a reasonable amount of knowledge in having tinkered with and worked in embedded systems for…(gets fingers and thumbs out) for 25+ years.
I currently have a few projects that are ongoing, one is a humidity sensor for 3D printer filament dry boxes, I’m also currently building my own airbrush paint booth, I have a project I started during the first lockdown (CEV here!) which is ping analyser for network applications (runs on Windows, Linux and macOS) and a million other side projects that I end up creating when working on projects, often I find that I need a specific tool so I’ll create them as I work my way through projects.
I bought a Prusa 3D printer in July 2020, but didn’t get around to building it until about 10 months ago, kicking myself that I didn’t build it sooner as it’s a game changer, don’t know how I managed without it now as it’s a game changer for a maker.
Seeing a project come to life is something that never gets boring, I’m really interested in seeing what other people are up to and what they create!
Yeah, they’re a really great technology for certain applications, absolutely perfect for my humidity monitors for dry boxes, the sensors report to my MQTT broker, but the display additionally allows me to see visually if something needs attention if I happen to be looking at the boxes.
My plan is to release everything as open-source, but I have a couple of minor things to adjust on this revision and I have a million other things going on, so stuff is piling up in my inbox.
I’m currently building a new airbrush booth, I’ve spent the morning cutting V shape aluminium profile for the lighting.
As I wanted to run from battery, e-paper was the only technology of display I could use.
The e-paper displays are absolutely beautiful to look at and consume zero current when displaying an image, the downsides are that they’re relatively expensive compared to LCD or OLED, they have very slow refresh (in the order of seconds) and they’re generally only really available in 2 or 3 colours - white being a lack of ink in the pixel, I use a 3 colour display with white, black and red, each colour is effectively a complete display, so they’re layered, so to display the right colour you need to understand the arrangement of each layer.
