Some projects are too small to ever be the reason you sit down at the bench. They just accumulate — a thing that stopped working, an annoyance you keep working around. This weekend I finally cleared a pile off them.
the water dispenser that wouldn’t charge
A USB rechargeable water bottle pump that had stopped taking a charge. Opening it up, the cause was mechanical rather than electrical — the USB port had come away from the board. Enough plug-and-unplug cycles and the pads give up before anything else does. Resoldered it back down, and the charge LED came on again.
the bath toy
A kid’s bath toy that had gone silent. Two halves, a small motor, a couple of resistors and a battery contact — and the usual culprit for anything that lives in water, corrosion on the contacts. Cleaned them up, resoldered a few of the connections to be sure the contact was solid, and that was it.
labelling sd cards
The one that had bothered me the longest. A drawer of SD and microSD cards, none of them marked, every one a mystery until plugged in. Two prints fixed it: a labelled SD/microSD card holder that takes a printed tag per card, and a matching stand to keep them upright and readable.
Now octopi, raspian, retropi and a few honest empty labels are visible without touching a reader.
reusing bambu lab rfid tags
Empty Bambu spools get thrown away with a perfectly good RFID tag inside. Cut it out, glue it into an RFID clip for Bambu spools, and the AMS recognises third-party filament properly. I paired those with a wall holder on the Multiboard, one hook per material — ABS, PETG, PLA — each labelled with the exact colour and code.
Worth knowing: only one tag per spool, placed on the side facing the AMS sensor. The sensors sit in the pillars between slots 1–2 and 3–4.
kallax wobble
There’s wobble between the Kallax and the leg/base accessory it sits on, and I wanted that gone. These Kallax leg support shims take up the play. I printed a full batch in one go, since each support needs 4 of them.
With the slack gone from the base, the unit sits solid and the rocking stopped.
a lab coat
Not a repair, but the fix to a recurring problem: I kept ruining clothes with solder, flux, glue and filament. A cheap lab coat solves that completely, and it was too plain to leave alone — so it got patches. Rockets, astronauts, UFOs, and a Hackaday Prize 2014 patch that I got from MuMaLab that had been in a drawer for a decade waiting for something to be sewn onto.
what’s next
Two projects got their first steps this weekend,:
- an offline pc for important files — an air-gapped machine that holds the documents that should never sit on anything networked (still encrypted and removable on their)
- an offline usb copier — the natural counterpart to the offline usb eraser. Duplicate drives without either one touching a computer that’s online.
More on both once they’re past the parts-on-a-desk stage.