The Party Printer Lives

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This is the latest “thing” I’m building. It is intended to serve as a “party printer”. It detects when people stand in front of it and offers to take their picture. After a countdown the picture is taken and then sent via Bluetooth to a printer that makes a hard copy of the image. You can see the tripod socket on the bottom of the device.

I’ve just about got the code working. The biggest problem has been getting the lens to focus. You have to do this by turning the lens in the camera. I was having a lot of bother screwing the lens in tight enough to get a sharp image. “No problem” I thought to myself, “I’ll use those really expensive angled pliers that I bought a while back to grip the lens and turn it”.

That didn’t end particularly well. As you can see by the massive scratch across the lens. The good news is that the scratch itself gave me something to grip on as I tried to rotate it. And it doesn’t look as if the image quality has been affected too much.

Now I just have to finish off the software and write up the device for a Hackspace article.

Radius vs Diameter: The eternal battle

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An important feature of the thing I’m building now is a tripod fitting on the base. I’ve decided that the best way to implement this is to get an adapter that converts a 3/8ths inch hole into a 1/4 one. If I make the right sized hole in the case I can just screw the adapter into the hole and it will provide the socket that I want.

I carefully converted 3/8ths of an inch into millimetres, added the hole to the design and printed it. However, as you can see above the hole is much too big. Twice as much too big. I’d used the value as a radius, not a diameter. The thing that amazes me is that I managed to check the diagram, look at the enormous hole and then say to myself “Yep, that looks like 3/8ths of an inch”.

Oh well.