Looks good!
You could’ve gotten a thousand bucks for that antique fence at auction, but now that you’ve polished off the patina, the thing’s near worthless.
The “priceless antique” with its original patina is still in my yard (slightly disassembled). Feel free to make me an offer. But hurry! Time is limited.
Trash day is Friday. 
If the vintage cinder block isn’t included, no deal
Sorry. We’re keeping the cinder block.
Rebuilding a retaining wall between our patio and the neighbors yard before we replace the fence. I put in the first two tiers of 6x6 with 4x4 on the side today. I’ve two more tiers to go. All held together and pinned to the ground with 2’ rebar and spikes. I rebuilt the retaining wall on the left already, now this middle one, and I’ll build a small one on the right next.
My back hurts just looking at it. Nice work.
Mine too. But most of that comes from the shoveling. And my leg, which I broke 8 weeks ago.
You sound like me! I decided to rebuild my front porch a couple of years ago, less than a week before desperately-needed shoulder surgery.
Here’s one of the projects I’ve been working on.
First, a little CAD design:
Then some electronic components including a microcontroller:
A whole bunch of C++ software, not shown.
Then a 3D printer for the CAD files, producing a base, a shade, and a tower for LED strips:
Final result: An internet-connected, bluetooth enabled LED Fire lamp:
It’s animated and looks pretty much like fire flickering inside the lamp. There’s lots of these types of lamps out there, but I equipped this one for product experimentation, so it has Bluetooth, Wifi, temperature, humidity and barometric pressure sensors, and its own web page for programming it. I’ve also got a bluetooth Neurosky headset I am interfacing with it, and I built a bluetooth finger sensor that detects blood pressure, temperature, heart rate and blood oxygen.
The idea is to make a lamp that can change patterns and colors based on information it receives from the internet or from a connected device. Next step: hooking it up to an AI API to do some really smart stuff.
The finger sensor and headset are to test the lamp as a feedback device for meditation. The prototype board in front of the lamp is a prototype of one of the connected devices.
Nice work!
I built something like this waaaaaaaaay back in the day. In fact, it was my first project with a microcontroller. It had no built-in comms, so I bit-banged a serial receiver. Obviously no internet, so it hooked up to a computer, which changed the color based on the company’s stock price.
Clearly, you can do way more sophisticated stuff now that the device itself can have Bluetooth/WiFi comms.
So: it turns out that the LIDAR sensor isn’t as reliable as I’d like in the long term. Soemtimes it works great–other times it dispenses 6 treats in a row without stopping. Part of it is the cat treat dust that builds up on the lens; part is that it just doesn’t have quite as high a sampling rate as it needed. Well, Cygnus liked the extra treats, but in my opinion he was getting too much reward for a run on the wheel.
So what did work? A simple vibration sensor (though actually it’s still pretty sophisticated):
It has a little piezoelectric disc and some kind of adjustable amplifier.
The treat drops down onto a little angled plastic thing, with the sensor below it. The impact causes a small vibration, which the sensor picks up easily and stops further dispensing.
I was worried that it would need endless fiddly tuning, but that’s not the case. I adjusted the pot until a treat reliably tripped it, and that was it. No false positives or negatives. It’s been going a few weeks now with no problem. Cygnus gets his small reward even when it’s 3 am and I’m trying to sleep.
I’ve posted this before but this thread is a natural place for it. Model of the Legion of Super-Heroes clubhouse
Could you have fixed the LIDAR bounce problem with a latch circuit and a 555 timer? The first time the LIDAR triggers, the latch flips, and doesn’t unflip until the 555 counts down a certain amount. If it’s a fast ‘bounce’ issue, that could fix it.
My lamp project has been dormant for a year now. I have a few projects like that…
Cool video!
No; it’s all way more software-based than that. You program a bunch of registers via I2C about the convergence time and some other things. And it has a streaming and interrupt mode as well. I tweaked the parameters a lot, but still couldn’t quite make it work more than ~80% of the time.
I think a partial problem is that the treat is moving too fast by the time it goes by the sensor. The drop column does have an internal ledge that the treat has to bounce from, and that I hoped would reduce the speed, but it’s not enough. Gravity is quick!
I use an interrupt on the ESP32 for the vibration sensor, since that’s not using I2C or another protocol. It does output a digital signal (with sensitivity adjustable by pot), but the pulse can vary in size, so I use an interrupt to capture it regardless of how long the pulse is. No sampling problem there.
Ah, got it. This stuff can be tricky sometimes, but it’s so easy to use that even the tricky bits can be fun to sort out. Not like the PLC systems I used to work on back in the day.
Yeah, I used I2C to connect the sensors that remain in the lamp. I also left two open sockets on a board in the lamp for expansion.
The most annoying thing for me is that the ESP32 does everything I need, but the LEDs are 5V and the ESP32 is 3.3. It probably wouldn’t sink the current anyway. So I had to add a 3.3V-5V converter and a power supply to the thing. That required making a custom PC board for the final thing. Right now it’s still all on protoboard.
Love the ESP32. Is there anything newer and/or better you know about? I haven’t looked at what’s come out in the last year or so.
You might be surprised. I think they do 28 mA per pin by default, and you can gang multiple pins together. If you have enough spare pins, half an amp should be possible.
I tend to power mine via USB, and you can get the 5 VDC directly from the USB (it should show up on one of the module pins). The LEDs have an internal voltage drop, so the ESP32 pins shouldn’t see an unsafe voltage even when they aren’t sinking current.
I don’t know of anything better than the ESP32 now, but there are a bunch of fun variants. I have a few of these guys that I haven’t quite found a project for:
https://www.aliexpress.us/item/3256804468589453.html
That’s a microscopic OLED display built right in. Like the size of a fingernail. But enough for a basic status display.
That is awesome! Which CAD tool are you using?
I can tell that he’s using Fusion 360 
. I use it myself for all my stuff. They have a free license for personal use. It’s very powerful.