Leather-bound notebook

Following on from the pen and pencil projects I figured I'd continue on with the stationery theme.

Like most people who've ever taken notes, I have a lot of half-used notebooks gathering dust, leaving a large stockpile of perfectly good paper not getting used simply because it's bound to some other paper that did.

I'd been thinking about trying a book-binding type project anyway, so figured why not save a few steps and do some up-cycling in the process.

The candidate books are some school-exercise-book style notebooks.

These are great candidates because they are only bound by 2 staples and each book is a single stack of folded paper.

There's a detailed Instructable for this, which I used heavily for this project, so rather than reinvent the wheel, I'm only going to detail the areas where my process differed from theirs.

To start with, I removed the covers from 4 of the blue books.

To get the fabric for the binding, an old t-shirt was sacrificed.

I oversized the measurements for this bit, so that I could pin the fabric to a scrap backing board, to hold it taut while I mounted the folios.

I put clips each end of the stack of paper, painted some PVA glue onto the fabric, and then added the spines of the paper. Doing it this way around prevents the glue leaking between the pages and fixing them together.

The resulting object was surprisingly stable enough to move somewhere safe to dry.


In the meantime I started preparing the cover as per the instructables instructions. However the leather that I had for the cover was slightly too narrow to have the one inch border that it instructs, but still have enough material to wrap around, so I'd be working with narrower margins.

In addition, in order to be able to fold the leather over to create a neat edge, it needs to be thinned. I did this using a combination of skiving tool and sanding, to thin the material around the border.

After that it was just a case of following the rest of the instructable. For the lining paper I used some of the card I had left over from the Picture Frame that I did a while back.

To finish it off I added some brass corners, and that was it. Not perfect by any means, but very happy with it as a first attempt.

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A post shared by Anthony (@darkmidnight_diy) on Jun 28, 2019 at 10:46am PDT

Writers Block Motivational Assistant

aka, electrocuting friends for fun and profit

One of my friends is a writer, and one of the common complaints I hear is that of “Writers block” - experiencing a creative slowdown and not being able to think of ideas to write.

I experience a similar thing with the projects I'm working on from time to time. A solution I've always sworn by is to just jump in and start doing something – even if it's crappy to begin with, it can always be edited later, and the process of actually taking action helps stir the creativity.

The discussion itself was enough for me to start thinking creatively for ways to overcome writers block. Think a cattle prod, combined with the movie Speed, and you get the idea.

As usual the full write up is below, or here's the video of it in action. Unfortunately there's not much to see, the shock wasn't strong enough to create much of a visible effect - it made my thumb twitch a bit, but seemed very dependent on where the electrodes were placed.


The hardware

As we're administering electric shocks to people with this project, in the interests of safety I didn't feel too comfortable DIY-ing the actual shock circuitry, so I picked up one of these reaction-test toys – the idea of the game each player holds one of the controllers, the light in the centre blinks red, as soon as it hits green, the last player to press their button gets a shock. Simple.

The shock game that's going to form a base for this project

The game in action

The bottom of the unit just contained the main switch, battery compartment and small speaker. None of these are needed in this project, so all found their way into the junk bin.

The top of the PCB just contains the main button (centre, surrounded by LEDs), a number of players button in the corner, and a few capacitors. The 4 LEDs around the edge were removed.

There was also a switch on the side which determined the severity of the shock - either a single one or multiple. I forgot to check which one was selected when I removed it, so that'll be a surprise when it's done. (This was connected to the green wires in the PCB picture below - effectively I've left the switch open)

I also cut away all the controller wires except for player one - that will be the one we're using.

The controller and it's circuitry

Interfacing & Software

How we're going to interface this is by wiring shut the player one button (so effectively it's always held down), and adding an optocoupler in place of the main game button. Then when receiving the signal to deliver a shock, a new game will be triggered, and player one will be shocked for pressing the button too early.

It looks like a steampunk torture device, but it works.

The wires on the controller side were re-wired to a couple of cheap pound-store bracelets, separated by a few 3d-printed plastic spacers and held together with copious amounts of hot glue.


The typical next step here would be to wire in a microcontroller, usb-serial converter and have the PC direct output that way, but I've done that dozens of times and felt like doing something different, so I'm going to use bluetooth and a Wiimote.

The Wiimote connects via bluetooth and contains several sensors. In truth, it's overpowered for this project, but it does give plenty of room for expansion in the future. We're going to use the vibration motors connections to link up to the shocker.

The dismantled Wiimote we're going to use

The connection itself is very straight-forward - a simple optocoupler between the shock toys' main 'play' button connections and the vibration motor output on the Wiimote.

Power is obtained with a 5V wall-wart supply, brought down to 3.3V for the Wiimote using an LM317.

The finished box and bracelet

The software
The source code for the application can be found on Github. Uses Bluecove and MoteJ libraries.

Update
The initial bracelet didn't work to well in testing, as the angle made it difficult to ensure both sides of the connection were in contact with the arm, so I put together an alternative using an old sweat band with a couple of pennies glued into it.

Inside

The new shock band