Solving My Oldest Technical Problem

One of the first unsolved problems I can remember, is probably from when I was about 10. I wanted to connect loose wires to a headphone plug. I don't exactly remember why. Maybe I was splitting a signal to 2 headphones. Anyway, I remember it being a complete pain in the ass. I'd try to twist the wires onto the 3 contacts on the plug in various ways and they'd always slip to one side and short across contacts.

Eventually I grew up, bought splitters, learned to solder, and otherwise moved past this problem.

On a recent flight, I had this classic situation again: the stupid plane had the weird old headphone jacks which have 2 mono 1/8" jacks instead of the standard single stereo jack. This means you can't plug normal headphones into them and hear sound in both ears. Of course the headphones they gave out which plug into these jacks sounded like crap. Unacceptable.

I ripped apart the plane headphones and tried to figure out how to connect them to my nice ones in a way that wouldn't screw up 10 minutes into my movie. Low and behold, I came up with a pretty damn good solution! I used pieces of insulation to tie bands around the connector in a way that both held the wires in place, and prevented them from shorting!

You may notice that the tip doesn't need a band to keep the wire from falling off because it narrows at the end away from the tip so the wire stays in that indented area.

It was so satisfying to be able to use my upgraded problem solving skills to solve the oldest technical problem I can remember having!

Life is good.

OSE: Ironworker disassembly and documentation

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=b3_jD-qhGWM

OSE: What I've been up to recently

First off, an amazing video of me testing the backhoe in the shop and Marcin discussing our outdoor testing.

Then a series of short, not-quite-as-exciting videos from today of us disassembling the ironworker so we can reassemble it with thicker metal to try to fix the bending problem, and creating detailed assembly instructions as we went:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=j4Zuy5Ui2-Y
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=F9pdjwSPdfE
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-l7tdodFF8A
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=MLJfQ55sd6Q
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=dBEdTFFWETA
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=OKhnzTJInF8

And here's a quick summary of all the stuff I've been doing out here over the month:

I worked on the backhoe 3 for a couple of weeks, redesigning a bunch of it and building it. Now I'm finishing up the ironworker 3. If I have time after that before I leave on Wed, I'd really like to take a quick pass at getting the torch table up and running. I'm also cleaning up the wiki, helping with assembly guides, and trying to improve various tools and processes (eg using github for issue tracking). And I've spent a bit of time working on the microhouse and fixing odds and ends at the hablab. Holy shit that's a lot of stuff!!!

OSE: Raising the Roof

http://youtu.be/jbdcsVYxn10

OSE: Microhouse Overview

Here's a post on the OSE blog with an overview of the Microhouse project and what I was doing for most of last week.

Open Source Ecology Work Log

If you're interested in the details of what I'm working on at Factor E Farm, keep an eye on http://opensourceecology.org/wiki/Dan_Log. I'll still try to post interesting pictures here though.

OSE: Plastering the Microhouse

http://vimeo.com/76072697