The new school year is well underway, so I (Adrian) best get some weeknotes out while I can still shoehorn that metaphor into the title.

We’ve got five weeks to catch up on, so let’s run through the more interesting things as bullet-points; in no particular order:

  • Neil has been making sure the Museum in a Box got plenty of love; with blog posts on both oral history and ways to share and remix your collections
  • He also showed off our work at the DoES Liverpool Birthday Open Day
  • After a comment over on LinkedIn, we knocked up a quick prototype to mash up a Museum in a Box with a microscope. We’ll be writing up a blog post on it, but here’s a sneak peek…
A microscope (we can only see the lower half of it) is sat upon a quartet of Museum in a Box boxes (look, we have them readily to hand). The Museum in a Box in centre of the frame is turned on (the LEDs on the front of it are all lit up) and some wires sneak out from the circuit board inside it to a position just under the stage of the microscope. There's a red circuit board (one of our My Bike's Got LED boards, as it happens) sat on the microscope stage. In the background there's a massive telly on the wall, and it's showing the output from the microscope: a close up of the red PCB. There's also a CNC embroidery machine and an industrial sewing machine in shot, but they're not important right now.
  • Some of my blogging bandwidth, that could otherwise have gone into weeknotes, went into writing up our thoughts on sharing code and other design files
  • I did get to do some FreeCAD and Kicad work. There’s a new project on the boil, and it will need some magnetic pogo-pin connectors. I found some good candidate parts, but needed to add them to Kicad so that I can lay out the PCB correctly. That took me into FreeCAD to design the 3D model; then Kicad to lay out the 2D footprint for the board; and back into FreeCAD with the Kicad-stepup workbench to bring the two together:
Screen grab of FreeCAD, showing a model of an electronic connector part. It's a fairly detailed model, if I do say so myself. There's a row of four gold almost bullet-shaped sprung pins, with 90 degree wires just visible to the rear. On either side of the row of pins are two silver discs for the magnets. And it's surrounded by a (semi-transparent in this render, to show the detail of the pins) black plastic housing.
Footprint for a four-pin right-angle magnetic pogo-pin connector, drawn in the footprint editor in Kicad. It's basically a plan view of the part shown in 3D in the previous post. A row of through-hole pads for the wires from the connectors to connect to the PCB, with a rectangle-with-four-bumps-on-it drawn on the silkscreen layer to the right of the pads—showing where the connector itself will sit. There's then a larger rectangle drawn over the connector area on the courtyard layer, to remind you not to place any components in the area where the other half of the connector will sit when you're connecting something to it!
A screen grab from FreeCAD showing the earlier 3D model placed on top of a 3D render of a bit of green PCB with the footprint from Kicad on it