“The wind will never cease to craze the frightening leaves”
– Success, Martin Amis
Those of you of a certain age will remember Electric Blue – an….. erm, 80’s classic collection.
You’ll also recall the mad triangle and squiggle patterns that were everywhere around the same time. And Neon colours, don’t forget the neons.
And that, my friends, is the inspiration behind my latest pedal “Electric Blue”. (The shapes and neons, not the sexy things.)
Let me take a step back about 3 weeks. I have a little CNC machine (a 3018) which I want to use to make PCB circuits among other things. The problem I was having was that my first attempts were deep on one side and barely marking the surface on the other, plus a few other little issues.
I had a pretty smooth flow for making them where I’d create the circuit in KiCad, export the SVG, put it into Tinkercad and create a 0.02mm model at the right scale. I sent this to my Mars 2 resin printer, and exposed the film on the board with that, then went through the usual process of turning everything I touched yellow with ferric chloride. I hate that stuff.
I also hate spending a week learning a new program just for one tiny thing, so I (that is, me and Monday, the sarcastic side of Chat GPT) started writing a little program for probing the surface, creating a height map and using that for the gcode generation.
Then I got sick of having to create the gcode and load it into UGS so the actual cutting controls got added. Then the ability to do an image (SVG r PNG). Then be able to mix multiple images. And so on.
I did learn after starting this that Candle does the heightmapping too – but whereas Candle heightmaps a full area block I made mine just heightmap any area that was being cut/engraved. Saved loads of time!
Anyways, Electric Blue.
In Photoshop CS2 (I’ll probably mention at some point in the future why I use a 20 year old version) I drew a squiggle. Converted it to SVG and dumped it into the new program to cut it out of the pedal. The cutting went well, but when it finished I thought the pattern itself was a bit wide and needed thinning out. Back to Photoshop.
Just under 2 hours later I had the new cut – perfect. I clamped the pedal box down onto some butchers’ paper and filled the pattern with resin. Time for bed….
Next day I had a perfectly filled pattern and came to gluing the LED flexible strip into place. An ambidextrous octopus couldn’t have done much better than me, and I failed hard. The strips are coated in silicone and glue doesn’t like silicone. Plus I was trying to do it inside a little metal pit. Back to the computer.
Using Tinkercad and a slightly thickened version of the squiggle I created a thin block with the shape cut out – a led strip holder. Managed to get the LED to glue into place enough to hold it, and pushed the holder in behind the cut. And here we have it!
Now, it’s by no means perfect. I’ve since revised the holder to make it easier to get the Led strip in, and that’s under trial. But you get the idea.