But we didn't give up and started investigating new, cheaper methods of batch-building those nifty little tissue-cubes. Lucky for us we found a way using a well manufactured premade tissue box made from sturdy cardboard. The results can be seen here:

And now for the important things: We've done this and made this prototype to be able to offer you a bunch of those thingies. When making them in batch, using the premade boxes, spray-mount, quality adhesive plastic-sheet and colored paper sheets we could press the price as low as 18Eur. That is if we get at least 10 "orders". Shipping would be europe-wide (and maybe others too, if not too pricey) for the standard "DHL Päckchen International" rates.

For those interested: The cube measures 12.5x12.5x12.5cm. Subtracting maybe 2-3mm wall thickness it still fits our originally used saubär tissue boxes. I do hope that similar designed (and sized) tissue boxes can be found anywhere...

In a nutshell

• Size: 12.5 cm x 12.5 cm x 12.5 cm
• Material: Magnetic lid, cardboard, acrylic paint, foil coated paper
• Price: 18 Eur
• Payment: PayPal or Bank Transfer (inside EU)
• Pattern options: Random pattern (default) OR Solved pattern (please write into the message field if you order via Paypal)
• Tissue option: Without tissues (default) OR with German SauBär tissues (blue and orange) (+1 Eur) (For the time being we can't offer this option!)
• Shipping (no tracking!): Germany: 4.10 Eur, European Union: 8.90 Eur, World: 15.90 Eur
• If you order more or want Express Shipping, please inquire!

If you feel like you want such a nice cube, feel free to either leave a comment or send a email to "cubes@kanojo.de".

OR Fast Checkout with PayPal

GERMANY	EU	World

IN STOCK!

PLANNING AND CONSIDERATIONS

So first when planning a system like this you need to decide a few things. What are the aspects that are most important to you?

• Speed?

I've decided that this system will be a mass-storage. A data-grave. Thus i have made no attempts whatsoever to optimize speed in any way. The result is relatively clear - not really fast.

• Security?

Does the data need special protection? For me it was simple - i've got a okay~ish CPU in the host box, so encrypting the whole data is no big problem. Why NOT do it?

• Reliability?

How important is the data you want to save really? RAID is nice, but it is NO BACKUP. Are there special considerations to make for desaster recovery? As this is going to be a data-grave for me i've opted for a "best effort" policy. I've got a used UPS to protect my equipment (server and this storage) from power losses and voltage fluctuations. Then i've decided for a RAID system, namely the old RAID 5. As i said i haven't optmized for speed, so RAID 0+1 was no option since you'd need more disks to get the same actual storage size. As for desaster recovery i've decided to use a LVM layer on top of my crypto layer. This allows me for snapshots (in case of huge write events when snapshotting i think i can even use a external large disk as a snapshot device...) when i perform critical filesystem operations. If the filesystem ever fails so hard that i have to perform potentially dangerous operations (and FSCKing a "crashed" ext-filesystem IS dangerous) i can always just snapshot, toy around, if i break it revert the snapshot...

• Noise and vibration?

As for vibration (and thus much of the noise of a harddisk array) you need to trade a few things off. On one hand its really nice to mount disks with thick rubber layers to dampen their vibrations. This has the backdraw that the harddisks will always move - they'll swing on the flexible rubber layer. Consider this article/video by Brendan Gregg to see why this is bad: Unusual Disk Latency. So basically you'd want something that is very rigid so the drives don't move *too* much. On the other hand, to isolate each harddrive from the vibrations of the others (huge commercial raid arrays all have/need ways to deal with isolating individual drives - consider a scenario where a RAID 5 or similar level array starts writing, many drives start seeking at the same time sending a huge vibration-wave through the case disturbing (and as i've heared - yes, only heared) and even headcrashing other drives.

I've attempt to achieve this by applying my knowledge from building speaker enclosures. The scenario as well as the vibration frequency range are quite similar. To supress case movements i've chosen a even (internally) and dense material: MDF. While this has the backdraw that it heavily couples the drives it will do a good job at dampening the overall vibration. As a upgrade to this (which i haven't implemented yet) one could use a additional "energy trap" consisting of a moveable, rubber-like but very stiff material. Fortuneatly this is readily available as a mat to put your washing machine on! If i'm not entirely mistaken even putting the whole construction on a piece of such a mat will not only effectively lower the (hearable) noise from the array but also further dampen vibrations by taking in the (slight) case movement and turning it into "heat" (by elastic deformation(?TODO: ASK PHYSICIST?)).

• Connection?

How do you plan to connect the device to your computer? There are basically two ways of doing this: One is to use a cheap S-ATA adapter card with enough ports (see below) which will then leave you with a large pack of cable running from whereever you place the array to into your computer (also requiring some kind of large hole in your case to route the cables through). I've chosen this option as it fits my needs (server standing somewhere in a drawer) better. The other thing i've come across are sata multiplier cards. These nifty little things implement a integral but not widespread part of the sata-specification: some kind if hub/switch. If your card supports sata port multipliers (and really REALLY check if it does!) you can get a rather cheap (~60Eur maybe) multiplier card (e.g. from "dawicontrol") which enables you to build a completely self-contained storage - just plug one (e-)sata cable into your computer and zuuup, there are your 5 drives!

CHOOSING PARTS

Theres a bit of a philosophical question here regarding harddrives. You could either use 5 exactly same drives bought from the same store, thus having a larger probability to be from the same production batch. For one this would be great because seek and throughput performance would be the same, you wouldn't waste bandwidth waiting for one slower drive. On the other hand this can suck because ... if theres a manufacturing error and one drive dies, you replace it, start a rebuild, the rebuild puts heavy strain on the other drives, bearing the same error they'll be likely to die too leaving you with severe data loss. So i'd recommend you either to try to get the same drives from different batches, or - that was the way i did it - buy 5 completely different drives. As speed is a non-issue for me this seemed the safest choice when it comes to per-batch production errors.

As for the adapter card i was very lucky to find leaf-computer.de who seem to offer quality storage controllers used on very simplistic PCBs - such as this: Marvel 8Port SATA Adapter. Exaclty what i need! And at what a small price tag! The marvel chip used on this board is known for excellent linux driver support as well as good performance and a nice feature set. Heck you could even plug sata port multiplier on this and achieve a 8x 5-disk-raid-5! It does also support staggered spinup (spinning up one drive after another putting less load on the PSU)

As for the other components i've simply tried to choose reasonable at a good bang for the buck ratio. A simple 450W PSU with 85% efficiency even in the medium power range, a reasonably silent and powerful large fan... thats about it.

IMPLEMENTATION (hardware)

Taking the measurements at the drives and calculating the case sizes was a bit of a hassle, but in the end it worked nicely. Here you can see a the parts of the case loosely put on each other.

As for the parts needed - heres the list:

• 1* 306x186mm
• 2* 102.2x186mm
• 1* 219x186mm
• 2* custom measures parts of ??x105.4mm

everything is made of 16mm MDF.

Here you can then see how the PSU will be mounted (it has two mounting holes where that square timber is) and the two custom measured parts. They close the edges of the fan and depend on the outer sizes of your fan - so first mount/measure the fan, then cut the MDF.

The case itself is assembled by using simple wood glue, then reinforced (as seen below) by counterbored screws to make the vibration-transfer better and distribute it throughout the whole case.

Now comes the most tricky part, and i must admit that i've forgotten to make detailed notes of this. You need to measure the harddrives (they're more or less 25.4x146.5x101.6mm by specification) and where their screw-holes are, then measure it on the top of your case, drill a hole that'll just fit your screw, then drill a little with a larger drill to countersink their heads...

After finishing the holes i've found a nifty little gadget in my old hardware scrapbags - a simple fan control pcb! Woo! I've just mounted it where it looked nice - please note that this is totally optional .

The next trick was to get the PSU to start and stay always running without attaching a mainboard or switch. Thanks to Wikipedias ATX Article this was very simple. Find the PS_ON pin, some random ground (the one above/beneath PS_ON for example), rip them out of the poor connector and solder them together... magic works, the PSU runs!

Now its time to mount the harddisks. This turned out to be a little more difficult than expected as you need to place the drives exactly under the drilled holes without looking. In the design i proposed there is a little space between the drives making this a little harder yet. I've had luck with using a led flashlight on the backsides (the one with the PCB) of the HDDs and looking through the holes from the top of the case...

... and having a hand in the front of the case is also very handy

Then i've packed all SATA cables into a nice large batch (wow, this looks SO professional )

and finally placed it where it belongs - in my drawer above my server!

After using it a few days i must say that both noise and heat is very good. Even with the fan on full i can barely hear the array even under full load (seek-hell). The drives report temperatures of 25-41*C through smart, which is really okay. When feeling with your hand it only barely warm...

IMPLEMENTATION (software)

Now as the hardware is completed, up and running lets head for the software. This was a little harder than i expected to get right. As already said i've chosen a design like MD <-> CryptSetup (LUKS) <-> LVM <-> EXT4 to have maximum flexibility, data security as well as a little more help in case of a data corruption.

The main problem with the software setup was to get all those abstraction layers neatly aligned. However, first things first. If you got new drives, what do you do? Right - badblocks and smart. The thing with badblocks on a new drive is that it almost in all cases will NOT yield badblocks. This is because a modern harddrive has some free blocks that are not mapped at the start of its livetime. As the drives firmware finds bad blocks while operating it'll replace them with those replenishment-blocks. Only when you run out of those you're in serious trouble. However, as smart prints the "Reallocated_Sector_Ct" field you'll identify a defective harddrive after a exhaustive badblock test even if there are replacement blocks left.

badblocks -s -w /dev/sd[efghi]

Is what you want to run now (assuming dmesg agrees that your new drives are sde,f,g,h,i). Do expect it to run quite long, if you want the RW test as proposed around 2-3 days. After that we'd want to start a smart long selftest (smartctl -t long /dev/sd[efghi]) and then read and try to interpret the results (smartctl -a /dev/sd[efghi]).

The next thing is ... naming your array! Its important for such hardware to have a good name. I've chosen the name "dantalian" of the recent anime "Dantalian no Shoka" (The Mystic Archives of Dantalian, ダンタリアンの書架). Its basically that this cute tsundere little girl here to the left does contain a large library of magic books in her chest, making her a library (the magic library dantalian). And as its magic it is HUUUGE. What is this array? HUUUGE! Nice fit!

Anyways, back to the software setup. Now that the drives are tested we can start to initialize the array. This can be done with:

mdadm --create -x 0 -l 5 -n 5 dantalian /dev/sde1 /dev/sdf1 /dev/sdg1 /dev/sdh1 /dev/sdi1

after partitioning your drives so you'll have one partition of the type "FD", aka linux raid autodetect. For testing purposes i propose to create a smaller partition, e.g. 100gb, on each drive. That way you can run your various desaster tests (and i've run SOME!) without the raid rebuild taking ages each time!

Now that md is told of the array, we need to persist its configuration. This can neatly be done byletting mdadm itself create the config

mdadm --detail --scan >> /etc/mdadm/mdadm.conf

This assumes a standard debian mdadm.conf (especially containing "DEVICE partitions", telling mdadm to probe all partitions known to the system to find raid drives...). Now you can monitor your raids initial 'rebuild' status by issuing

watch -n 10 cat /proc/mdstat

which will yield something like:

Personalities : [raid6] [raid5] [raid4] md127 : active raid5 sdi1[5] sdh1[3] sdg1[2] sdf1[1] sde1[0] 7814041600 blocks super 1.2 level 5, 512k chunk, algorithm 2 [5/4] [UUUU_] [&gt;....................] recovery = 1.4% (28754816/1953510400) finish=1590.0min speed=20174K/sec

Now, according to a good source

If the device to be encrypted is an md RAID array, you should use the --align-payload= to ensure that crypto blocks are aligned on RAID stripes. This option takes as an argument the number of 512-byte sectors in a full RAID stripe. To calculate this value, multiply your RAID chunk size in bytes by the number of data disks in the array (N/2 for RAID 1, N-1 for RAID 5 and N-2 for RAID 6), and divide by 512 bytes per sector. In the example below, /dev/md0 is a RAID 6 device with 4 data disks and a stripe size of 128 kbytes: 128 * 1024 * 4 / 512 = 1024 sectors. # cryptsetup --verbose luksFormat --verify-passphrase --align-payload=1024 /dev/md0 When prompted, supply the key you created in the step above.

So, adapted to our scenario that means that we'll create the crypt layer using:

cryptsetup --verbose luksFormat --verify-passphrase --align-payload=4096 /dev/md/dantalian

Now (after opening the device using cryptsetup luksOpen /dev/md/dantalian dantalian-crypt) lets create the LVM:

Consider this formula:

metaatasize = chunk size times number of data disks in the array

which then gives us the command to create the physical volume format on the crypto-pseudodevice:

pvcreate --metadatasize 2048K --dataalignment 4096 -M2 /dev/mapper/dantalian-crypt

now, using pvscan you can let this new volume be autodetected as:

PV /dev/dm-2 lvm2 [7.28 TiB] Total: 1 [7.28 TiB] / in use: 0 [0 ] / in no VG: 1 [7.28 TiB]

Okay, we've got our physical volume for LVM, so lets create one volume group containing one (or more, depends on your preferences here) logical volume on those:

vgcreate dantalian-vg-main /dev/mapper/dantalian-crypt

lvcreate --name dantalian-lv-main -l 100%FREE dantalian-vg-main

Now, after some more vgscan and lvscan you should be presented with your /dev/dantalian-vg-main/dantalian-lv-main device - ready to create a filesystem. This again needs to be .... ha - what is it ... ALIGNED! Hell No!

Lucky for us EXT4 pretty much autodetects that it is on a raid device, what stripe-width and stride-width are, but to be sure lets ask our source from before again:

The relevant options for ext3 are stride and stripe-width. stride is identical to the md array chunk size, and stripe-width is identical to the array stripe width, except that both options are specified in units of filesystem blocks instead of bytes. The default ext3 (and ext4) block size is 4096 bytes, so simply divide your chunk size and stripe width by 4096 to get the proper values for these parameters. Here's an example using a RAID 6 array with 6 disks (i.e., 4 data disks) using a chunk size of 128k (stripe size is therefore 512 kbytes)

So for us its now:

stride = chunksize / blocksize, (512*1024)/1024 = 128.0

stripesize = stride * datadisks = 128 * 4 = 512

which will then result in the following mkfs command:

mkfs.ext4 -n -m 0 -E stride=128,stripe-width=512 -b 4096 /dev/dantalian-vg-main/dantalian-lv-main

leaving us (when removing the -n option) with a nicely aligned filesystem that is aware of the striping/striding. The last point is then again a data-security thing. If ever the unlikely case should happen that the crypt layers metadata get corrupted it is really handy to have a backup. This can be achieved by

cryptsetup luksHeaderBackup --header-backup-file DANTALIAN-LUKS-HEADERS /dev/md/dantalian

cryptsetup luksDump /dev/md/dantalian &gt; DANTALIAN-LUKS-HEADER-DUMP

with all its backdraws. Those can be found in the cryptsetup/luks FAQ!

Now after some while of using the array i'm quite fond of it. Its not only faster than i've feared (i do get 25-30MB/s over my gbit lan) its also proven to be quite sturdy in case of bad(TM) events. I've tried killing the power of the array, the host computer, tried unplugging single harddrives or even more than one harddrive - all even with heavy random access (compiling a kernel). I haven't succeeded in creating a situation that would've lead to data-loss.

Again, if you're interested in more details, would like to know the exact locations of the holes you need to drill for the harddisks or something else - just write a email or leave a comment!

After a long dry season of posts here on blog.kanojo.de i proudly announce yet another garage-tinkering-tutorial: How to print t-shirts yourself. While this may not sound special or new at all, the technique we've chosen required a lot of fine tuning to yield *PROFESSIONAL* (and by that i mean really really REALLY good) results. So i considered it worth sharing.

While i must admit that i make a equipment-assumption that may not be the case for most, you can work your way around it. What i'm talking about is that recently a cutting plotter moved into this household. A cutting-plotter is almost like a normal plotter - except that it doesn't paint or print the paths (read: vector-files) you give it, but cuts. For those who don't know what a plotter is - imagine a printer that is able to print on a infinitely long roll of paper and doesn't print per line, but prints a arbitrary path (e.g. a sphere, bezier curve, etc.) at a time.

This allows to scrounge off so-called "flex film/foil" from professional shirt shops (they always seem to have some oddments to give away) or buy it really kinda cheap on ebay. This can then be cut using that cutting plotter given a nice vector-file you did before (inkscape is great once you learn how to use it by the way!). The trick with cutting plotters is that the foil you use comes on another foil, the "medium". This medium is not cut, but only the "useable" film on top of it. So after cutting you need to take away the excess outset and inset foil.

And this is the point where i like to stress that you can, in fact, do this even without having a cutting machine like this handy! If you have some patience (and we had before we had that machine) you could just print out your motif, trace it to the foil and then cut it by hand using a scalpel or hobby knife. Just be careful only to cut the useable film, not the medium foil!

But it's only after this that the real work begins - everything before was done by machine (or, by hand, in that case that was the most work ). The film needs to be pressed on using quite some force, a defined (short!) time and a defined temperature. For this purpose professionals use "transfer-presses", machines likeseen here on the right...

So, what do we do at home? We hack! After some datasheet reading and one Shirt full of little bits and pieces to try around we've found out how to properly do it. What you'll need is found in (almost) any household:

• a hard, smooth piece of wood
• a regular electric iron
• baking paper
• a stopwatch
• a frind who's doing body-building also comes in handy

Make sure the iron is set to around 170°C (thats ~338°F). The press time is roughly 8 seconds *per point on the film*. As you have to move the iron around you need to guess how long each point was pressed on around 8-12 seconds... but for the pics! And the further explaination of course - it'll be under the pics as always...

finished getting rid of in and outsets. You mag now recognize the famous mahjongg-player akagi

The iron and wooden board...

Now first lay out the shirt as flatly as you can

then iron it where you want to put the motif, just enough to be kinda smooth

This is the setup for fixating the foil on the shirt - you align the film/medium nicely, the baking paper over it (so you can move around nicely without moving the foil) and a stopwatch to time how long you've been pressing...

ready, steady....

GO! Press as hard as you can (or as your bodybuilder buddy to press even harder than you can) while slowly moving the iron around. Moving it has to be done to make shure the film gets fixated evenly!

press more ...

... and even more - until ever point on the foil got hot and was pressed on for about 9-12 seconds

For pictures this size (~14x14cm) this usually takes around 15-20 seconds

Now the film is fixated on the fabric, but the medium also sticks to it quite hard ... the trick here is TO WAIT UNTIL ITS *COMPLETELY* COLD.

You can, by the way, already see whether it worked by looking out for a silky~ gloss on the surface of the film

Then, after its COMPLETELY AND UTTERLY COLD start pulling it off at a angle as sharp as possible - and SLOWLY. Even if the worst case should happen and small parts peel off with the medium you could use your hobby knife to pull them back and fixate them later...

After finishing removing the medium - you can already see the film "burned into" the fabric.

But not enough yet! You need to burn it in a little more - fortuneatly this is possible when using baking paper again... i like to fixate every point for around 1:30min - which seems to be the point where "well fixated film" turns to "burned film"

Everything finished, not yet finally fixated...

closeups from after fixation - you can see the film burned nicely into the fabric

Here it seems i fin-fixated a little too much, the film started to melt and the black fabric comes through a little. Lucky me it isn't too bad!

The final result

With this technique you can achieve a almost professional result from everyday home-use items (except for the cutting plotter maybe...). Some professionals may cry out because of this tutorial - but it really works. Washable too, the first test-shirt didn't break down yet...

I hope you had fun with this tutorial and are now put up to try it yourself. Really, even with hand-cutting easy motifs aren't too bad to make... As always, feel free to ask!

Also look out for our post with tons of vectors for T-Shirt printing .

What we did is basically make stencils out of tamiya masking tape (which sticks nicely to just everything - no overspray or paint running under the tape), masked off the rest using crepe tape and old newspapers and sprayed using some cheap textile-paints and a 0.4mm nozzle airbrush - after that iron to fixate, that's it. Here are the results:

The stencils are the official "Mustang running pony", which i sourced from here as a eps. The silhouette of the car is of a 67(?) Ford Mustang (fastback) and are sourced from here - in case you also wanna do one.

Please read on for a more detailed howto on how to sew one...

So, first is what you will need:

• 1 Pcs: 34x40cm of white fluffy cloth
• 1 Pcs: 34x40cm of green (or bamboo-ish brown) fluffly cloth
• 2 Pcs: 34x9.5cm of the same white fluffy stuff
• 2 Pcs: 34x9.5cm of the same green (or bamboo) stuff
• 2 Pcs: 40x9.5cm ... white?
• 2 Pcs: 40x9.5cm ... green/bamboo
• 2 Pcs: 34x40cm of very stiff textile interfacing
• 2 Pcs: 40x17cm of very stiff textile interfacing
• 2 Pcs: 34x17cm of very stiff textile interfacing
• 1 Pcs: ~30x35cm red felt
• 1 Pcs: ~30x35cm double-sided-glue textile interfacing
• A sewing machine
• A good fabric-scissor

As always i will post the progress pictures from making the tile here, sub-texted with instructions what to do:

I'm quite pleased with the final result - especially the sides are as stiff as they should making the whole tile "box-y" enough to look good. A little drawback is that the thick textile interface make a "crumbling" / bending-cardboard-like noise when you rest your head on the tile, so it's not a ideal pillow to sleep on.

As always - if you want detailed help, better measurements or more more detailed explaination somewhere, please mail in or leave a comment! Hope you enjoyed this one!

If you want a Ebook-Reader just as good at a lower price you're gonna suffer - here are my experiences...

(NOTE: for the cover scroll down!)

There are a few things to look out for if you want a E-Reader to read manga - my main requirements are:

• 6" or larger screen
• 16 or more values of grey (5bit)
• clear matte screen (especially no touch layer above e-ink layer as in early sony / iriver cover story)
• reasonably fast processor
• firmware optimized enough to actually switch pages fast (so crappy processor with superb firmware is okay too, even though you're not gonna find it)
• firmware generally doesn't suck - beeing able to configure various reading-parameters (*good* reflow mode), UI parameters (annoying bars eating away your precious screen-space), beeing able to rotate ebooks, rendering of complicated PDFs not fucked up, etc.
• reasonably rugged build

Those were at least my requirements - if you're mainly reading "text based" ebooks you can probably live with missing options to remove annoying bars, page-turn speed for text is also better than for pictures on most readers, etc. - but if you want to read manga/comics those are a real must, especially on cramped 6" of space!

So my journey begun - i've first tried the Icarus Go E600 ... which sucked really really hard - the firmware was a mess, it was chinese cheapo-software which was illegaly based on stolen GPL ("opensource"/Free Software) programs (dissect the firmware yourself, it's on their website! It's a simple msdos-partition in a file, just mount it (on linux) and look in there - grep around for xpdf or freetype or X11/XFree86) and still sucked. There were annoyings bars you couldn't remove, the device was super slow turning pages, the build quality was that of the cheapest plastic-box you can imagine, it was just horrible - back to dealer!

My next try and current "keep" was the Acer LumiRead L600. It has a bunch of super pointless features (such as WiFi - okay, that can have uses - or a camera that can scan barcodes of books so you can buy the ebook right away) but the build quality is okay, the UI is okay~ish (still has bars that cannot be disabled and can't rotate ebooks (but CAN rotate the internet browser)). The page-turn speed is okay~ish, and well ... the display is okay overall, so for the price it's kind of okay. Plus they run linux and give you (at least partially) the sourcecode, so you could start hacking yourself (and i WILL be hacking this!). The LumiRead source can be grabbed at http://www.linpus.com/linpus_acer_source.html and it'll listen on the standard telnet port with a shell for you - just log in as root and explore the system!

Nichijou, the manga/anime from which sakamoto came

So, with that reader as a keep i've decided to build a nice cover/case for it as i didn't have one yet and wanted to protect the device. Fortuneatly i had recently gotten a freebie document carrying case made of rough, sturdy fabric - so we've ripped it apart and started sewing. The document-case consisted of two layers of that fabric and one very stiff border that was wrapped around the borders of the f

Sakamoto

abric layers. The final carrying case also has this layout. The inside was wrapped with the fluffy side of a old shirt to protect the reader even better.

But the greatest thing about that case is - it features the best character taken directly from the manga/anime you see here, nichijou. The character in question is the cat "sakamoto", which was painted on the cover using simple textile/fabric-colors and masking tape, but see for yourself!

The Amplifier itself is a TexasInstruments TPA1517NE Class-AB Amplifier that is driven at a voltage of 18V (to be able to supply a reasonable signal for high-impedance (600ohms) headphones. The Schematic is almost the application note except for enlarged output capacitors to lower the cutoff frequency of the output-filter. Both powersupply and amp reside on on PCB.

The casing is made from 15mm Multiplex, routered at the edges. The volume-control knob is also routered from the same 15mm MPX material. The edges are routered along with 45*

Buuut, as this is a picpost, here they come:

Schematics:

PCB Layout (600DPI):

Finished PCB:

Volume Knob (for Case):

Case with everything attached:

Inside of Case:

And last but not least it was finished off with a nice chen (from touhou) application:

See the pictures below for the whole drink collection as well as the drinkholder and both put together .

(some building details inside!)

Unfortuneatly we didn't have time to document the whole build process due to time constraints (we only had one evening to build the whole thingy), so just a little description here.

All the wood was birch plywood ("multiplex"), the baseplate is 18mm thick, the top one (the one with the holes) is 12mm to save some time routing the holes. Both are 35*50cm. The two sides (3*50cm) are made of two layers 21mm wood, so it'd get high enough. First we routed a 45* bevel around the bottom (read: the ugly side) of the baseplate, then started to route the holes - they are of diameters 7cm, 8cm and 6.5cm (so that all the bottles fit just nicely). This was all in all the most of the work - after that came routing some bevels onto the inner diameter of the holes, routing the bevel on the top plate and glueing the four  21mm sides together to two higher sidewalls. The finish was sanding up to 180grit (using a eccentric sander) and rubbing the whole thing with linseed oil. We only used a little as we had the need to dry it overnight - this sadly minimizes the protective effect of the oil but we had no choice. Normal would be two or three times flooding the wood with oil, letting it stand for ten minutes and taking the rest off - after that it'd need to dry completely which would take several days if not weeks.

Hope you liked this project again - as always, if you have any questions, please feel free to comment or mail in!

The idea is to have a frame thats front glass plate is dismount- and mountable in the glimpse of a eye thus allowing to change the contents without too much of a hassle. The other aspect is that the whole content of the frame is made up of a mosaic of mini-pictures framed by small but thick cardboard frames. You can then use cardboard spacer to lay the small framed image-"cards" (moo.com are half business cards, ours are roughly creditcard-size) out in every way you want to create a nice compilation of the works displayed!

The frame itself is quite flat, 6mm without glass, rougly 8.5mm with the glass front attached. The glass it held by a couple of strong rare-earth magnets and sits very tight, so no worries about falling glass. The inner frame can hold around 7*3(=21) of our cardboard-mini-frames, but ... see for yourself! And if you feel like it, make one yourself....

As for the materials we have used it's actually quite simple. The most exotic thing you would need to also built a frame is (if you want it nice n woody) veneer although it could be substituted for something else and equally nice (later more on that).

Here a small list of what you would need (the frame itself, not the "mini frames"):

• a angle-saw or angled saw guide (i used something like this: gehrungssäge but other things like a regular wood saw and this: sägeblock would work too)
• HDF plates / "bars" to your liking (depends on what inner and outer dimensions you want) and one large "backplate" (details will get clearer with pictures below)
• regular wood glue, a flat iron (for veneering)
• veneer (or alternatives, see below)
• a old brush for applying the glue to veneer/hdf
• some linseed oil and/or beeswax-glaze
• some wood drills (depending on the size of your magnets)
• (optional: a hole cutter, something like this
• rare earth disc-shaped magnets (we used 12x4mm and 10x3mm)
• 2 component (epoxy) glue
• Some glass, harvest it from the cheapest picture frames you can get or - even better - old windows. Ask the nearest glazier, whatever comes in handy.
• A glass cutter - good hardmetal (tungsten carbide) wheeled cutter is recommended as they really really yield nice results with minimal "learning-cost" (read: glass plates you've ruined)
• some ~2-3mm thick homogenious (non-crinkeled) cardboard
• (optional: spraymount glue)
• regular 80g plain paper
• some metal frame hangers

I hope that list didn't scar you off. But some of the things can be left out while others are "standard equipment" - at least more or less...

Okay, now onto the making! First we're gonna make the frames for the roughly creditcard sized pictures out of ~2-3mm thick cardboard which is plated with plain paper to beautify it a little...

one piece of our cardboard, already cut to the right outer dimensions. inner cut dimensions are already marked.

To cut such thick cardboard we used a good(!) cutter (the japanese brand "olfa" makes godlike cutters! but use whatever suits use) and a metal ruler. align the ruler carefully, then first cut the surface a little without applying too much pressure. that way you won't slip. Then cut again a few times each time with a little bit more pressure. for the inner cutout ... see below

The large piece of cardboard which is our source for the mini-frames. It is marketed as material for bookbinding, maybe check your nearby arts-store?

First test picture "clipped" into the frame - success!

As the inner cutouts tend to get a little tricky i first made little slots at the corners (without a ruler)

then cut alogn the edges as described above (first without pressure...

now turn around the cardboard, you'll see that you've probably missed a few millimeters of the last layer in the edges - go back to the other side again and cut into the corners carefully at a large angle

Now as the frames are finished you can beautify them by cutting out a just-a-tad-larger piece of paper

and mount it on the frames with spray mount (or whatever you have at hand...)

differences - this is why you wanna get some additional plain paper over it

beautified mini-frame

After giving all hdf "bars" a 45-degree-sawoff glue the 45 degree edges of the hdf "bars" with a thick layer of wood glue

lay them flat on a piece of paper, newspaper or whatever may get dirty and get ripped later...

carefully align all the pieces to be at exact right angles (if you've used a sub-par angle-saw as i did you may see small gaps, just fill them by pressing some additional glue in with your fingers.)

filled 45-degree gluespot

smeared all the edges a little - this saves some sanding time later.

to hold the edges together a little i used crepe-tape. apply it with care, you could move the carefully aligned pieces of hdf again!

And here is that little point where you could do something other than veneering. You could - for example - sand the surface of the HDF up to 220Grit and paint it using acrylic paint. First prime using acrylic primer two times, then sand again using 400grit, then paint two or three times in whatever colour you want. You can also get creative and glue colourful napkins on it, glue paper on it and paint on it, you choose, get creative!

I have learend the veneering technique shown here from Nordic-Audio - it's described nicely and even has a video attached, so if you don't speak german either try the google-translation or just watch the video (which should be explainatory enough). This is also the reason why i haven't documented and described the veneering tech in detail - this guy's better at it!

Now for the veneer - after the hdf outer-frame dried completely i placed it on two mirrored pieces of veneer (here: maple) and drew a line around it. then i cut with a good buffer (~3-8cm) around those lines on both of the mirrored pieces

mark for cutting

next step is to smear the veneer with the wood glue, apply a thick~ish layer so the whole piece is slightly milky-white. it'll soon roll itself up, but don't worry, it'll work anyways. also smear the hdf-frame

smeared hdf frame

veneering workplace with the already half-veneered hdf-frame.

the first broken edge looks like this

as you can see there was a little problem caused by veneering the hdf - the heat of the iron made the hdf-outer-frame bend a little. this has to be corrected later ;/

piece of veneer with not yet broken edges.

first half is now finished...

the point where the next half of veneer would hit is a little crucial so it has to be sanded down to get almost flat towards the end

detail of the flattening

detail of the flattening

else the first veneering part looks okay - clean edges with no raptures, flat and even veneer

the second half was now also veneered and the backplate is glued on. note that some space must remain between the outer border of the backplate and the outer edges of the outer-frame. the intersection between both sanded down to be level.

the whole thing is flat and smooth without any bubbles or raptures at the edges

the intersections between the two parts of mirrored veneer are also clean, flat and smooth - and in reallife barely vissible.

The next step is wood finishing - first sand the veneer with 120, 220, 400 grit paper, then wet it with a sponge, let it dry and sand it with 400grit again (only sand along the streaks/with the wood-texture). then apply some linseed oil, let it stand on the wood for ~5minutes and wipe it off again. This will make the texture of the wood come out nicely and have a little protective effect. !!! be careful with paper/fabric that is linseed-oil-soaked - it can self-ignite !!!

Then as a second step of wood finishing (after 2 days of linseed-oil-drying in a warm, dry place with direct sunlight light) is applying beeswax-glaze. I've opted for a "milky-white" version of the glaze to set the wood a little back, it is only a frame after all..!

after applying thickly and letting it stay there for ~5-10 minutes take a clean and fine cotton sheet and start polishing the wax in circular motions with medium pressure. you'll see a sligh "semigloss" appear - that's exactly the effect we want that'll look nice behind glass!

finished polishing ... damn photos, you never see nice textures on them!

finished polishing ... damn photos, you never see nice textures on them!

finished polishing ... damn photos, you never see nice textures on them!

Now to mount the magnets i drilled a hole from the backside and used a hole-cutter (see above) to enlarge it step by step so the magnets would just fit in really tightly

you can see the inverted cone a little

the front had to be cleaned a bit using 400 grit, then polish again a little using the cotton sheet from before to restore the texture around the hole. Now smear just a little bit of your 2k-epoxy-glue into the hole (from behind) - be careful not to smear the frontside - and press the magnets in. carefully wipe off any excess 2k from the front.

to beautify the edges (inner and outer) we used crepe-tape to mask the outer-frame off and painted the edges using acrylic paint - here the inner edge...

and here the outer edge (shows the masking from below)

inner edges ready!

more painting on the outer edges...

aaand now for the frontplate - we've used harvested glass from cheap n ugly picture frames. the cutter is a "silberschnitt" cutter with a hardmetal/tungsten-carbide wheel. We use the (crappy quality) HDF backplates that came with the cheapo-pic-frames as a underground for cutting. use a long metal-bar as a guide and using medium pressure (you hear when you're doing right - it should sound like it's scratching but not like scrubbing with sand). Cut in one steady stream, never stop or go back!, then break carefully over a edge (it'll just break cleanly without any sharp corners if you've cut in one long stream)

Now place the glassplate on the frame and align it. take the other magnets and put a little drop of 2 components-glue on it. let them snap on the glass over the other magnets carefully and slowly

snapped on and glued magnet.

magnets already holding the glass tightly - technically you wouldn't need any more magnets. As you may remember the hdf bend a little from the heat from the iron while veneering - this causes a huge gap between glass and wood so we had/have to add more magnets to press the glass against the wood to close the gap... ;/

First test with the frames... Also to beautify the inner part of the frame a bit more we sprayed a large sheet of plain paper using spraymount (use whatever glue you have at hand).

they line up nicely, the height matches almost perfect!

Some real pictures inserted!

To hang the frame we used plain metal frame-hangers which are meant to be screwed onto the wood - as the hdf is rather thin here this isn't possible...

... so we just smeared a huge load of 2-component epoxy under and over the edges of the hanger

... like this

... and if you smear enough and carefully ...

... IT'LL HANG!!!

so nice!

By the way - the cards displayed here are traded on a german self-painted-card-trading-system called "Kakao-Karten". The miniframes fit the formats there nicely and whenever you get a landscape-oriented one you can use the spacers and place it anywhere in the frame. If you're a little less lazy you can fit many many more pictures in it, at all orientations and placements you want!

But it could also be used to display regular large images such as photo printouts or painted or printed pictures. It comes in handy whenever you need a frame with a thick "outer frame" thats contents can be changed easily and often...

I hope you liked this tutorial and idea and will build your own frame using some ideas shown here. Also - as always - if you want exact measures or tips on anything, just mail in or leave a comment. You'll always be welcome!

As it's a one-chassis design the construction was as easy as possible. Although i've left a little space beneath at the bottom for future activation using a small (class-d?) amp. The MDF Cases were veneered using quality Teak-veneer and then etched: Front dark reddish-brown, Rest dark black. Oiled (using maple oil) and sanded multiple times up to 600Grit they have a wonderful feel to them.

The sound is just as convincing as the exterieur: For such a small broadband driver in a closed box they perform just great! The GHP design allows a clear and detailed play over the full spectrum and i was really astonished when i heared them play Niels-Henning-Orsted-Petersons sweeped bass... I just wouldn't believe that small broadband drivers would play bass on such a level in a *CLOSED* box ... wow . The suction-circuit does a nice job at flattening the rest. Although for a real and full highend (Oo) experience you really want to add a subwoofer and take a little load off those smallies...

All in all it was really worth the building time. The part that took longest was - as always -the finishing, but it was worth the nice looks and good fit into the existing cupboard-system.

References:

Original Design