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 .

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!

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!

Also, as we (and probably many many others) like to use plain glass shelfs (as they're easy to mount and look good) to display figures there is the very common problem of dust and dirty laying down on the figures. The other thing we propose here is a nice method to build sturdy yet good looking glass cover you can simply place on the shelf over the figures (a box with two open sides: backside and bottom).

For building and setup instructions for those two cool concepts, please look inside .

First things first, so what we'll cover here is a method of building custom glass display cabinets of precut glass (we're still using the method from http://blog.kanojo.de/2010/10/04/custom-modelkit-display-part-2/ - just that we switched to a hardmetal-wheeled glass cutter which is a huge improvement!).

We do this using regular silicone as used for sealing off edges in bathroom/kitchen. You can probably get it in any DIY/Hardware store near you for just a few Euros (2.50Eur seems a common price in germany). The cheapest clear you can get will suffice . Aside of glass and silicone a little crepe-tape and a razorblade and/or cutter (for scrubbing off excess silicone) as well as a silicone pouring gun and a silicone peel (optional) are the only materials/tools needed.

Lay out the glass as you would like it to be glued together. Mask off the edges with the tape as shown (leave ~0.3-0.6cm space to each side)

Detail of the masked glass

Detail of the masked glass

This is the layout of our masked glass pieces. Make sure they will fit in this order .

A nice trick for protecting both your workspace and your parts from the silicone is to use plastic bags which have been cut open beforehand - silicone will not stick to them.

Tools used to pour and peel the silicone.

We'll use the "edgies" part of the silicone peel tool for this - we don't want too much of that stuff sticking in our corners and edges.

Another nice little trick is to cut a little angle into the nozzle of the silicone - this will act as a guide along the edges of the glass when pouring the silicone

Now very slowly pour nice rolls of silicone on all the edges. Remember to loosen the spring of the pouring gun just a half cm before the end of the glass so you won't pour any excess silicone....

Then after placing a roll of silicone on all the edges put up the glass, best using two persons. Hold for just a few seconds and make sure that there is a little gap between all the glass parts. a gap <1mm will work, but with no gap it won't get as sturdy as it could...

Another sample of how the edges and corner can look like when drying

Another sample of how a (more or less) nicely poured roll of silicone will look....

As you can see here you will get ugly blobs of silicone here and there. This is why you want to pull your silicone peeling tools slowly and carefully along all edges. Be sure not to remove the silicone completely - a small roll of silicone should remain in the edges!

This is what the outsides will look like - this is where you want to use a razorblade or cutter to carefully remove excess silicone.

Now would be the time to let your silicone dry. Normally it takes up to 15-30minutes for a initial outer Skin. Every conseccutive 3mm take 24h to dry - so as we normally use rolls < 3mm let's just wait a long night...

Also compared to the previous attempts to glue glass to glass this is extremely sturdy. Even the long 1.15 meters case can be held on one corner using only one hand without any signs of weakages!

But now for the lighting.... For this we used cheapo LED-Strips from the german electro-crap supplier "pollin" - they can be found here:

http://tinyurl.com/63ogqja

International readers may want to check dealextreme.com for "led-strip"s, examples could include:

http://www.dealextreme.com/p/12v-led-strip-11-led-33cm-white-5254

http://www.dealextreme.com/p/12v-led-strip-30-led-50cm-white-5256

http://www.dealextreme.com/p/12v-75-led-white-light-strip-50cm-11303

which all sound reasonable. All those have in common that you can (just a "probably" and given a tad of skill for the dealextreme ones!)  cut them, even if stated otherwise and that you may want to peel them out of their crappy housing. The Strips themselves want to be supplied with a standard 12V voltage, so use any switch-mode powersupply you can get your hands on. Don't buy too cheap - we tried, we regret it!

Our first tests with those nice led-strips were kinda successfully, so now for the mouting

After determining the positions of the strips place small short rolls of silicone in the edges

And press the strips into the silicone. You may want to hold them "in" for a few minutes depending on how deformed the strips were (some are quite deformed!). Also note that this is a great use for your razorblade and cutter to remove the excess silicone once it's dry

The cable is made of painted (so it's isolated) wire which we twisted so it'll look nicer. Here it's still mounted using clear tape for testing, later we'll mount it using small blobs of silicone.

For nicer looks the backside of the strip is beeing covered with white e-tape.

which you need to press on thightly - also note the nice "twisted pair" cable

Cut off the excess tape

and fasten using silicone as shown above.

These are the small mounting blobs for the cable. Still need to cut off some excess....

One late addition was using 10x10mm aluminum L-Profiles to nicely conceil both the backscatter of the LEDs and the led-strips themselves. Looks even better!

Yay, it's finished. You still see the strips and the irregular light they sometimes scatter back into the room - looks like just some tape wasn't enough :/.

but the translucency of the silicone-glued glass and light inside is just great!

Look, even Marissa is blinded by all the light and randomly starts to masterspark-shoot-people!

Nice effect .

And, as promised - we used the same LED-strips to light our DETOLF - the whole construction is kinda simple, a 12V SMPSU, some twisted pair painted wire (as before) and three strips per side...

Full shot of the lit DETOLF

Both reflectons on the backside plate and the inner lighting looks great on the figures!

the mounting was really easy - solder the 12V PSU to the led strip and fasten to using cable straps

upper cable strap.

this way even blackrock shooter lights up in a whole new dimension!

we used 3*48cm of strips on each side, luckily they were easy to solder so now it's one large strip

That's what we thought when we started to plan that table. Another nice thing about it: It's extensible, you can always mod in a LED matrix and a matrix-cabinet and start displaying pixel art, a ticker or whatever you feel like ... but first you need the basic hardware, and thats what this post is about!

And now, since i want to prevent a "too long, didn't read" article, straight on to the pictures (tagged nicely with information on what is happening ):

Starting with the milky-plexiglas ... from standing two years in workshop it looks quite bad, scratches and drit all over...

So using some glass-cleaner (as lube) and 800grit paper we need to sand it level, 800 is also fine enough to leave a nice frosted surface. If you're after a smoother surface use a 100%-cotton cloth and toothpaste (yeah, thats right) and polish with medium pressure and speed.

As for the whole cabinet, stands, etc. we used 19mm to 22mm MDF

For painting we used "Door and Window Paint" (a PU-hardened acrylic paint) and a simple foam-roller....

And see ... it works quite nicely. A nice and even surface can be achieve with this (two coats, sand using 220 to 400 grit, another final coat)

As you can see here raw mdf needs quite some coats (as described above), especially the edges tend to suck in all the paint

After final coat....

last coat and properly sealed edges here too...

Ready to be worked with

The stands are a simple construction of one small and one wider MDF-piece - they'll look "square"-ish afterwards

all those edges need to be filled and smoothed - quite some things left to do ;P

all stands are reinforced with two screws per stand. The screwheads are countersunk so the holes can be puttied, this way nothing will be visible later...

countersunk screws....

smeared putty in it, leave some putty on the surface, as the mass dries it'll slump down, so you want a buffer...

marks for the screws on the "baseplate", those will reinforce the stand-joints...

everything put together - IT CAN STAND, YAY!

still not perfect, quite a gap visible ...

these are the upper cabinet walls, the squared timber will hold the glass and plexiglas sheets later...

be shure to measure, mark and glue very exact...

to reinforce the mounts for the glass we also used some screws...

the screws on the baseplate were also countersunk ... so the upper cabinet walls can be glued on without any problems

As just described...

the walls were mounted using simple wood-glue

and theres - just again - work for some putty and a sander ...

and now for something completely different: ... wait, not quite. but this is the main switch we've chosen at a local electro-market ...

and .. wooo, lamp socket and cables. those will be mounted inside the table and used to illuminate it later!

and - as a first test (unaligned) revels ... the concept works

quite okay ... well, the light is distributed very unevenly, but that'll get better once the lamps are aligned

so, putty hardened, sander sanded, this is how the new smooth outer-wall-surface looks now ...

after some fitting (took almost two hours using a file) of the glass-plate there are some gaps, those get filled with putty and left to dry (no worries, it'll come off the glass easily later)

more hard putty action

more hard putty action

here the glass was already removed ... a tad too early one might say

and sanded down and smoothed using 120-400 grit paper...

the inside will be layed out with aluminum-foil plated paper

the foil was mounted on the paper using simple spraymount. where this nice and cheap boesner.com brand is not available one might fall back to 3M hobby mount or the like...

after some experiments with pieces of wood to hold the lamp-sockets we fell back to using ... tape!

in the meanwhile the milky and frosted plexi-plate has got some additions ... these make nice equally spaced and sharp shadows and thus conceil the "dirty" shadows of the mounts on the inner walls...

closeup ...

finished reflector with lamps...

after some coats, sanding and a final coat (as described above) the main cabinet is ready for use...

closeup of the upper edge...

closeup of the upper edge...

the mounting hole for the biiig mainswitch

and everything nicely assembled

and this is how it glows!

here, be assured, the camera brought out the unevenness of the lightdistribution worse than the human eye does...

blends nicely into the room ...

... and what can we do with it? We can get shots of figures with "epic" lighting

... or make clouds look more realistic

... endless possibilities

it also really really looks good on tea in glass cups (especially those nice double-walled ones). reimu also enjoys a hot tea

glowing tea, yay!

Well, that was about it. A little sidenote may be that all the light evenness issues are way worse on the pictures than in reallife, somehow the eye blends the dynamic ranges better than the sensor. Also, if you feel like building exactly this just leave a comment or drop a mail, we'll assist as good as we can, especially if you need dimensions we can just drop them whenever they're needed. Hope this encourages you to build your own nerdy and cool furniture . And glowing things always catch peoples eyes ...

Okay, so first you might ask yourself what you need to build those? It's rather simple, only two things really. Of course the leaf-gold or leaf-silver, the special "transfer" version which sticks a little to one piece of parchment paper and thus can be touched, moved, etc ... very handy. We recommend starting with the silver as it's cheaper for learning and experimenting. You might find it in a nerby art-supply store (boesner.com if you live in the right place ) - if that was a false shot, maybe try asking in shops that build picture-frames and frame your pictures - if it's a shop that crafts the frames themselves they might have some and sell it to you.

The next thing is spray-mount, use 3M permanent spraymount for example. We didn't use the traditional method with that special gold-milk (a strange kind of watery wood-glue thing) as it was hard to get it evenly distributed on thin paper (parchment paper) without making the paper crinkle ... that's where those spraymounts come in handy.

And thats really about it - we used the parchement paper which lies in the package of gold/silver between as a seperator, it worked perfect. So no extra paper too!

Okay, now on to the crafting:

The package of transfer-leaf-gold

Now take on sheet of the parchment paper seperators of the gold/silver package and coat it evenly from ~20-30 cm distance with the spraymount

place the sticky spraymount-coated parchment paper on a table, take the sheet of transfer-silver/gold and slowly lower it above the sticky paper onto it. Once it touched the surface only lower it further, never raise it again, the gold/silver will tear ...

then after a few seconds (10-20) you can pull the transfer-paper off - the gold/silver remains on the parchment paper we coated with spraymount ... still shiny and smooth, almost no crinkles!

and then ... do your usual origami!

Yes, it's true - we this is a small kind of tutorial, but the spraymount / slow lowering technique really took its time to find out. We first tried with that gold-milk, was a no-go. The silver was full of crinkles as the thin paper crinkled (the milk is kinda watery as i said...), so this didn't look nice.  Also all experiments with those kinds of materials tend to be expensive .

What is also missing is a description of the origami done, but this is a whole different story that's better describe on other sites ... our tip: try youtube videos, they're much more comprehensive than those image-kind of instructions ... they tend to get very confusing.

So, what did we do with this? Using the glass-cutting technique described in a earlier post we build some boxes and ... wai - here are the results:

Hope you found this idea inspiring and ... it's not that hard, try yourself! Get Creative!

While using 3.x on my iPhone free (as in self-hosted and "free as in free speech") syncing was a bit of tinkering here and there but worked. With iOS 4 Apple introduced a new scheme for the Calendar (which used to be a nicely and sanely formatted sqlite file), so all the sync-tools aren't really working anymore. Iphonesync (required J/B Phones and synced to e.g. Funambol) can still read notes(?) and addresses but can't sync the calendar anymore. So i was looking for another option to sync this thingy - and found one (or two) ...

Basically there are two options - one is to use libimobiledevice, a library that achieved protocol-compatability with iPhones native interfaces (the same protocol as used by iTunes) that is just Wowzers. They also implemented a API for syncing calendar, contacts, notes and apps(?). Problem is - the API is there, but no "client" to use it. Conduit seems to have something in the planning or may have even started implementing it... but you'd have to hack or wait here.

The other option you have is checking what option that strange phone has natively, and for iOS 4.x you may discover theres calDAV and cardDAV, which are two nice (almost) standardized protocols for syncinc Calendars and Contacts... So why not just use them?

Turns out it's a bit more complicated than that. Apple has published a card/calDAV sync-server under GPL, but has made it kind of complicated to get this up and running nicely. Thanks to the thrive of the Free Software Scene there are quite some alternatives, to me to most noteworthy one is davical - a nice little service written in php to provide both cardDAV and calDAV as well as a tiny tweeny little web-interface for administration and settings. That and a variety of sync-clients on the Linux side makes just what you need! So let's set this up!

For those of you using Debian there's the nice way to use the official davical packages on their repository. I chose another path and installed from git - i simply checked out their git-repos and moved the files in my DocumentRoot, then almost verbatimly followed theiwiki-page for Debian-Installations. One real problem was the .well-known URL scheme for cardDAV (who the f... came up with that f... up scheme for auto-discovery?). Thanks to the nice support in the davical irc channel and some brute-forcing i got it to work quite easily. Luckily i didn't need the SRV-Records proposed here (why ever?!), so all i had to do is forwarding the .well-known urls correctly:

RewriteEngine On

RewriteRule ^/.well-known(.*)$ /caldav.php/.well-known$1 [NC,L]

RewriteRule ^/principals/users(.*)$ /caldav.php$1 [NC,L]

caldav://your.hostna.me/path/to/caldav.php/USERNAME/home

http://your.hostna.me/path/to/caldav.php/USERNAME/YOUR-CONTACTS-NAME

Heyyas there,

here comes part two of the "custom modelkit/figure display" series (or whatever you'd call it). A custom display for figures, modelkits, whatever - you name it! It's a crossover between a glass-case/cabinet and a shelf. It combines the idea of hanging it on the wall with a glass-case so the figures/GKs don't collect too much dust. This time - unfortuneatly - i don't have pictures of the quality and detail of the other tutorials, but i will try to describe the working parts as good as possible.

It first started with the build of that one Tenshi GK - which was paticularly fragile, thus the problem to clean it when/if it collected too much dust. So, as the glass-cabinet was in another room a new shelf had to be built. It would need to be good visible, but protect from dust - so most of it had to be glass. We decided to do the bottom as wood to keep it more simple. So, here's the Pix/Howto:

Materials you need for the basic stuff. Here it's a glass-cutter, three 40x30 picture frames and the wood (already beveled with a router)

Details of the beveling. If you own a router and a few millers you should recognize the pattern . If not, try asking a cabinetmaker near you. If you're nice they might help you with this for little money in the thank-you box(?)

Details of the bevel...

And this one was the trickiest part of the whole process: Cutting glass. I use a regular steel-wheel cutter, place the glass on a surface that won't scratch it, mark the line where it has to be cut, use a ruler to guide the cutter and cut. The cutting speed/strenght is the key to success - you don't want to press so hard you can hear "sand-ish" sound, but hard enough to cut the glass slightly. you'll recognize the right sound if you hear it. then quickly (as glass can flow just a tiny little bit and will close the cut at microscopic level) put it at the edge of a table and break it with in one heavy yank.... use some sanding paper to trim the edges....

Next the glass needs to be glued together - i used pattex glass-glue (which is a kind of superglue), it needs to be applied very very thin, so the edges need to be good. If you cut the glass right no two selfcut edges will need to be glued together. I supported the glass with two rectangular (90* angles, yay!) stones and books....

Detail of the glued glass, note the supports with tape and stones

Also i've already router'ed the notches (4mm, as opposed to 1.5mm for the glass) so while glueing i have a bit of a guide for the glass...

Next, after putting the notch down to 1.5mm (just the width of the glass, i applied oil to the glass, put it in the notches, applied and smoothed the putty and took the glass out again) we need to sand the wood. To do this i used a eccentric grinder, but if such a machine is inavailable, you can just hand-sand it....

Then, after sanding i applied acrylic primer using my paint-gun....

... which needs to be hand-sanded again. I used K220 paper here.

Then the first layer of simple acrylic white. I diluted it with water so i'd be able to spray wet, which gets a better "gloss" effect

Okay, the edges aren't perfect...

Now, to avoid too much dust/dirt sticking to the wet paint i quick-dried it using a infra-red lamp, which is normally used when you catched a cold ... at least here in germany...

Finished! Yay! (yes, it's not straigt, but the poster also isn't!)

So, this is our new figure display case for two medium-size or one large figure. The glossy paint-job turned out quite okay, only a few faults/not-so-nice parts. Mounted on the wall it really looks nice!

I hope this inspired you to try DIY'ing your next display, and not just run to the closest IKEA to buy a ready made one. Selfmade furniture is the best, has a that nice feel of something you yourself made with your own hands to it ...

So, on we go. Even though this is pretty straightforward you need a bit of equipment to get it right. The basic equipment is glue - quality wood-glue, as sold by Ponal. The secondmost important thing is probaby some kind of grinder/sander, as you would go crazy doing all this by hand. Next would be a router (no, not the computer thingy but the power-tool...) and/or jigsaw... but more of that later.

!BIG FAT WARNING!

THIS IS NOT A HOWTO - IT IS A DOCUMENTATION ON HOW I BUILT THESE SPEAKERS. I AM NO EXPERT AND THIS IS NOT A ADVISE ON HOW YOU SHOULD DO IT. I MAY HAVE DONE SEVERAL THINGS WRONG/SUBOPTIMAL!

Okay, here we go:

Basic materials needed ... wood (MDF), the speakers ... lets go ÖP

Closeup of the broadband speaker and the hole - we already used the router here

The hole got quite okay - since the speakers aren't to be counterbored(?) anyways

Okay, now for some glueing action.

Make sure everything is airtight - you don't want any leaks nowhere. to be sure smear some glue in the corners/angles...

Moar glueing...

Be sure to have a pack of cleenex or similar handy - and don't do this on grannys good carpet

After only a hours (or two to be sure) they should be okay to work on...

As we suspected leaks we smeared even more glue in the angles...

Then drilled the holes for the connectors on the backside. even if it's not so important here we made sure we have a tight fit so we need to screw them in using force - again to avoid leaks.

those fluffy pieces of clouds are called "Sonofil" - its used to absorb sound / damming on the inside of the box. you could also use sheeps wool ....

After tearing it apart a bit to make it even fluffier put it in the box like this

then, after soldering the cables on the backside connectors, routing them through the inside and soldering them on the chassis - time for a first test

Also, more suspected leaks - smearing from the outside Oo

After enough testing and smearing we worked on - here we milled a angle on the front using the router...

Worked out okay it seems...

Glue glue glue and some more glue - hell, this is going to be fun to sand

After some deliberate sanding using a eccentric sander ... this emerged!

smooth as a babies ... well, whatever is smooth on a baby!

The guy that wanted to have those speakers wanted them ... like this. well, tastes differ i guess

the color is named "pretty violet" - makes me pretty violent, still the paintjob worked out okay for a first-timer

there *are* marks, okay, but ... its only a 10eur speaker and ... firsttimer, remember?

Crinkles here are going underneath the chassis anyways...

Final product looks okay on the desk!

Yay!

So - the final product seems okay, and for less than two days of work (not fulltime!) its a really nice speaker. It certainly lived up to my expectations of how good a 10eur (actually more 16-17eur) speaker can sound, and its hell better than most pc speakers you can buy out there for maybe as much as 30-40eur. Its - at least in my opinion - worth the time and effort - even if only to learn something, and have tried something new.

This project is - for me - a base to build upon - as in that i want to build more and more sophisticated speakers with better craftsmenship, so this is just a start. I hope you maybe drawn into Speakerbuilding yourself as it is a vast and interesting hobby - and you can start off with almost nothing still getting excellent results - especially if you're not into looks it gets way easier .