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<?xml version="1.0" encoding="utf-8" standalone="yes"?><rss version="2.0" xmlns:atom="http://www.w3.org/2005/Atom"><channel><title>BenCurranDev - Build Awesome Stuff In The Cloud</title><link>https://bencurran.dev/</link><description>Recent content on BenCurranDev - Build Awesome Stuff In The Cloud</description><generator>Hugo -- gohugo.io</generator><language>en</language><lastBuildDate>Mon, 04 Mar 2024 04:18:36 +0000</lastBuildDate><atom:link href="https://bencurran.dev/index.xml" rel="self" type="application/rss+xml"/><item><title>Nostalgia Files: Zone 3 Midnight To Dawn</title><link>https://bencurran.dev/posts/laser-nostalgia/</link><pubDate>Mon, 04 Mar 2024 04:18:36 +0000</pubDate><guid>https://bencurran.dev/posts/laser-nostalgia/</guid><description>&lt;p>There used to be a laser tag place in the city called Zone 3. Back in the late 90s and early 00’s they would run Midnight To Dawn sessions. All night, unlimited games until the sun rose, Prodigy, Orbital and The Shamen blasting, plus it was also the only place here you could buy Jolt Cola. Basically it was Hackers vibe with laser guns.&lt;/p>
&lt;p>A bunch of regulars to these events and the pro league players would come to know the place inside out, every hidey hole, every sniping nest, every base weakness and common travelled path’s choke point. Some of those 3am caffeine rush games became epic for their hard fought battles or complete and utter rout of a team. Yellow base was always the worst and would be a crowning achievement if you chose that team and came out victorious.&lt;/p></description><content>&lt;p>There used to be a laser tag place in the city called Zone 3. Back in the late 90s and early 00’s they would run Midnight To Dawn sessions. All night, unlimited games until the sun rose, Prodigy, Orbital and The Shamen blasting, plus it was also the only place here you could buy Jolt Cola. Basically it was Hackers vibe with laser guns.&lt;/p>
&lt;p>A bunch of regulars to these events and the pro league players would come to know the place inside out, every hidey hole, every sniping nest, every base weakness and common travelled path’s choke point. Some of those 3am caffeine rush games became epic for their hard fought battles or complete and utter rout of a team. Yellow base was always the worst and would be a crowning achievement if you chose that team and came out victorious.&lt;/p>
&lt;p>At the end of every game you would come out, hang up your game vest and gun and head out to the common room to shit talk, refuel of Jolt and fries, and wait for the ancient but reliable as hell for matrix printer to spit out every players score card. The pros would scan their ibutton fobs used for league membership on the Wyse terminal to check their stats changes. Either way the shit talking increased as we would find out who shot who, especially if it was your own team mates.&lt;/p>
&lt;p>At some point during the night the siren call of “MACCAS RUN!” Would ring out and people would negotiate with those going to bring them back food, eventually resulting in 10 people piling into a compact car to go through the nearby 24 hours drive through. The rest would play on until a game would end and you would come out to find a table piled with burgers, fries, sundaes, and drinks. It was bedlam.&lt;/p>
&lt;p>Eventually, the sun would rise, and it was kick out time. A gang of bleary eyed nerds would wander out the door, sore, tired, crashing from sugar, caffeine and adrenaline highs. One hand a half drank, warm, Jolt, other hand a bundle of fanfold paper with all our game stats. We were TOTALLY gonna keep those. Back into our car that hopefully hadn’t been ticketed or towed in the middle of the night. Back home after dropping friends who we gave a ride to home. Slept the day away.&lt;/p>
&lt;p>Those sure were some goddamn days.&lt;/p></content></item><item><title>I made an Octolamp!</title><link>https://bencurran.dev/posts/octolamp/</link><pubDate>Mon, 03 Jul 2023 08:18:36 +0000</pubDate><guid>https://bencurran.dev/posts/octolamp/</guid><description>&lt;p>Earlier this year I noticed a &lt;a href="https://hachyderm.io/@martinwoodward/109700261628981082">very cool project&lt;/a> posted by &lt;a href="https://hachyderm.io/@martinwoodward">Martin Woodward&lt;/a>. He had made an &lt;a href="https://github.com/martinwoodward/octolamp">Octolamp&lt;/a>, a 3D printed Octocat (mascot and logo of GitHub) lit by RGB LEDs inside it that could be controlled via Wi-Fi using a web interface and API. I have a bit of a history with loving things that light up and have cool designs attached, so I thought this was a really cool project to build. I had a few ideas for how I could make it my own and I wanted to make one myself. Only problem was, I had no way to 3D print my own.&lt;/p></description><content>&lt;p>Earlier this year I noticed a &lt;a href="https://hachyderm.io/@martinwoodward/109700261628981082">very cool project&lt;/a> posted by &lt;a href="https://hachyderm.io/@martinwoodward">Martin Woodward&lt;/a>. He had made an &lt;a href="https://github.com/martinwoodward/octolamp">Octolamp&lt;/a>, a 3D printed Octocat (mascot and logo of GitHub) lit by RGB LEDs inside it that could be controlled via Wi-Fi using a web interface and API. I have a bit of a history with loving things that light up and have cool designs attached, so I thought this was a really cool project to build. I had a few ideas for how I could make it my own and I wanted to make one myself. Only problem was, I had no way to 3D print my own.&lt;/p>
&lt;p>Fast forward a few months and my family got me a 3D printer for my birthday, a &lt;a href="https://www.creality.com/products/ender-3-v2-neo-3d-printer">Creality Ender 3 v2 Neo&lt;/a>. I was very excited to get my hands on it and start printing things, and I knew exactly what I wanted to print first. After a few weeks of learning, testing, tweaking, and many &lt;a href="https://www.3dbenchy.com/">3DBenchys&lt;/a>, I finally felt confident enough to start printing a large project like the Octolamp.&lt;/p>
&lt;p>
&lt;img src="https://bencurran.dev/img/IMG_8799.jpg" alt="My new Ender 3 v2 Neo" class="center" style="border-radius: 2px;" />
&lt;img src="https://bencurran.dev/img/IMG_8791.jpg" alt="Traditional first print of a #3DBenchy" class="center" style="border-radius: 2px;" />
&lt;/p>
&lt;p>I picked up some white and black PLA to make the print and found that my local, friendly, electronics store &lt;a href="https://www.jaycar.com.au/">Jaycar&lt;/a>, who had also been our go-to for the Ender 3, carried all of the internal components I needed as well. I picked up a &lt;a href="https://www.jaycar.com.au/duinotech-wi-fi-mini-esp8266-main-board/p/XC3802">Duinotech ESP8266 Mini&lt;/a>, a &lt;a href="https://www.jaycar.com.au/duinotech-arduino-compatible-w2812b-rgb-led-strip-2m/p/XC4390">Duinotech WS2812B RGB LED strip&lt;/a>, as well as a little self-congratulatory promotion present of a &lt;a href="https://www.jaycar.com.au/rechargeable-12-30w-soldering-iron-set/p/TS1545">Rechargeable Soldering Iron&lt;/a> to put it together as my old soldering iron was not in the best shape.&lt;/p>
&lt;img src="https://bencurran.dev/img/IMG_9206.jpg" alt="My USB rechargeable soldering iron" class="center" style="border-radius: 2px;" />
&lt;p>Armed with all the parts, I went to work, first forking and cloning Martin&amp;rsquo;s repo and importing the parts into the slicer software to get them ready to print. I had to do a bit of tweaking with the settings for the prints, as I needed the front diffuser and inner reflector to be good quality in the white PLA, but using the same settings for the black PLA case would result in a full 24 hours of printing, which I was not comfortable with at this time. So, I added in a lower quality, therefore faster, print output to get it down to 9 hours. I printed the parts over the course of a few days with no issues printing the white pieces, but a small mistake on my part in the slicing of the case causing a failure at 90 minutes in. Quick adjustment and the retry printed great! As a bonus, my 3 year old daughter has a new outline of a cat for her dressing table mirror, she loves it and no waste!&lt;/p>
&lt;p>
&lt;img src="https://bencurran.dev/img/IMG_9209.jpg" alt="Progress photo of the black case" class="center" style="border-radius: 2px;" />
&lt;img src="https://bencurran.dev/img/IMG_9182.png" alt="Progress screenshot of the white front diffuser from Octoprint" class="center" style="border-radius: 2px;" />
&lt;/p>
&lt;p>While that was happening, I soldered the wires for the RGB LED strip connector to my ESP8266 Mini, plugged it in and flashed it with &lt;a href="https://github.com/Aircoookie/WLED">WLED&lt;/a> using their amazingly cool web installer. Hooked it up to Wi-Fi and the light strip to test and it came out great! So many cool configuration options to make it do all sorts of things! Once the front diffuser was printed, I installed the lights in it, needing a little glue to convince some of the LEDS with strange bends to stay in place, cut to length and configured WLED with the new length and configured the number of LEDS in each of the segments.&lt;/p>
&lt;img src="https://bencurran.dev/img/wledui.png" alt="The WLED control interface" class="center" style="border-radius: 2px;" />
&lt;p>After the rest was printed and I was confident in the electronics being in place, I finally snapped it all together and turned it on for the first time, it looked MAGICAL. I had set the default light scheme to be a cyan/magenta synth-wave style pattern, and it looked amazing. I was so happy with how it turned out. Only problem I ended up having was that the Duinotech ESP8266 Mini comes with GPIO headers pre-soldered onto the board, which makes it too big to fit inside the Octolamp. I attempted to de-solder them but had trouble removing them, so I am going to instead design and print a base for the Octolamp to sit on that will house the ESP8266 Mini, and have a hole in the bottom for the USB cable to come out of.&lt;/p>
&lt;video width=100% controls autoplay>
&lt;source src="https://bencurran.dev/video/Octolamp-bencurrandev.mp4" type="video/webm">
Your browser does not support the video tag.
&lt;/video>
&lt;p>I am extremely happy with how the Octolamp turned out, and I am so thankful to Martin for designing it and sharing it with the world. I paid it back, in true GitHub fashion, by contributing to the project with the resources for Australia and some of the extra tips, as well as the base once I have built it as an option for others. I&amp;rsquo;m not exploring some of the capabilities of WLED and seeing what else I can do with it. I have a few ideas for other projects I want to do with the 3D printer, so stay tuned for more posts about those in the future! I could combine both of these and leverage the OctoPrint API to make the Octolamp light up when a print is in progress, using the ring as a progress meter. So many possibilities!&lt;/p>
&lt;img src="https://bencurran.dev/img/IMG_9215.png" alt="First working photo of lava mode" class="center" style="border-radius: 2px;" />
&lt;p>UPDATE 4/7/2023: After talking about this project with a colleague, he said &amp;ldquo;Why desolder the connector? They&amp;rsquo;re cents to replace, cut them off and desolder the individual pins, much easier!&amp;rdquo;. So I went and did that and the wires are now directly soldered to the board and inside the case as designed! Much neater and easier to put somewhere!&lt;/p></content></item><item><title>First Post</title><link>https://bencurran.dev/posts/first-post/</link><pubDate>Thu, 17 Feb 2022 06:36:36 +0000</pubDate><guid>https://bencurran.dev/posts/first-post/</guid><description>&lt;p>I have actually put something here finally! I&amp;rsquo;m still building it for now, learning Hugo, but this is up using GitHub Codespaces for development and authoring, GitHub Actions for automated build and deploy and GitHub Pages for hosting! Like a real dev!&lt;/p></description><content>&lt;p>I have actually put something here finally! I&amp;rsquo;m still building it for now, learning Hugo, but this is up using GitHub Codespaces for development and authoring, GitHub Actions for automated build and deploy and GitHub Pages for hosting! Like a real dev!&lt;/p></content></item><item><title>Hello World</title><link>https://bencurran.dev/posts/hello-world/</link><pubDate>Wed, 16 Feb 2022 13:29:20 +0800</pubDate><guid>https://bencurran.dev/posts/hello-world/</guid><description>&lt;p>Hello, I am Ben.&lt;/p></description><content>&lt;p>Hello, I am Ben.&lt;/p></content></item><item><title>Links to my stuff</title><link>https://bencurran.dev/links/</link><pubDate>Mon, 01 Jan 0001 00:00:00 +0000</pubDate><guid>https://bencurran.dev/links/</guid><description>&lt;p>To be created. I know!&lt;/p></description><content>&lt;p>To be created. I know!&lt;/p></content></item><item><title>Who am I?</title><link>https://bencurran.dev/about/</link><pubDate>Mon, 01 Jan 0001 00:00:00 +0000</pubDate><guid>https://bencurran.dev/about/</guid><description>&lt;p>I am Ben Curran, I am a Cloud Solution Architect, teller of Dad jokes and herder of cats.&lt;/p></description><content>&lt;p>I am Ben Curran, I am a Cloud Solution Architect, teller of Dad jokes and herder of cats.&lt;/p></content></item></channel></rss>