A Better iPad Stylus

A few weeks ago, I decided to make a stylus for my iPad for use when drawing or doodling. It turns out there are several dozen blogs and YouTube videos showcasing the many ways to accomplish this. It's quite easy to do.

While the homemade styli designs I reviewed were surely functional, I thought most were lacking a bit in the aesthetic department. Then something occured to me.

Remember the Handspring Visor Edge? I had the metallic silver model (and still do). It sports a blazing fast 33 MHz CPU and 8MB of RAM. I've kept it over the years because it still works ... and because I think it's a great design.  I especially loved the weight, shape, and feel of the little stylus.  That stylus happens to be metallic.

You see where I'm going here. Since the stylus is metal, all that I needed was some sort of conductive tip.

Here's what I came up with. It works great as long as any part of my hand is touching the metal pen (which is hard not to do). It looks nice (I wouldn't say it's beautiful, but I think it looks better than most homemade styli). It's compact and easy to tote around. And here's the best part: the tip offers far more accuracy and draws a thinner line than commercial or homemade conductive styli that I've tried or seen demonstrated.

Here's how I made it:

I started by removing the little plastic tip from the Handspring Visor Stylus. Here, it's already removed. You may need pliers to pry it out.

Here are the primary ingredients. Heavy-duty aluminum foil, tape (I used electrical tape, but you could use duct tape), and a rubber foot that I found in my shop.

About the rubber foot. This may be the hardest bit to find, but it's something you should be able to pick up at a hardware store (or, at least, you can find something similar). I cut off part of the foot as seen in the photo above, then drilled a hole into the rubber that would tightly fit the metal stylus. Other materials will also work. I made an earlier model with a cheap wood plug using the same method. It worked well, but isn't as flexible (meaning that you may have trouble with the wood cracking when you drill into it). Rubber works best. 

Wrap the aluminum foil around the rubber and fold it into the hole you drilled. Roll the aluminum foil-wrapped rubber around on a flat surface to make it nice and smooth. Then stick the stylus into that hole, ensuring the foil makes good contact with the metal stylus. Test it out at this point to ensure it works well.

Now wrap the foil-wrapped rubber foot and stylus with a short piece of strong tape. Once you've done that, you're done. The blue shrink tubing you see here isn't really necessary. It's just for looks. I took a short segment of blue shrink tube, stretched it out with pliers so it would fit over the stylus, cover the tape, and partially cover the foil-wrapped foot. Then I applied heat to seal it all up. Here's the (almost) finished stylus. The last thing I did was smooth out the blue tubing with my fingers until there were no bumps or weird shapes caused by the underlying tape.And here is the completed stylus, ready for action.

So that's all there is to it. It's a bit more involved than most of the DIY capacitive stylus tutorials you'll find on the web, but I think it's worth the effort. It works great. It looks nice. It's a great way to recycle a peice of old tech. I've been using it for a while and the aluminum is showing no signs of splitting. If it does split, it's a relatively simple matter to rip off the tip and make a new one. If you don't have an old Handspring Visor Edge in your closet and want to try this, would you believe that you can still buy a metal stylus? 

New Life for a Broken Lamp

We have a set of 'natural light' lamps which, while ugly, are useful. They contain special bulbs that cast a full-spectrum, very bright glow (1,800 lumens) that approximates daylight.  

These sort of lamps claim to support a feeling of well-being by boosting seratonin, melatonin, and Vitamin D production. I can't vouch for that, but I can report that the lamps are great for reading and computing. When I'm staring at my monitor at night, I like to place a lamp nearby and point the bulb toward the wall. It's almost as if a window is open.

Last week, a cheap plastic component on one of the lamps broke. I didn't want to throw it away. There was nothing wrong with the wiring, switch, or bulb, after all. Instead, I took it as an opportunity to create something new. This is the result.

I started out by (carefully) destroying the lamp with a screwdriver and small pry bar. I threw out the plastic junk and kept all the internal parts.

I then assembled a container for the new lamp with some scrap wood I had lying around. For the main face, I joined two 1"x4" pine boards. The top and sides are made from strips of 1/4"x4" oak. It's held upright by two small pine 'feet' joined to the back of the lamp (see the image below to see what these look like). I drilled a hole in the front-facing pine to house the on/off switch.

This is the wall-facing side of the lamp, showing how I reassembled the 'guts' of the old plastic lamp in the new wood structure. Only the on/off switch required soldering; I had to completely unsolder the switch to fit it through the hole in the wood. I used heat-shrinking plastic tubes to cover up the solder work. For the other wires, I used plastic connector caps to join them back up. I attached the components to the wood with screws and staples. It's hard to tell here, but I mounted the metal reflective shield from the old lamp to the wood surface behind the bulb. Last note: I had to cut all the wires when extracting them from the old lamp's plastic housing. The key thing to point out here is this: if you try something like this, be sure to mark the wires very carefully so you can remember how to reattach them.

Here's what the assembled lamp looks like in place.

And here's a wider view so you can see the effect of the light reflecting off the wall behind my main monitor.So that's it. The entire project took about five hours on a Sunday. I'm waiting for the glue to completely dry before applying a coat of polyurethane to the front. 

The most challenging part was figuring out the design: I wanted to create a very simple and functional lamp using only scrap wood left behind from other projects. Aside from my time, the project didn't cost a dime.

The tools I used to assemble the lamp included a miter saw (to cut all lengths and angles), a biscuit joiner (to join the two pine pieces and the feet to the base of the lamp), a drill (to create a hole for the on/off switch), a table saw (to cut a strip of oak for the top edge of the lamp), wood glue, and a sheet sander.  For the electrical work, I used a soldering gun and some heat-shrink tubing, wire connectors, a wire cutter/stripper, and a few screws and staples.

I think it looks better than the original. It certainly fits in better with my wooden desk than did the plastic lamp. I may have to go and break the other lamp now.

My new desk

I haven't posted in a while. I've been spending all of my free time building a new computer desk in my workshop. I'm quite pleased with how it came out. 

I had four requirements for the project: I wanted a large surface area that would accommodate all of my stuff without appearing cluttered; I wanted the desk to be 100% wood (no pressboard); I wanted to minimize visible cables; and I wanted it to be ergonomically correct for my height. 

The desk is a three-piece modular design based on plans I found in a library book, which I adapted to meet my needs. It consists of a corner desk, a writing desk, and a printer/scanner stand. The modular design allows for different configurations, which is great if I decide I want to move it somewhere else or arrange it differently down the road.

I used relatively cheap, off-the-shelf wood from Home Depot to keep the cost down. The desktop and keyboard tray surfaces are 3/4" birch plywood edged with 2" Radiata Pine. The legs are also constructed of Radiata Pine with birch plywood panels. 

The desk also sports a plywood bookshelf that forms the rear support for the corner piece. It serves to support the weight of the monitor, and the books and external hard drives stored there keep most of the cables, bricks, and power strips out of sight.

The black material covering the wooden keyboard tray consists of two sheets of .99¢ cent foam mat sold for children's craft projects, which I mounted with a light tacking glue that's easy to remove should the panels be damaged. The mat material is similar to what you'd get in a mouse pad, but it's thinner and firmer. 

I have a printer, a scanner, an external mike, external speakers, a pen tablet, two external hard drives, and a wired Apple keyboard hooked up to my Macbook Pro. I hid most of these cables on the underside of the desk using double-adhesive velcro strips. I mounted a USB hub under the desk to connect all of the devices.

I also devised a simple wooden laptop stand to raise and angle the Macbook's monitor. I based the dimensions of the stand on the technical specs of the Rain Design mStand.

I had to buy two items to complete the desk: an adjustable keyboard mount (without a tray, as I chose to make a custom oversized tray) and a monitor arm. The monitor arm is particularly nice as I can adjust height, depth, and angle of the monitor with ease.

While the desk turned out well, it's worth noting that using wood from a hardware store chain isn't ideal. It's not furniture-grade material, and I don't have a jointer or a planer. So I had to do a fair amount of planing by hand to fix warps, bends, and thickness differences. Also, working with plywood can be maddening. The top layer of birch is so thin that it's scarily easy to sand right through it. As for tools, it required a table saw (with a dado blade), a mitre saw, a drill, a few hand planes, chisels, and a lot of clamps for the glue-up. 

The project is complete, but there are a few things that could make it better. For instance, I'd love to mount a 30" display on that monitor arm! And I'd like to take advantage of the fact that the monitor can be raised to standing height. The problem, of course, is that I'd need a raised platform to hold the keyboard and mouse.  I'm envisioning a small tabletop lectern that I could mount to the front of the desk for times when I feel like standing up to compute. I'd want it to be hinged and collapsable so I could store it nearby. Hmm. I'll save that for another day.