Duplexing a living room - DIY woodworking India

Duplexing a living room - ideas in my mind

I was thinking about it for a long time. But somehow, it never got materialised. To get the tempo back, I am penning it now and perhaps sometime in future, I will build the same. 

To start with the description, let me tell you about the wall where my TV is hanging. I have lot of open space above it. Because I have the TV and tv table there, I never access that part of the wall, 4'x10'x5' approximately. To optimally use that part of of space, have come up with this plan. 

Plan for duplexing the living room

Plan for duplexing the living room

Depending on the load on it, the partition should be of appropriate size and material. I would like to use either of 4"x3" thick wood or iron rod similar to railway track. We can even think of iron pipes. Whatever it is, the number of rods along the length should be 4. To hold those, support block should be fit under it as shown in the picture. They can be 4"x3" wood or anything which can bear the load. Once they are lied, we need to lie a ply board on top of it, preferably 18mm thick. 

A broader view to the living room, staircase planning

Staircase fitting

 

Staircase fitting

Safety handle/frame

TV unit below the duplex setup

This way, I can utilise some amount of spaces which was not accessible earlier. It is a perfect single bed. We can even plan for a small library up there. 

The making of cajon drum - DIY woodworking India

The making of cajon drum(fixing laminate) - DIY woodworking India

Hey everyone. Welcome to DIY woodworking India.

I have fixed laminates on both the sides of the drum. I have kept it for a couple of hours without disturbing it so that laminates fit properly on the underlying cajon structure. For first part of the cajon making, please visit my post The making of cajon drum - DIY woodworking India. I have described about the structure, plan and the final product there.

In this part, I will touch upon the steps which I have not mentioned in that post such as fixing the laminates, giving it the final touch etc.

Laminate cutters are available in local hardware shops. The one I have is shown below:

Mark the line on the laminate you want to cut, place a ruler along with it and then draw the line with the cutter along the line. You have to draw the same line or mark couple of times until the laminate piece can be removed with a gentle pull.

Once pieces are ready, apply wood adhesive on the back of those and on the cajon body. Basically, we need to apply adhesives on both the surfaces which will join.

Once you have applied adhesive, put the laminates pieces gently on the cajon body. Be careful of putting it accurately on the surface so that you don't need to remove and put it again. For laminates bigger in size for example, 4'x8', we keep 4-5 sticks on the surface and then fix the laminate over it so that we can adjust the position of the laminate. Now, we have to put tape so that the laminate is fixed properly in the edges. This tape is known as masking tape. After it is fixed, keep the cajon unit at rest for a few hours till the adhesives dry. It will be be written on adhesive usage instruction how long you should wait for it to dry.

Here is a demo of my cajon drum.

Bit and pieces of android app development - DIY woodworking India

Bit and pieces of android app development - DIY woodworking India

Being in the tech world as a network engineer for almost a decade, I have always tried to keep myself up to date with the evolving technologies. It often eats up my free time. But believe me, its really good. There are so many things in there, unless you try it, you won't realise it. One of those things which I have tried is android programming.

As smartphones have become more and more popular, more and more people are connected via internet. Information transfer has become lightening fast. Everything is at your finger tip. To alleviate my learnings, I have started exploring android application development. I had an end goal of course. I was residing in an area where the road was full of potholes and there was no street light at all. Often, my back used to take the heat at night time. I was thinking what I can do to address that problem or perhaps solve it if possible. If there were 1 or 2 potholes, that would have been practical. But there were hundreds! I started raising complaints to fill those with the town planning authority. As expected, nothing happened as usual. Then I thought how about avoiding those potholes by putting sign boards! Too many it will be. But how about plotting the location of potholes on a Google map and alerting the user if he/she is about to hit it? Thats a good idea!

Therefore, my research started and I started gathering information about what all things I need to gather information about potholes. Either I have to inspect a pothole and plot the map manually or I have to  make everything automatic. Of course latter was better.

To detect a pothole, we need a sensor, an accelerometer. What is an accelerometer? It is a device which can give you acceleration value in XYZ direction. Just to mention, acceleration means rate of change of velocity. Its a vector entity. How we can use it for pothole detection? Whenever we hit a pothole, we fall vertically down. It may be very little but still there is a fall vertically. Therefore, accelerometer shows increase in acceleration value in vertical direction. That is the clue. Once you get values or reading like that, capture the geo location or latitude/longitude. Logically these are the two things we will be needing.

Now where I can find an accelerometer?
Its available in most of the android smartphones! Just google it, you will find related android API probably from android SDK 6 itself and accelerometer is present from that moment on.

Once we have the inbuilt accelerometer, we must know how to get the readings. There comes the android APIs, details about which we can find in google developer site. Lets stop here today. Next blog will be more about the entities in android application development. Till then, bye.