Shop Notes, Milwaukee Packout, 3D Printing Colors + NFC
Today I am starting a series called Shop Notes, a semi-regular collection of posts about what I am working on and the details behind them. These will mostly be text and links, with occasional images, and I will be archiving them here so you can reference them later.
So here is what I’ve been working on:
- I am starting to go back through the project archive and update the website with pics and project descriptions, and then posting those on Instagram. The plan is to go through them all so I have the full archive captured (finally).
- Last week I 3D printed lots of small inserts to go inside these Milwaukee Packout organizers. They further divide the included bins so you can store smaller quantities or smaller sized items. This has been a long term project in the shop that I never got around to, but found time last weekend to organize a lot of my screws, nuts and bolts. I designed these inserts a while ago, and have them posted here in my XYZFYI archive if you want to print some for yourself.
- Over the last few days I have been 3D printing little color samples of filaments I’ve had as well as whole bunch of new samples I ordered from Protopasta. I think there are some fun ones that I’ll order larger rolls of. Nerding out a little, I embedded little RFID/NFC tags in each one so when I hold it up to my phone a little message pops up with the maker and color. If you are curious about how I did this, let me know.
- A fun side-project I did this week was design a simple brand and website for our local music boosters organization. It’s not live yet, but will link to it in a future Shop Note. I really flexed Claude.ai’s muscles on this design and web project. I have a pretty refined process for designing and launching simple (free hosted) websites now that includes Claude, Figma, Astro, and Vercel for hosting. If you would like to learn more or have a project you want help with, let me know.