Thursday, August 23, 2012

Home improvement - Part 1 - creating a TV mount

Once upon a time, there were a certain kind of TV's around. They were called Cathode Ray Tube or short CRT TV's and they were big, no let's say huge and very very heavy.

They also had very interesting dimension and were sold till about 2005 and were replaced by LCD TV's around 2000.

Sadly our house was build in 1999, which provides a little cubical to put your CRT TV in, which is exactly 2 inches to narrow to fit our 42" LCD TV. And these days 42" is not even considered large.

before we got started. That is how it looks. 
our 1.5 x 1.5 inch side bars, after drilling holes for our mounting screws. There job is to hold our support bars later

apparently one of these anchors hold 75 lbs, to be sure I installed 5 on each side 
since I'm german I love precision. It's more or less perfectly level 
now the support bars are mounted to the side bars, with 6 screws each  
1/2 inch MDF plating to make it look nicer, but still looks a bit plain. But at least we drilled a hole to route our cables

after painting and filling in parts with putty, it starts to look nice 
and finally the TV is mounted and looks quite nice and seems to hold so far.
I also think that's the first woodworking project I ever finished from beginning to end. Only thing I'd like to change is to move the TV half an inch back. The proportions seems to be slightly off, looking at it from the side.

Saturday, August 11, 2012

roomba is no more?

this morning we had an unlucky surprise.

Right now we have 3 puppies at our home, one is visiting and one of these little 'nightmares' decided to poop on the carpet...

Rather annoying, but it would had not been the big deal, except that unluckily our little roomba was running at the same point in time and we did not know about this accident. A short while later we come in the room, because of the 'curious' smell and see that the roomba successfully dragged 'poop' all over the room and was clogged with pooped and has literally shit in every crank and all over it's circuit boards...



several hours of cleaning later, it refuses to turn on and doesn't say a peep. I guess I will disassemble it again and blow it out with compressed air and clean all the sensors and parts again. But I don't have much hope at this point in time...

Update it does turn on now and only runs in circles, but the display works too after cleaning all the contacts with compressed air. There might be just the bumper sensor left, which could be clogged or so...