What do you do when you have some equipment from the 80’s and a functional plastic part breaks? What if it’s not yours, but it was lent to you by your girlfriend’s family? Well, that happened to me.

This iswas a critical part for an IKRA A204 electric chainsaw: guide bar support, oil channel, chain adjustment and bearing holder. Unfortunately, I believe they stopped manufacturing this model a very long time ago, and I would not be able to find a replacement part even if I lived in the Czech republic.

Thanks to Fusion 360, vernier calipers, and some iterations, I managed to get a model right.

So if you are the owner of an IKRA A204 from the 80s, needs this part, and knows a place to get it 3D printed, it’s your lucky day, as you can download the model here.

DISCLAIMER: Use at your own risk, I’m not responsible for anything that happens if you use this model.

In 2014 my mom gave me a fantastic set of suitcases: a small, medium and large, all hard shell. They have been warriors and resisted many years of journeys without any problem. One of them though, had a harder life than the others.

The smaller one is just so much more convenient for short trips or space-constrained journeys. The most notable example being the trip Paris -> Italy it did with me, attached to the back of my bike.

It still worked great for a long time after that, but one day one of the wheels stopped spinning properly, and got badly damaged pretty fast.

I searched for that wheel assembly everywhere, and even though there are tons of suitcase swivel wheels on AliExpress, the replacements for the whole assembly didn’t seem to match the hole pattern nor the shape of my suitcase. If you are looking for a way to repair yours, make a comprehensive search through these results, as finding one that fits would save you from a lot of work.

I chose to make new ones, so I bought a very nice new wheel set (with ball bearings!) for almost no money.

Made a new model with Fusion 360 (download: STL, F3D) and got it printed (100% infill, PLA):

And with the right pin size, got it attached to the assembly, and to the suitcase.

I believe PLA is strong enough to resist normal wear, but it may melt/deform if exposed to heat. If that happens, I’ll re-print in ABS.

Job done! Let’s see for how long it lasts.

I’ve been working for some time on a custom dashboard for my motorcycle. I’ll share the progress here, but for now, I’ll just drop a preview.

I did some research as an undergrad in a mobile robotics lab at Universidade de São Paulo, and we had a super nice XSENS IMU for an autonomous car project, which did sensor fusion from GPS, gyroscope, accelerometer and magnetometer data (the last one was kept disabled for most of the time, as it’s common for ground vehicles because of interference). It provided incredible positioning accuracy even when losing GPS coverage, but it was very (!) expensive. This was in ~2010 and since then, many things have changed. XSENS still sells pretty expensive boxes, but MEMS technology evolved a lot and it’s much more affordable and popular today because of smartphones and drones.

I found an article one of these days comparing a few inexpensive IMUs and was really impressed with how good the results/specs seem to be. The article is from 2015, so things probably evolved a lot since then, but I sticked to it and got an MPU-9250. I want to integrate it with a custom motorcycle display I’m building, and see how far I can go with kalman filters. I’ll share the progress here.

Finally, after many years, got a blog for myself again. For real, it’s a few. I’ve decided to create five different blogs, for different topics:

• Development: As a software developer, I believe I have many things to share. If they are good or not, well, you tell me!
• Making things: I love making things. This is a special space to me where I’ll write about electronics, 3D modeling, 3D printing and some development, but mostly linked to stuff I’m making.
• Hacking: I also love breaking things. Initially I thought about putting “Hacking” and “Making” together, but it felt weird to write about “PowerPC VLE instructions” and “3D Modeling” in the same blog, so here we are.
• Thoughts: Here I’ll share anything that doesn’t fit in the other categories. It’s more of an unstructured space where I can write about anything I feel like without worrying about mixing up topics.

These will probably grow slowly, but I’m excited about the journey.