Procopius

Well, never say never... "Amusingly", I actually bricked the soundboard right after making that video when I tried to update the configuration. I had to remove the old board and solder in an entirely new one, super fun, let me tell you. But it once again works, so huzzah!

And all done!

So yesterday after the kids and Mrs P decamped for work, I was enjoying one of my most favourite times of the day: the brief interregnum between when everyone else leaves and when I have to shower, get dressed, and go downstairs to start working. We have a large window in the living room that catches the rising sun perfectly, and it's not only very pleasant, but often very beautiful, words rarely said of the Illinois suburbs: (These photos are obviously not recent ones.) In any case, I was sitting there, slowly warming up under the rays of the surprisingly chilly spring sun (barely 16 C), when I received a text message from Melanie, letting me know that we had forgotten to give our children, any of our children their inhalers, and even more alarmingly, that we had forgotten to give Winston his lobotomy pills. I jest, slightly. Winston used to have to wear a patch, like the nicotine patches smokers sometimes wear, for his ADHD, to prevent him from doing things like: jumping off of his bunk bed to try and grab the paddle fan, tearing it out of the ceiling; using nail polish to paint Grandma's car; trying to flood the upstairs bathroom by clogging the drains and leaving the taps running; pistol-whipping his younger brother with a Nerf ("It's Nerf or Nothing") gun; shoving his face up to a classmate's with only a millimeter of separation and bellowing "SHOVE IT IN MY FACEHOLE" apropos of nothing; and many other divers antics. Please note that none of these are hypothetical. They all happened. Unfortunately, Winston's patch had one minor side effect, which is that it was killing him. Some days, this felt like an acceptable trade. But he stopped gaining weight, and while he was convinced he was quote "looking ripped," he actually looked like someone who would be very, very relieved that Allied tanks had just driven through the gates. He largely wouldn't eat, and to make things even more fun, he threw up in a stiff wind, or if things went even slightly not his way. Not ideal. So we ditched the patch, and he's now an active, healthy little boy again, albeit one who people slowly find themselves coming to believe should be, in the immortal words of Noel Coward, struck regularly, like a gong. So absent the patch, the other medication ensures that Winston remains merely exasperating, rather than a likely candidate for preventative imprisonment. Winston not having this would be bad. Normally, on Thursdays, I have the car, because as part of their war against the American family, Mrs P's school requires teachers to stay at work until 6 PM for a staff meeting. So on Thursdays, I drive everyone to where they need to be, then leave work early to pick up the kids, then double back a few hours later to get Mrs P. Fun fun fun. Yesterday, however, Mrs P had graciously arranged for after-school activities for the kids and was going to drive herself home and collect our children on the way back, and thus I was not involved in the transportation arrangements. What followed was the unedifying spectacle of a middle-aged man somewhat past his prime thundering along the sidewalk to the train, clutching a plastic bag of pills and several inhalers (the boys use small cylindrical ones that taper to be slightly conical, a fact that will become pertinent shortly). Winston refuses to take his pills without chocolate milk, and like Xeno's tortoise, which can only travel exactly half the distance between it and its destination with each stride, thereby never arriving, he can only drink half the glass, no matter how much is in it, leaving the rest for us to find as it slowly curdles. I wasn't about to run with a glass of chocolate milk in hand, so I figured I would get some when I got off the train. In this I had miscalculated, for the sleepy village in which the school is located (setting for Ray Bradbury's profoundly bizarre "The Lake") had a gas station perhaps fifteen years ago, but no longer. So after sprinting around the town looking for any place that sold chocolate milk, I arrived at the front of the school and pushed the buzzer to be let it. I don't go into the school often, so I'm not generally recognized as a teacher's spouse. To add to that, I was wearing my pajamas, which are athletic shorts and a t-shirt, and I badly need a haircut and was out of breath. So when the receptionist looked out through the door, she saw a red-faced and unkempt overweight man huffing and puffing, then producing a bag of pills, before rifling around in his pocket for an inhaler, an action which I now know looks very different devoid of context. After everyone calmed down, I was finally let indoors and coaxed Winston to take his pills with only mere water, like a peasant. He resisted, and I quoted Achilles to Hector in The Iliad at him: "be a warrior now, and a spearman brave," which certainly sounded encouraging, but actually meant, if you were cognizant of the original context, that I was about to kill him. He took the pills. Success! Job well done. Anyway, the replacement buttons for the sabre are out for delivery today, so I should have those in hand soon to wrap things up.

Thanks, Cookie! Very much so, given I despaired of ever getting to that point. You too! I've missed you all a great deal. Good news: more progress: I resoldered the errant wire to the soundboard so that it goes underneath, like all the other good little wires. I also bought a multimeter, which apparently everyone should have (part of being a homeowner in one's forties is discovering how many things you're supposed to have owned for the last ten to twenty years, it would seem), and was able to test the wires connecting the buttons. I resoldered Button #2 on the soundboard, then discovered both buttons on the upper chassis were wired incorrectly and pulled them out to fix them. Events did not develop necessarily as we might have hoped. The buttons have four little prongs, divided between two sides, which are delineated (I learned rather late in the game) by lines on the underside. Each button needs at least two prongs, one on either side, one for grounding, one for the appropriate button pad. Whoops. So I bought some replacements from Amazon, which arrived at my door this morning. Unfortunately, while the dimensions of the box were perfect, the button was too tall, which I had failed to reckon with. I trimmed it down, but slightly over enthusiastically. However, it does still mostly work. The buttons are now correctly wired, too, so the top button ignites and turns off the blade, while the bottom button makes blaster bolt deflection noises and, when the blade is retracted, lets me cycle between "soundfonts" which govern what the blade sounds like. (I have several loaded onto the SD Card: this lightsaber as it sounded in the arena on Geonosis in Attack of the Clones, how it sounded in the duel with Christopher Lee, and how Obi-Wan's other saber sounded when he was fighting with Jango Fett on Kamino. If none of that means anything to you, well...you're not missing much. I also added a couple of versions of Shaak Ti's lightsaber from the 2003 animated Clone Wars cartoon, for variety's sake and because I have them lying around. (I have a soft spot for the cartoon Shaak Ti, because she's trying very hard and carrying her team during a group project; without girls like her, I would never have graduated high school.) As you can see, things mostly work. So, success! We did it! There have been casualties, though. The buttons should have little white raised parts, which are separate pieces, and one broke off of one; I've ordered replacement buttons which are more "accurate" (they're slightly dished, apparently more akin to the real prop) and will swap those in when they arrive. The blade plug (the little thing which goes in when the full blade isn't in there) is cracked all over after an overenthusiastic test swing sent it hurtling across the garage, and most seriously, several of the pixels on the blade connector were scraped off while trying to open the upper chassis to get at the buttons. This normally isn't a problem because of the the way the blade plug is designed (it's in in the video, so you can see it covers most everything and permits only a little light out) but I know it will bug me.

I firmly believe it's phlogiston all the way down. What news of the project? Well. I went back and had to resolder all the wires into the board, and then of course a wire broke, and then one was too short, and there was a lot of backing and forthing, and then one wire was too short, and something inside of me broke and I remembered that someone said to me that "just because it works doesn't mean it's good soldering", and I decided that instead of being a cautionary statement, that was actually a license to do some incredibly shoddy work in indecent haste, and LOW AND BEHOLD It kinda works. But only kinda. Some more wires broke, and I resoldered them, but the top button, which was supposed to ignite the saber, doesn't work (apparently I also reversed the buttons somewhere in the wiring, though, so I can still turn it on), and I'm not sure if it's jammed up with a lot of flux, or what. I'm not kidding about the worst soldering in human history, either. The wire that was too short, I just arced over the top of the soundboard instead of underneath, like some demented meth addict. But: progress!

Last night the weather suddenly remembered it was late spring, so the temperature rose and then the rain fell, making the garage seem a less than desirable place to be. I did clean my office armed with the strength of despair at its state. The fact that this feels like a massive improvement should suggest to you how bad it truly was. Several bookshelves aren't visible from this angle, of course. Today is Mrs P's birthday (she's two months younger than me, so I delight in telling the children I married a "MUCH younger woman"), and so I expect I won't progress much if at all this evening. Hopefully we can get all of the way there soon, though.

I did! It took forever.

UPDATE : The glue sure didn't hold. But I have other methods. The plastic bag is a fig leaf to protect the traces on the PCB, in the fond hope that repeated finger pressure, smeared with great globs of rosin, being dropped, etc has done nothing to sully its virginal purity. The clamps are to show the raw power I exert over my domain when I can remember where I put things (the floor). My grotto needs a deep clean. It is disarray thanks to making space for two Elegoo Centauri Carbon 3D printers (a Mk1 and a Mk2), and because I recently rejigged my paint storage again in the interests of greater efficiency, which had the usual effect of making everything unusable. To make matters worse, I was changing horses mid-stream in an already occurring reorganization of the area, leaving me with lots of surplus 3D-printed storage cubes now. I'm not very smart, but I am very consistent about being erratic.

GENTLEMEN. It's not all days of wine and roses here however. (Or maybe it is, given how dire that particular flick is, a far cry from Messr. Edwards' better-known works like Pink Panther or Operation Petticoat.) You see, while I'd managed to more or less wire up everything to the right places, I had neglected to ensure the resulting spaghetti monster-like agglomeration of cables would actually fit within the friendly confines of the lower chassis. The mere fact that I mention this to you, in my airy, empty-headed way, should indicate that it did not, and in fact, attempting to make it fit broke several wires free. The lower chassis is presently a work in progress. The wires connecting to the rotary PCB are all done, and the glue holding it in place is now (hopefully) curing. I'm really struggling to keep the wires short enough to fit in the chassis while leaving them long enough that I can actually solder them, and several wires broke off in the little holes, and getting them back out has been...challenging, by which I mean the entire neighbourhood has been treated to a cacophonous symphony of chain-detonating F-bombs emanating from my garage for most of the evening.

It did indeed! The replica, which uses the same basic materials as the original, is heavy enough that one realizes ol' Obi-Wan was just showing off when he used the lightsaber on the lads down at the pub, and could have simply KO'ed them, one hit, lights out, by using it as a cosh.

Stew! I'm sorry to say that most of the humor in my life these days seems to be of the Woody Allen variety ("Tragedy is when I cut my finger, comedy is when you fall into an open manhole and die"), with me as the unfortunate object of the joke. However, we may reassure ourselves with the supposition that Messr. Allen's comedic sensibilities are as defective as his moral ones, and press onwards. However, case in point: my mother in law has continued her unbroken streak of locking me out of my own thrice-damned house again this visit. Normally she has the decency to do it when I go out with friends (not even to the pub, or anything even mildly dissolute, but to play toy soldiers), but since I got a house key (after only six years of living here...I only got a car key of my own last year), she's upped her game and now tends to lock me out while I'm in the garage soldering. I get that it's a large house and she can't be bottomed to look for me, but you know, it's also MY house, my name is on the mortgage and everything (and my 401k was gutted to supply the downpayment for it), so maybe keep your filthy little hands off the locks, eh? EH? Only the knowledge that Mrs P would be enraged on her mother's behalf is stopping me from putting up a sign on the door that reads: "PLEASE FIND EDWARD AND HAVE HIM LOCK THE DOOR. IF YOU CAN'T FIND HIM, YOU'RE PROBABLY LOCKING HIM OUT." But I digress. Tonight I soldered and closed up the entirety of the upper chassis, which is normally fixed in place in the hilt by the two buttons, or rather, if it's removed, the buttons fall out. This involved soldering the neopixel connector (wot makes the blade LEDs light up), the "hiltside rotary chassis connector" (which a look at the wiring diagram suggests should have been on the removable part, but the photo showed different, and TOO LATE NOW; the two connectors are in any case effectively a sort of portal, wormhole, or stargate that wires pass through from the upper chassis to the lower, since the wires on either side are more or less mirrored, or something. You follow me, I trust), and the two buttons. This is all done. Was it done well? No. Was anything damaged in the process? Quite possibly. Could a short induced by my shoddy workmanship turn the lightsaber into a grenade† the first time I turn it on? Good. I hope it kills me outright. On the lower chassis, the GND, BATT-. SPKR+, and SPKR- terminals are all wired up. This leaves us with 2x rotacry PCB + to splice and wire to the positive battery terminal, then wiring the positive terminal to the killswitch, then wiring the killswitch to BATT+; rotary PCB B1 and B2 to BT1 and B2 respectively (watch me mix them up), Rotary PCB Data to Data1, and 2x rotary PCB - to LED2 and LED3. (A diagram of the soundboard is here: https://fredrik.hubbe.net/lightsaber/v6/) Each step gets more and more complicated, as the soundboard is gripped more and more firmly by the ten million little wires holding it in place. Much failure to follow, no doubt. I still have to program the soundboard, another point of failure, although I've managed to do it successfully with sabers I haven't built myself. † Fun fact: the upper portion of Obi-Wan Kenobi's lightsaber in Star Wars is constructed from a (hopefully) disarmed No.35 Rifle Grenade intended to be fired from a No1 MkIII SMLE. And speaking of, look what arrived today: It's a Roman Props Mk1, generally considered the most accurate replica of Obi-Wan's lightsaber that you can get without using original parts, which are, from left to right: Rolls-Royce Derwent balance pipe, No.35 rifle grenade, Graflex flash holder clamp with Marconi transistors screwed into it, part of a .303 Browning machine gun (the bit right before the flash hider), and Armitage Shanks faucet knob. This can be installed with a soundboard etc. as the Geonobi is, but I'll pay someone else to do this one, as thin-neck sabers are more complex to wire.

I tried some more soldering tonight, with more failure and no real successes, save managing to get most of the excess solder off the chassis connector PCB. And just now, as I look back up at my picture, I realize I've been using the wrong PCB the entire time. The one with the pins should go on the top chassis that has the buttons, and the flat one should go on the bottom. God I suck at this. After much desoldering, the wrong PCB: I also managed to knock off one of the little reset switches on the soundboard while scrubbing off flux using IPA and a toothbrush (you can see it here, north of the zed-like shape). As it shouldn't be needed, that technically may be fine. And yet... Everything has gone so disastrously wrong. The words of diarist (and unrepentant postwar Nazi) Wilhelm Pruller, writing of being informed that Barbarossa's advance would continue deeper into Russia in November of 1941, spring unbidden into my mind: "...I laughed, and laughed heartily, out of malicious joy at my own misfortune." I cannot seem to do any of this right. I'm caught between the Charybdis of being miserable while failing relentlessly in my little spare time, and the Scylla of giving up and accepting wasting a lot of money that I can't readily replace. I can honestly say I've hated every year of my forties so far, and things only seem to be getting worse. Today at work I raised a reasonable objection to someone about a subject in which I'm our acknowledged technical expert, and after a two hour silence, received an obviously ChatGPT-generated reply suggesting that I should find ways to make it work instead of reasons why we shouldn't do it. I hate pretty much everything about life these days.

Sorry for the radio silence all, I've been struck down with an awful cold from Madeleine; for whatever reason, any year we have a three-year-old is plague season, and I invariably get sick enough that death seems more than slightly preferable. I completely forgot to mention that before descending into the abyss that is getting sick and then being told by my spouse, who is a miser with their own sick days, that this is perfect because I can watch our significantly less sick daughter, who enjoys running into her weakly protesting father with the energy of a medium-sized freight train redlining the throttle, I made dinner. I make dinner most every night now, because Mrs P is more of an ingredient collector than someone who actually has the energy to make dinner, and so my doing it is easier on our finances. I managed to find UK-style bangers at a local grocery store, and so I made bangers and mash with onion gravy (FROM SCRATCH) for everyone. The reception, I am sorry to say, was muted, as the boys refused to eat it, Melanie seemed unimpressed, and only Madeleine and I ate with gusto. But that's my two favourite people in this misshapen little band, so perhaps it doesn't matter. Winston went through a period where all he would eat were nutella "uncrustables". An uncrustable, if you've never had the misfortune, is an actual product borne of mankind's eternal desire to spit in the face of god and make manifest the worst things we can think of. They're frozen little oblate spheroids that are fashioned from two pieces of bread around a filling (often PBJ, or for the folks who've truly given up, Nutella), and with the crusts trimmed off. I told Mrs P, who has a masters degree in early childhood education, that we could never, ever, ever give the kids uncrustables, because they would then expect them for every meal. So naturally the first time it would have required the minutest amount of effort to do anything else, Mrs P gave Winston one. He then proceeded to eat a minimum of three a day, at least one at each meal save for school lunches, where they were prohibited, for what felt like a hundred years, with each meal being a sip from a very bitter cup indeed. The cruellest part of all is that he still wouldn't eat the extreme rim of the damned things, because it was too close to a crust. (His mother also will not eat crusts, which seemed less like a dire warning fifteen years ago.) These things are of course absurdly expensive for what they are, and we had to buy them in bulk. I love my family, I'm sure, but I can't help but feel life might be nicer if they were all off working on an oil rig in the North Sea and just sent me a postcard periodically.

Update: I hate soldering. As you can see, I've managed the soldering equivalent of my trademark gluey fingerprint: accidentally melting part of the carbon fibre (fancy!) chassis with the tip of the iron, like the idiot I am. Soldering is almost perfectly optimized to match up to my many weaknesses: it's learning something new, which I've never enjoyed; it requires precision and careful planning, two things I've not been great at, historically; and the consequences for getting it wrong can not only be expensive (each PCB is around $35) but also potentially personally injurious. Let me scoot back a bit in my tale. I soldered the battery terminal yesterday, but predictably I made a hash of it. The main issue is this: I have no idea what I'm doing, or only just enough to do it wrong. The guy who designed the thing actually made a video series on how to install it, but I've never been good with verbal instructions, and the video is far enough away thatm I can't really tell what's going on. Although I also emailed him and he very kindly wrote it all out, and I still didn't get it, so maybe I'm just stupid. As shown before, I made my own wiring diagram, but wiring diagrams are infuriating, because they don't show how you stuff all of that stuff into the chassis like cramming a little sausage full of conductive meat. The diagram, in fact, fundamentally fails to capture how everything goes together. It was suggested I thread all the wires into the chassis and then solder them to their respective point As and point Bs, but I'm doing this in my limited spare time, often while tired, always while confused, and I can tell you right now what would happen: I would get every last one of them mixed up and solder them to the wrong things. Additionally, since I cunningly destroyed both the speaker and the spare speaker I had, and then ruined the first battery terminal, I started trying to do the rest out of order while awaiting replacements. Like math, something else I don't enjoy, order of operations is very important. This is what it should look like assembled: (There's a second, fixed chassis destined to live permanently inside the hilt that will have the buttons and the pcb blade connector, along with another pcb to connect it to the hiltside chassis connector.) So as you can see, almost all of the wires have to reach the soundboard and still allow it to be glued into place with E6000, but also have to afford enough freedom of action for me to somehow solder them. Because some things were done out of order (soldering the killswitch, soldering the negative battery terminal), that got a whole lot harder. Additionally, several wires need to be spliced together, a process of which my understanding could generously be described as "purely theoretical". Failing to do this properly, I tried to use both holes (heyoooo) of the positive terminal to accept first the wire coming from the killswitch, and then the combined wires coming from the hiltside connector PCB. The problem is, that this creates a great tumorous mass of solder and wire on the battery terminal, which will touch the battery, probably causing nothing good. I honestly don't know, and I wasn't terribly interested in finding out. So I had to dig out my desoldering wick and melt the solder up onto it yet again, during which I foolishly braced the terminal on the chassis, leaving the melty bits. At this point I decided that I should probably remove those parts and start over. The poor hiltside connector pcb has been soldered and desoldered so many times that I'm beginning to wonder if I shouldn't just bite the bullet and buy a replacement one to start over afresh. Only the fact that it'd be like forty bucks and inflation has been hammering us at the grocery store stays my hand. This whole process, which was advertised as something a novice could do, something that would be great for a novice, even, has proven to be very frustrating and demoralizing.

I'm still alive. I often feel as though no time at all has elapsed since 2020 and the end of the world, but in fact we've passed the half-a-decade mark, still living in the ruins we made and continue to make of the world. Certainly I feel the effects of time heavily on my own body, which no longer bounces back from injuries and shows no desire to shed the weight I put on with every new stressful event. I recently had to start doing lateral leg lifts every morning, because working from home from my desk is so sedentary that my muscles were too weak to keep my kneecaps from periodically popping out of their trochlear grooves, an experience which I don't at all recommend. Grant, my middle child, is now eight, and his terrible asthma meant that catching Flu-B and pneumonia in conjunction (2026 has been a terrible year for double illnesses, our pediatrician noted, almost as if, contrary to what we're told, the country is not being made healthy again) was a deathly serious event this past month, with him missing school for two weeks and at one point running a temperature of 104 F; he sat up and told me that we needed to "ride the sun," one of the most frightening things that's happened to me as a parent. Grant also has a little chewing problem, in the same way that Genghis Khan had a mild looting problem: he's chewed the sleeves off of his shirts and chewed into his seatbelt enough to destroy its structural integrity, something I'd not known was even possible. The car cost $300 to fix. Grant will be considerably more expensive, the therapist assures us. Winston, the oldest, is ten and we've taken him off of the Clonidine patches that were to regulate his ADHD, because they were literally killing him: he ate very little and was totally listless, meaning that he's smaller than Grant and very thin. He's shown immense improvement since we did this, at the cost of exposing the entire world to the coruscating fulminance of his unfiltered personality: This has been rough for Grant in particular, because if words do not come to Winston with sufficient speed, he's perfectly happy to use his bony little fists. Grant is more of a professional goblin than a fighter, and so these exchanges go badly for the younger boy. We didn't do that to his hair. He cut it himself, and nobody had the heart to tell him that the bowl cut went out of fashion around the time of Agincourt. Madeleine, my delight, is three going on thirty-five, bossy and clever and funny. I don't have a favourite child (that would be wrong), but she's the best one. I'm fairly certain she can read at least a little. Anyway, I really am trying to build something, though I think I'll have to rely on your generosity for it to be considered a model. You see, the exterior is finished already: With three children, two of whom look conclusively like me and a third who acts unfortunately very much as I did at that age, I have nothing left to prove to the world. Wargaming has failed me as a hobby, because I have few friends and even less spare time. Modelling requires time and discipline which I no longer possess, thanks to my beautiful children, who have to be frog-marched into bed at 8 PM while my own bedtime has receded to a pathetic 10 PM lest my aging brain fail me totally during working hours. I don't have the energy at present to try and ruin a model airplane, sadly. But I do accumulate stupid, expensive hobbies like nobody's business, and this might take the cake: "working" replica lightsabers, the sort of thing that may have instantly conferred virginity back upon me after 27 years. Great days, gentlemen. The principle behind these (wholly unlicensed) replicas is that the hilt of the saber contains a chassis, a sort of sled that holds a printed circuit board soundboard that is in turn wired to a speaker, the buttons, battery terminals (typically for an 18650), possibly a killswitch, and the hiltside blade connector. The removable blade, a polycarbonate tube about 36" in length, is typically held in place by a set screw and contains a strip of "neopixels" (don't ask me what distinguishes them from ordinary pixels) wrapped in foam diffusers, allowing it to "ignite" and make pleasing wumm-wummmm sounds. Like so: This is a niche market of a niche market (Disney, which is only stopped by the limits of modern technology from actively draining the life force from park attendees to power the lights, produces their own, far inferior, but similarly priced examples), and is dominated by a handful of Chinese firms selling on Aliexpress or through dropshippers in other countries, almost all of whom purport to make the sabers themselves and charge vastly inflated prices. Of course, just like models, there are even smaller firms catering to those with an obsessive love of accuracy (which can get dicey: Luke Skywalker has one lightsaber in Return of the Jedi, but there are something like four or five very different props that represented it in the film, not to mention different props for subsequent appearances in the TV shows and [spits] the sequel trilogy), with costs to match. I paid $450 for what is currently accepted to be the best representation of the "hero" version (i.e. the one intended for close-up shots, though it's only seen once and briefly in the final cut of the film), and that hilt didn't even come with electronics. To get it installed by a pro was...well, I'd rather not say, but suffice it to say that it cost a lot more than I should have spent. Basically what I'm getting at here is that this hobby, such as it is, is economically unsustainable given my pay freeze and Mrs P's recently discovery of "Warhammer for Girls," AKA jewelry. This isn't an isolated issue. Our tariff regime and the economic effects of having a supergenius who requires no advice and always knows what's best for everyone at the helm of our rapidly-declining great nation has caused great disruption to the lightsaber market, with many people abandoning the hobby and a number of smaller manufacturers going belly-up. (One switched from making lightsaber parts to machining firearm components, which feels like one a them there metaphors we hear so much about.) However, there is one way to cut costs, and as usual, it's probably a lot more expensive than just forking over: learning how to solder! You see, you can buy all the electronic gubbins for these white elephants and then build them yourself, and all you have to do is learn a trade. Let's be clear here: I know nothing of programming or Arduino, and I know even less about soldering or electronics. I was briefly an electrical installer in the summer of 2003, but I was so bad at it that by the end of the first week, I was relegated to screwing on the outlet covers, which is not a humourous exaggeration. But I bought myself a soldering and rework station, and then began the slow process of learning the hard way that it never pays to cheap out on tools. I thought I was buying a 110-watt iron, which I gather is good. However, I'm very stupid, and had bought a 110-volt station, i.e. one meant to use US-standard household current. The actual wattage was 25, which is pretty dire, I've learned. I also discovered that my eyes don't like looking at tiny PCBs, so I bought an electronic microscope, which wobbles alarmingly and is frequently poked by the iron as I wave it about. The sharp-eyed among you will note this is my garage, because I'm using lead/tin solder, rather than the safer pure tin, and I felt it would be unwise to use it in the home. My early efforts were not crowned with success: However, after replacing the iron with an 80-watt one identical to one that I bought for Winston (thinking it was inferior to my own, and then wondering why his soldering efforts were going so much better than mine), things look a bit nicer: Unfortunately, I soldered the wire to the wrong pad and then got to use the desoldering wick a lot. You haven't lived until boiling hot rosin has rocketed up to hit your thumb. I've also destroyed two speakers (the heat gun can melt things besides heatshrink, it turns out) and lost a battery tab, so it's going well. In any case, the hilt I'm working on is the "Geonobi", by an American company called Saberbay. It's based off of the saber that Obi-Wan Kenobi as portrayed by Ewan McGregor uses in the latter half of Attack of the Clones (a dire movie) after his original is confiscated by Christopher Lee's unfortunately-named Count Dooku. It has the virtue of being cheap ($85 empty), and was allegedly an easy install. I beg to differ, however. It has a two part chassis, with one part containing the hiltside blade connector, the two buttons, and one side of a PCB called the rotary chassis connector. The removable half contains the battery, the other half of the rotary chassis connector, the battery killswitch, and the speaker. This makes it somewhat more complex to wire than a hilt with a single-piece chassis, and I'm far from certain it's been done right. So all of the work and failures so far might well be for nothing. What a delight. I'll try to solder some more tonight, as my replacement battery terminal is due to arrive, but I've also taken on making dinner (Mrs P hit a phase where she buys the ingredients "to keep us from having processed food", then is too tired to make them and we have to make mac and cheese and sandwiches), and I try and make a genuine meal each night for the children to reject. Tonight is bangers and mash, because I miss you all and your island more than anything.