nio101's hideout

I've started building my bartop arcade machine!

The design was derived from this cool instructables project. I adapted it to suit my 23.5” IPS screen dimensions and rendered it with Freecad.

This allowed me to print the technical drawings and dimensions for all the main parts, and also a 1:1 template of the side panels.

I bought some big 19mm & 10mm plywood panels, and now I will begin cutting and building the mainframe...

After more than a decade living in a comfortable house near Caen, a cool french middle-sized city where I work, I feel that it is now time for a change...

This house is (too) big, but it nevertheless lacks space for me to have a proper workshop, and making things is one the activities I enjoy the most in my life. Also, it's a house located in a subdivision which means some nuisances here while remote working, and no direct access to surrounding nature without using our car.

And above all, it is here I enjoyed being with my daughter. Whom I loved more than anyone else. Whom I can't see nor talk to anymore. For many years now. And I can't do anything about it.

So yes, now is a good time for a change... :)

OK, but where?

I'm currently remote working two days a week, and perhaps this will increase to three days, or half my total working time in the future? Meanwhile, two days without commuting is still enough for me to consider living farther from the city, up to a psychological limit of 45mn of travel time, for example.

My first aim is to live in a cool and a little bit isolated place in Nature. And the part I prefer 45mn away from Caen is definitely Norman Switzerland. So, yes, it will be there!

In fact, I'm already looking for a place to build my new home in this part of Normandy...

(this is an obscure Higepiyo anime home building reference... If you don't know this anime, check it out, it's weird & funny!)

What will it be, then?

I want to see it like a shelter... A place where we can feel safe, protected. This goes well with the post-apocalyptic imagery I'm fond of in movies or games... and also well with the surrounding nature that reminds of the swiss Alps, in which shelters are common for hikers. I will call it the basecamp! Yes, it is a cool name for this project. Remember to always have cool codenames for your projects! :)

Since I like industrial, rustic, natural and even post-apocalyptic ambiences... (a hidden undergroung bunker anyone!?!), I would like to see concrete, wood and metal.

I also like japanese ambiances, and props, so there will be sliding doors and everything else I that reminds me of cool things I liked there (TOTO washlet! ^_^).

I dream of a big cool workshop, with a lot of tools for metal and wood working... A welder, an XXL CNC plasma cutter, an XXL woodworking CNC...

I also want us to be able to grow vegetables all year long, so there will be a greenhouse for sure.

I want the main living room to be thought like a loft, a big space with high luminosity (zenital light), high roof, with no proper limit between the kitchen place, the chilling zone, the TV/gaming zone...

I will enjoy doing my own home automation system!

Finally, I'd like it to be as green as possible as for the building materials and the building process.

But I won't build it all by myself. I will only focus on the architecture, that will be studied with an actual architect, and I will only allow myself to do some easy/basic finishing work, for my workshop for example.

Architecture sketching

While I'm looking for a proper place, I'm also trying to find out proper tools and processes to be able to sketch and render architectural ideas.

I'm going open source for that. I witnessed how Autodesk used the maker crowd to improve their flagship fusion 360 modeling product, only to go greedy and restrict the maker/personal use license in the end at a point you could not use it for personal projects. I found that so disappointing, after having spent many hours learning to use their product... It was so naïve of me.

So, open source means here FreeCAD and Blender. It seems to be the best combo to sketch a house (in FreeCAD, using the BIM workbench), and then render it using all the great Blender features.

I already have been using FreeCAD to model parts that I 3d print on my Prusa MK3S. So the idea is to learn and progress to some more skilled level with freeCAD, and well, it may take quite some time... :s

FreeCAD is very promising, but it is still looking more like a work in progress than a stable/finished product. And mastering it seems to be quite an achievement.

But I'm motivated! And this seems to be a useful skill, since it will also help in the future for any CNC related work (plasma cutting, CNC miling...).