jan opensource contribution; an altimeter enclosure
Last year was the year of projects. My girlfriend insists that each year have a motto, so 2024 was dubbed 2024/7 Projects. At least, that was the motto in January.
Around June or July of last year, I put many of my extracurricular projects on hold for two reasons. First, I had the opportunity to climb Mt. Kilimanjaro, which was incredible, but the training required took up all of my spare time. Second, once I got back from Kili, I immediately started an additional part-time job at a startup.
Maybe a third reason—which I am embarrassed to share—is that I started watching Stargate. With three feature-length films, a main series that ran for ten seasons, and two spin-off shows with five and two seasons respectively, it’s been a significant time commitment. I initially got into it because I wanted something to watch while suffering on the stairmaster preparing for Kilimanjaro, but the show has managed to worm its way into my evenings. Now, I try to watch an episode at the gym and sneak in another while doing chores around the house. Even then, I have hardly scratched the surface of the Stargate canon; it might be my Sagrada Família.
Anyway, this year, instead of trying to stand up my own ideas, I’ve decided to usurp other people’s efforts and contribute to existing projects.
To start things off, I designed an enclosure for this audible altimeter project. The project itself is pretty cool. If you’re unfamiliar, skydivers generally use wrist-mounted altimeters to know when to pull their chutes. The drawback is that the skydiver has to focus on their wrist when they could be soaking in the experience of free fall. Audible altimeters solve that problem by announcing the altitude to you à la Iron Man J.A.R.V.I.S. style. The drawback of audible altimeters is, well… their price. For some reason, someone decided that a barometer, speaker, and battery combo should cost between $100 and $300. The creator of this project realized that all the discrete components for an altimeter are readily available to hobbyists for much cheaper than their consumer counterparts.
Anyway, here is my CAD model:
It’s designed to fit in an ear pocket that skydiver helmets have.
I got to make a bonus contribution as well. The creator of Audible-Altimeter is using discrete components from Adafruit. In general, Adafruit has been great about providing CAD models. However, they didn’t have this one push button that the project had on its BOM. I modeled it myself and uploaded it to grabcad, where it already has 22 downloads and 2 likes :-).
Oh also obligatory photo of Kilimanjaro since this my own blog after all:
