July 2016 – Ben Craven

BEKANT sit-stand table

I’ve just spent the last day and a half making another irregular polyhedron to use as a lampshade in the room where I work. As I worked, I was reminded how useful it is to have a table with motorised height adjustment. The thing that I was making started off flat, and finished 40 cm in diameter, so a table that was the right height at the beginning would be far too high towards the end of the construction.

But it’s not just about workpieces that grow. Different assembly operations are best done at different heights: cutting and folding need a lower table than glueing, for example, and if I need to take a close look at something, it’s useful to be able to raise it as close as possible to eye level. (I do nearly all making tasks standing up, by the way.)

There are many different sit-stand desks out there. Mine is an Ikea BEKANT electric sit-stand desk. The height adjusts electrically from 65cm to 120 cm, and it takes about 20 seconds to cover the full range. It seems to be reasonably solidly built, though I wouldn’t try to do woodwork on it.

It seemed a bit of an extravagance when I bought it, but I love it. By enabling me to keep a better posture, it’s much more comfortable to work at than a fixed-height desk, and the ability to move the workpiece to the best height for any given operation materially improves the quality of the things I make.

How could it be improved? Foot switches (or even better, speech control!) would be handy for those stressful times when you need to change the height of the desk quickly, but have both hands occupied holding something together. And being able to tilt the tabletop would be wonderful – a project for the future, maybe…

Lilac chaser

The lilac chaser is a remarkable visual phenomenon that is normally seen as a computer animation. Dr Rob Jenkins of York University wanted to show people that the effect works with real, honest-to-goodness, physical lights, so he asked me to make him the equipment to do this. The video below shows you how the apparatus works. Note that the limitations of my camera mean that the effect is not as strong in the video as it is in real life.

I used an Arduino microcontroller board to control the LEDs.

One useful technique that I developed here was a way of producing an an even spot of light from an LED. Diffused LEDs give an even spread of light but send light in all directions, which is wasteful if you want only a small bright spot. Clear LEDs are available which direct the light in quite a narrow beam, but the distribution of light is very uneven. I found that shining the light from a clear LED down a short white tube, about 10 mm internal diameter and 60 mm long, did a very good job of producing a sharp-edged even spot on a piece of tracing paper placed at the end of the tube. I assume that the many reflections inside the tube thoroughly mix up the light. I found the tubing in the plumbing section of a hardware shop, and lightly roughened the inside of it using fine sandpaper.

To get a spot with a blurred edge, I placed a second tracing-paper screen a short distance away from the end of the tube. By varying the distance of this screen I was able to vary how blurred the patch of light on it was.

How high am I ?

Last week I was on holiday in Wales. It wasn’t the driest of weeks, and while I was inside not climbing mountains, I finally got round to doing some mountain-related geometry that I’ve been putting off for the last 30 years or so. It’s about knowing how high you are.

Hellaval and Skye from Askival — Am I higher or lower than the summit in the middle distance? (The peak of Hellaval on the island of Rum, taken from the flanks of Askival, with Skye in the background)

If you’re climbing or descending a mountain, you sometimes want to know roughly how far (vertically) there is still to go. One way to get an idea of your altitude is to use nearby peaks or other points of known altitude as reference points. But how do you judge whether you are above or below another point? It’s not always obvious, and without some sort of rule, the worry is that you’ll make optimistic judgements, leading to disappointment in the long run.

My friend Malcolm once told me that, as a rule of thumb, you should look at the reference point relative to the distant skyline. If the point appears to be above the skyline, you are lower than it, and if it appears to be below the skyline, you are higher than it. I’ve used this skyline-rule ever since, but I’ve never checked how accurate it is.

The fact that there’s any doubt about the rule is because the Earth is not flat. If it was flat, then your line of sight to the (infinitely distant) sea-level horizon would be exactly horizontal, and the rule would work perfectly. If the skyline was made up of mountains, the rule would work perfectly as long as they were as high as your reference point.

But the Earth isn’t flat: it’s a big ball. How does this affect the accuracy of the rule? I used a wet Welsh Wednesday afternoon to find out.

It turns out that the rule is good enough for general hillwalking purposes as long as the reference point is no more than two or three kilometres away (as it usually will be). The errors are smaller if the skyline is distant mountains rather than the horizon at sea level. The rule consistently underestimates your altitude, which, in ascent at least, is probably better than the alternative. Continue reading How high am I ?