Oaken Gearbox

There are likely many ways to complete this task. The method below uses GIMP 2.8.8, an opensource (and free) competitor to Adobe's Photoshop and a pretty generic Cannon Scanner. Scan your artwork in Black and White (not greyscale) at twice your intended resolution (I chose 600dpi, the highest offered by my scanner software) and save to a format of your choice. I used .tif because there is no quality loss, but it's not really very important for this application. Don't be alarmed if the result has ugly, jagged edges and extraneous stray pixels. We'll take care of that later. Your scan will look something like this Open the saved file in GIMP. Rotate if needed. Note GIMP's "Select by color" feature didn't seem to work if I didn't first rotate the image (presumably a bug?). Crop out the unwanted margins. Select Image>Mode>RGB Color Go to Image Size and set the resolution to half of what it was before. This will eliminate a lot of ...

When I moved into my "new" house last year, I quickly realized that something about the switches for the light above the stairs wasn't right. Once the upstairs switch was "off", the downstairs switch no longer turned it on. Although it isn't hard to wire up two switches to control one light, cleaning up after someone else who did it wrong can turn into quite a puzzle. The first step is understanding exactly how these simple, convenient circuits work. The diagram below shows this. This is not the only way to wire it, just the simplest. If you want to see a few of the stranger variations, check out this link . Note that each one does the same thing, it just splices the wires in different places. To begin unraveling the puzzle you will need a multimeter , screwdriver , and maybe a pair of pliers . First, flip the breaker for the circuit you're working on. Pull the covers off both switches and pull unscrew the switches from the box.  Before to...