UptownMaker

If necessity is the mother of invention, snow day boredom is the drunken dorm-mate who will ultimately get you picked up by the campus police. If you're outside of the Minneapolis/St Paul metro area, you may only be cursorily aware of the current snow-tastrophe .  We've gotten about 12 inches so far (300mm for you post-Imperialists) and are expecting another 4-6 (100-150mm).  I managed to get my car safely embedded into a snowbank off of the snow emergency route I live on (read the rules regarding that here - it's harsh but necessary), and, after digging and pushing out a few more people on the walk home, I got bored. My work has been throwing out shoebox sized coroplast boxes for a while now; and being, as I am, on the verge of collapsing into full-on hoarding behavior, I've been picking them up and carting them home.  I've probably rescued about 800- there's a stack taller than I am at the Hack Factory.  Anyway, I use these things for everything- as boxes ...

Adafruit had a post a few weeks ago about building a cyclorama to take nice pictures of your work.  I built one up for the office (we always have horrible pictures of things in our documentation), but for home I can't justify even the $50-75 one would cost me.  So, I did what any good maker will do- hit the junk piles! First, a word on sourcing:  the local IKEA has a section right before the checkout called "As-is".  (My wife and I frequent IKEA for some reason- we eat breakfast there about once every couple of weeks, and dinner there almost as often.)  As-is is where IKEA goods too good for the trash but too bad to sell as new go- returns, scratch and dent, display models, etc.  Every so often, they'll bundle up a bunch of crap and put it on a "mystery cart" or a "handyman's cart".  The shelves just visible to the right above were a handyman's cart item; the lights all came from a mystery cart.  I've actually bought far too many ...