Twenty Twenty-Five
This year especially, I’ve found myself committing a sin I so often warn against. Namely, using social media as a repository for one’s work, instead of a place you own. In an effort to undo that a little, here’s are some of the things I made and did in 2025. Some already have articles on this site, but many were only mentioned in places like Mastodon (and, shudder, Instagram).
In no particular order...
Tape Dispenser
I've posted plenty about about this, but I did ‘upgrade’ it this year by making a custom PCB. It was the first one I’ve ever designed. It vastly improved the experience of assembling it, and gave me a much-needed prompt to learn some KiCAD.
Thanks to an impromptu lightning talk I gave at this year’s Open Hardware Summit, it got some extra attention and an outing at Dublin Maker Festival. I also sent a few assembled and unassembled out to various people, and it’s a huge joy to see when people do amazing work making their own!
Tide Printer
My wife and I go to beaches a lot, and often find ourselves planning around tide times. So I found a cheap receipt printer second hand and made this, which now lives on our hall stand. It prints a seven-day tide forecast, including spring and neap tides, along with sunrise and sunset times.
The hardware setup here is a Raspberry Pi Zero W connected to a SII brand printer, and a GPIO button that triggers printing. Software-wise it’s not super interesting. There’s a script that retrieves tide times from the World Tides API and does some fairly simple calculations to figure out neap and spring tides, as well as the sunrise and sunset times. I wrote a simple CLI binary in C, using the SII SDK (kind of the only option I had, I think), that just accepts a string and prints it out.
It was surprisingly joy-inducing to see it show “next week the days will be 9 minutes longer” for the first time.
Piano
I’ve also been trying to get better at recording myself playing piano (see the 3D-printed mount below). In the past, I’ve been too much of a perfectionist about recordings. To a point that is not matched by my actual playing ability. The result is that I rarely ever made recordings of my playing. I’ve tried to loosen up on that a little, and here are a couple of pieces I’ve recorded over the previous few months.
One of my favourite pieces ever, Chopin's Étude in E Major, Op.10. No.3.
The first movement of Beethoven's first piano sonata, Op.2 No.1 in f minor.
Photos
I got a Ricoh GR IIIx in late 2024 and completely fell in love with it. Here are some of my favourite photos from the year.
Music Box
After getting involved in Dublin Maker Festival, I signed up for its Secret Santa. For that, I made this music box that plays Christmas tunes as you spin the flywheel on top. It’s fairly simple; there’s a Hall effect sensor in the housing, and a couple of magnets in the flywheel. Each time the wheel rotates, it triggers a pulse that advances the tune. The logic is handled by an Arduino (clone) running an ATMega 328P, and the whole thing is 3D printed with the exception of a small ball bearing. The bearing was the easiest option that would let the wheel spin freely for a relatively long time.
I’ve been experimenting with physical interaction mechanisms for another project, from which I borrowed the flywheel idea. I’ll hopefully post more about that soon.
Bits and Pieces
In no particular order, some other things I’ve made this year include a really bespoke mount for attaching my phone to my Zoom audio recorder. Mostly for recording piano. A simple desk ornament that creates a surprisingly pleasant effect with a diffused LED matrix. While not my designs, I also made a Severance-inspired bluetooth speaker for a friend’s birthday and a moon lamp that sits proudly in my living room.
For a completely different type of make, I’ve been honing my milk bread skills and making some pretty delicious katsu and strawberry sandos over the past year.
I feel incredibly lucky to be able to do the things I do, more so with each passing day. I hope you all had a good 2025, and I'm excited for more making and creativity in 2026.