Graham White: My Notes

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IoT Christmas Tree Tech

November 23, 2021

In my previous post where I was showing off my IoT Christmas Trees, I described the project and what the trees are intended to do. This post features the inside track information about how I put the project together. So the first post is supposed to be non-technical if you will and this post details the info more of interest to those interested in the technical make-up of the project. Since this is effectively a recipe for how to create one of my IoT Christmas Trees, we'll start with the list of things needed.

Ingredients

For the Tree

Bits you need to make one tree:

Wood
Paint
Arduino ESP32
Micro USB Cable
Veroboard
LED String
Buttons

Server and Connection Requirements

These are Internet connected of course so needed here are:

An MQTT Broker
An HTTP Server
WiFi with Internet Connection
Another WiFi capable device

Other Useful Bits

Probably staple provisions of any maker's tool box:

Glue Gun
Soldering Iron and Solder
Heat Shrink Tubing
Wire (22AWG Solid Core)

Putting it all together

The wooden bits

You need enough wood in whatever design you prefer. I made a point of making each of my trees in a different style. It caused more work that way of course but there's something nice about each tree being unique. My designs are all between about 25cm and 40cm tall without much thought put into why. However, this sort of size seems to work well with the light string I chose. Given the light string is 5 metres long and I used half a string for each tree I needed to hang 2.5m of string around each tree (containing 25 lights per tree). Therefore, you need to size the wooden structure appropriately for the length of string or number of lights you intend to hang.

Painting

I decided to use spray paint to try and achieve a really smooth and high quality finish. I selected Montana paints as they provided all the types of paint I wanted to use (primer, metallic top coat, glitter and varnish). I went with 4 of their colours, Aztec Gold, Avocado Green, Titanium, Red; and glitter effects in Silver and Dusty Gold. Everything came from Graff City.

A couple of coats of primer were needed followed by a couple of coats of metallic. The glitter paint goes on as a varnish layer with particles of coloured glitter in it and they recommend a top coat of varnish is used to seal the glitter coat and prevent and loose glitter falling off. The result is a really nice layered effect where the fairly reflective metallic coating is set off against a subtle glitter effect and everything is finished off with the sheen of varnish.

Electronics

The main driver of the project, electronically, is an ESP32 board. The board I chose is a knock off of the Lolin D32 simply because it has everything I needed (including having the pins not soldered) and much cheaper than locally available boards in the UK. While the board was cheaper, I did discover some of the drawbacks in as much as it doesn't have built-in pull up resistors on its GPIO pins and as such I had a lot more soldering to do to work in a 10kΩ resistor into a little veroboard circuit to wire in the buttons I chose.

The string of LED lights looks very cool with some quite presentable wiring between the lights when compared to an LED strip. They're completely WS2812/NeoPixel compatible so they're easy to programme and there's some nifty libraries out there already available. They are, however, fairly hellish to solder since the wires are coated with some very thin plastic insulation which is either difficult to remove or otherwise burn through with your solder.

Finally, the whole thing is powered via Micro USB so I ordered a pile 3m long USB-A to Micro-USB cables so the trees can be sited a reasonable distance from a power socket and I didn't have to worry about batteries or charging although battery powering these units would definitely be possible.

Firmware

The firmware is a fairly standard Arduino implementation for the main loop and using WifiManager to configure the ESP32 WiFi to connect to an SSID. It wont come as any surprise to find the messaging component I'm using is based on MQTT and so I'm using Nick's pubsubclient library on the client side.

One of the more interesting things I've done with the firmware is to attempt to make it as remotely configurable as possible without the need to rely on over-the-air updates for the firmware. To this end, I'm using the inih library and the firmware downloads its configuration as an ini formatted file from a remote location that allows me to configure as much as possible, currently: mqtt hostname:port, username, password, SSL settings, publish and subscribe topics, device name; and then configurations for the lights for things like which colours to cycle around, how long the "Merry Christmas" setting is maintained before reverting to the previous setting. The ini file format also allows an easy "global" configuration to apply across each tree while also allowing a per-tree customisation. Should the WiFi connection not be available or the configuration file not be available then the tree reverts to a sensible set of defaults.

Once running, WiFi connected, MQTT connected and the configuration has been downloaded and applied there's some basic login there to cycle between the different light configurations when the left button on the tree is pressed. This is all done locally on each tree. The right button, when pressed, sends a (configurable) message to the other trees that tells them what to do. So it would be possible for each tree to have its own specific "Merry Christmas" pattern so you could, for example, work out who had sent you the message by the pattern/colour of the light flashes on the receiving tree.

I have also built in a simple command protocol to further take advantage of the MQTT connectivity. This allows me to send a "ping" to each tree to see which are currently alive, connected and working properly. The second command I have is a "reload" command that will cause the tree to download and re-apply the configuration from its remote location, noting of course that the configuration could have changed and so I can cause a tree to remotely update its configuration. Finally, there is a "reconnect" command that will cause the tree to disconnect and connect to its configured MQTT broker. This is useful in the rare circumstance where the IP address of the broker may have changed in which case I can update the configuration, have the tree read a new configuration, then have the tree disconnect from the current broker and connect to a new broker.

MQTT Broker

The MQTT broker is provided courtesy of my still relatively new Pi4 home server and the rather excellent Mosquitto MQTT broker. Since I'm running this all myself and not using a cloud based MQTT service I've screwed it all down as far as I can from a security perspective but there's nothing like running your own services to make you feel vulnerable!

IoT Christmas Trees

November 23, 2021

My latest maker project has been running for a good chunk of the year and has been a really cool thing to do to keep me occupied during lockdown since I'm not really one to binge watch box sets. I've been making Internet connected Christmas trees as gifts for close family. They're designed to be ambient ornamental decorative pieces with a funky twist of interactivity. The video I produced probably explains them best...

As you can see from the video, each tree is deliberately different. I thought it would be more interesting to have a completely different wooden design for each. My dad did the woodwork which saved me quite a lot of time and allowed me to concentrate on writing the software and doing the electronics not to mention building and painting each tree. There's a good few hours work in each of these things.

Operation of the trees is pretty simple with the most complicated bit, like with most of these things, being the initial set up to get them onto your WiFi network. For that, and to explain the basics of how they work along with a bit of troubleshooting information, I wrote a little user manual to go with them. After all, it will be our closest family members that receive one of these and so I can always help out remotely (and potentially fix any issues that arise). The left button on each tree cycles round a set of pre-defined colour schemes. However, these can be changed on a per tree basis should someone want a different colour or configuration. Similarly, the trees can be operated remotely but I've yet to write a decent interface to do so. The right button on each tree is where the fun is, causing all the other trees to change light pattern for some period of time. Again, this is all configurable per tree but by default they all cause the same green and red frenzied light pattern which should be very noticeable in the corner of your room should it occur.

Finally, big thanks to James Sutton and his original iotree project was in no small amount an inspiration for my work here. Although, the implementations are different both physically and in software there's still a huge amount of overlap. James was also responsible for running an IoT hackathon at work (we're colleagues) introducing a lot of the technology I would need in order to perform this build. Thanks again, James!

I've also written more details on the technical implementation. But, I'll sign this post off with a closer look at each tree in pictures...

Snooker Cue Maintenance

January 22, 2014

A slight departure from my usual sort of posts but these are "my notes" so what the heck.

Last Christmas I treated myself (or strictly speaking was treated to) a new snooker cue. I've always dabbled with snooker, not particularly good, but I can do enough to get by. My old cue (18th birthday present) was getting a bit tired. I decided to go with a really nice English make, Peradon, from Liverpool. They are reasonably priced but the real treat is the quality of the craftsmanship and since I'm quite keen on making things from wood I really appreciate that side of the cue as much as anything else - it's clearly one that's far above the level to which I actually play the game. I eventually settled on the Ascot ¾ cue.

With such a nice piece of wood I was surprised to see a complete lack of advice on how to care for and maintain it. I wrote to Peradon for some help and what follows is their advice, and hence the reason for keeping it on my blog so I'll stand a chance of finding it again in the future...

The method is quite simple:

Rub down with a very fine steel wool (I use Liberon 0000) and wipe away any residue
Apply raw linseed oil (I use Liberon Raw Linseed Oil) with a lint free cloth and leave for 20-30 minutes
Buff the cue with a lint free cloth
Repeat if necessary (you can also heat or dilute the linseed oil for multiple coats)

It seems to work very well. Peradon recommended I do this every couple of weeks which seems to be to be rather on the excessive side so I'll probably opt for "every now and then" and since this is the first time I've done it, it looks to be an annual event although I may do it more often now I've got all the gear.

Making a Cajón

June 02, 2013

When I asked my best mate what he wanted for his birthday this year he came back with something rather unexpected, he said "I'd really like a Cajón!". Having never heard of one before he continued to explain what it was and I looked it up a bit later too. It turned out that for the sort of thing he wanted, something with an electrical pick-up (to make it semi-acoustic) with an adjustable snare too, it was a bit out of budget. After a bit of research around various different makes and models I wondered how hard it could really be (it's just a wooden box after all) and offered to make one. Matt quickly warmed to the idea and so with his knowledge of what he wanted in the way of design and my woodworking experience we set about a joint project that we've just finished this weekend.

To save the long blog post about exactly what we did, I'll simply refer you to a video (below). This is more or less exactly what we made, following Steve Ramsey's design almost to the letter. There were a few things we had to make up that the video didn't explain very well and a couple of design adjustments (where we found the video to be incorrect - we weren't the only one's to notice the problem).

The main departure from Steve's design in the video was the inclusion of an electric pick-up. However, we didn't depart from Steve's advice and just followed his design for an electric pick-up using a piezo transducer and a 6mm jack socket soldered together as can be seen from about 4:30 in the video for his stomp box.

We took pictures all the way through which can be seen in chronological order in my Flickr set or via the slideshow at the bottom of this post. We started off with a bunch of different stuff we needed to work up. Here's Matt with the cheesy-grinned first picture before we got started, posing with the various bits and pieces:

More or less everything we used is there in the picture above:

4' x 2' x ¾" birch faced ply sheet (for the top, bottom and sides)
3mm ply (for the front piece, called the tapa)
25mm dowel rod
piezo transducer and 6mm jack socket
4 speaker feet
Snare wire
2 knobs, m6 40mm long thread
Clear wax
Glue

On the first afternoon's work, the birch ply was cut to size and rebated to form a box shape, albeit not yet glued together:

This was actually the main part of the work we had to do. The next time we got together we modified the back panel so it had a large hole in it (to let the sound out) and a fitting for the jack socket to be screwed through. After that came the tricky business of fitting the adjustable snare dowel rod mechanism to the sides which can best be seen in a couple of different pictures. Once all that was done we were able to glue it all together and left it clamped up for a couple of days to dry, the result was a completed box:

Finally, we cut the front to size and fitted that, waxed the whole thing then fitted the feet and jack socket. We gave it a few different tests. First was to sit on it (since that's how they're played) and it survived that, then Matt had his first play on it in my garage followed by heading in doors to hook it up to the stereo in order to test the semi-accoustic-ness off it. Everything worked well.

We're both really pleased with it. It's really solidly constructed and feels like it should last a good many years use. All the tweaks to a basic Cajón design work really well including the adjustable snare and the electric pick-up. It looks really good too, we were really lucky to source such a nice looking piece of ply (thanks to my cousin's at Ascot Timer Buildings), finished it off with nicely rounded corners and a good quality clear wax. Of course, the really important bit is the sound and fortunately it performs on that front too (better than I'd expected). The base notes from the middle sound really deep and can be quite loud if you're really going for it and they graduate to a nice high pitch as you move towards playing at the sides. When turned on, the snare adds an extra dimension when hitting near the top too.

So, it's happy birthday to Matt (a wee bit late since we started making it just after his birthday). There have been loads of people interested in the project as we've bee going through so I'm sure he's going to be a busy boy showing it off all over the place now.

I'll close out with the slideshow and another mention of thanks to Steve Ramsey for his excellent video tutorial.

Building a New PC

June 05, 2012

This post is related to a couple of my recent posts, the New PC Build post that explains the kit I ordered for this build with a little reasoning thrown in for good measure, and the New PC Install Notes post where I dumped a few of my thoughts about the software installation. However, this post is specifically about the hardware build.

This is what I started out with, a set of shiny new boxes and an old PC which would be gutted back to the case and have only the case reused.

It's a nice Antec case and I couldn't find anything much better around today so didn't see the point in buying another one even if it did mean I had to strip it out before I started. This is the shot with the case stripped back and all the stuff I used to have in there strewn across the bed I was doing the build on.

I only had 1 case fan in my previous build and decided to upgrade to include 2 fans in this build by including this Antec fan. It seems to me that a lot of the new cases you buy these days have moved away from the ATX specification for front-to-back airflow as they have all sorts of fans and vents all over the place. I quite like the idea of front-to-back airflow to give a nice continuous stream of air to the parts inside.

Here's the fan mounted in the front of my old case. It was supplied with some little rubber grommets for screwless fixing into any case. However, my case already had the purple clips you can see in this picture in place so I had no need for the grommets and the fan just clipped into place very quickly and easily.

Next up it was the power supply. Here's the one I chose while still shrink-wrapped.

It turns out this is probably the most over-packaged PSU in the world. The box is designed to give the wow factor when you open it, the likes of which are usually reserved for high-end consumer products such as a squeezebox, it has a fold-out design in a glossy box to reveal a very neatly packed PSU with all the cables hidden underneath.

The fan fitted pretty quickly and easily as well, the build was going well so far.

One of the things I use my PC for most is for photos. I decided when putting together a spec for the new machine to include an internal card reader for convenience. I also wanted to mount a USB 3 socket on the front of the box so this little reader from Akasa seems to fit the bill perfectly.

Here's the card reader after being unpacked and fitted. It's much like fitting an old floppy drive, being a 3½" device and you simply connect it up to power and in this case the USB 3 motherboard header and it's job done. I've not included a floppy drive in this build so it also makes the front of the case look less bare.

One of the indulgences of this build, given they're expensive against a traditional hard disk, is the inclusion of an SSD drive.

Here's the content of the box, you get a molex to SATA converter (presumably in case you're fitting it to some ancient power supply) as well as the fixing screws, a SATA cable and conveniently a 2½" to 3½" mounting bracket - which I needed as my case doesn't have any 2½" mounts in it. You also get the manual and CD but those are still sealed ;-)

This is round the back of the SSD after fitting, inside the case. You can see it's a pretty simple affair as you'd expect with just a SATA and power connectors on the back. You can also see how the 2½" to 3½" mounting bracket works from this picture. The bundle of wires at the top of the picture is coming from the back of the Akasa USB 3 card reader and slot.

There's plenty of better pictures of the Asus P8Z77-V LX board out there, but this is my board fresh out of the box and ready to be fitted into my case.

This is the board in place in my old case. It was really very easy to fit as I'd removed an old Asus board before fitting this one and all the mounting holes were in exactly the same place.

Here's the new Ivy Bridge 3570K CPU out of the box with some Arcitc Silver 5 thermal compound. Interestingly the stock cooler doesn't look too bad and is certainly much easier to fit than previous coolers I've worked with.

As I said above, I was pleasantly surprised to see the stock cooler being so easy to fit. It was (as has been usual for coolers) a screwless installation with the four plastic fasteners secured in place with a simple firm (but not too firm) press towards the motherboard.

Here's the memory in box, ready to be fitted. As usual for DIMMs it was a pretty undramatic installation process as they slotted in very nicely next to the CPU. These don't have any huge fins on them for cooling and have a very simple heat sink arrangement making them low profile so I had no worries about overhanging coolers interrupting the fitting of the DIMMs since I would be using all four slots in the above picture.

All in all it was a pretty painless installation process and I've been using the machine for a couple of weeks already without any real issues.

New PC Build

May 13, 2012

It's been quite some time (about eight years) since I last built a PC for myself and I've been promising to build a new one for quite a while, now I've finally got round to ordering some parts. Not that I need to, but I've justified the expense as a treat to myself after our annual bonus came through, having never really spent the bonus on anything particularly exciting before.

This is a short post detailing what I've gone for and why, not to show off, but so in years to come I can look back (as I have before) on what was available at the time and I'll have a record I can get to should I forget the detail of which parts are in my current PC.

I'm still the sort of geek that likes to build my own computers. I like to do the research and put them together but it's still definitely the best way to get a good deal and the only way to get each component to be the exact one you want. I also still like to have a PC for some reason, I have a laptop for work so I've already got something mobile and a PC just feels like the right solution for home use.

So with no further ado, on order are:

Case: I'm sticking with my old Antec SLK3700 case, okay so strictly speaking this isn't on order.

Processor: Intel Core i5-3570K (£175)
Sandybridge was a real game changer when it came out and firmly handed back the power to the hands of Intel in the processor market. I've been waiting for Ivybridge to come out for a while, either so I could buy a cheaper Sandybridge or plump for the Ivybridge if the price difference wasn't too great. Well, for those who know their processors you'll see I've gone for the Ivybridge option. Currently it's only 20-odd quid more than the equivalent Sandybridge processor and I think the extra expense is worth it to get the better on-chip graphics capabilities and minor improvements in speed and energy efficiency.

Motherboard: Asus P8Z77-V LX (£94)
I'm a sucker for a good Asus board, I've used them in most of my PC builds so that's where I start looking when I want a new machine. I nearly went for the LE version of this board, it was another 20 quid, but I decided I wouldn't be using the extra features it provides (surround-sound audio and extra sata sockets) so I pocketed the difference and went for this one instead.

Memory: Kingston (4x4GB) DDR3 1600MHz XMP HyperX (£65)
I very nearly went for some Corsair low profile DIMMs but was swayed by the vendor support list for DIMMs for the motherboard chosen above. I'm still in shock that you can get 16GB RAM for 65 quid!

Storage: Intel 120GB 520 Series SSD (£140)
I've got 4 hard disks in my PC at the moment, one of which is not connected, another is hardly used and the remaining 2 are coupled together in a striped RAID array in an attempt to get some sort of speed out of them. Hard disks really are the bottleneck in your PC these days so I've decided to shove in a top notch SSD from Intel. They're the only manufacturer to offer a 5 year warranty and also came highly recommended (under the Hitachi brand, Intel and Hitachi work together on their SSDs) from one of my respected colleagues in the storage department at work. 120GB should be ample for my storage requirements on the PC, the disk will be split to dual boot both Windows 7 64-bit (for those occasions when only Windows will do and a bit of gaming) and the main stay of Fedora x86_64. My data other than the operating system already lives on a NAS.

PSU: CoolerMaster 600W Silent Pro Modular (£63)
Unfortunately my current 620W ATX power supply only has a 4 pin CPU connector rather than the currently common 8 pin EPS so I've begrudgingly had to fork out for a new PSU. This CoolerMaster one gets some decent reviews for being quiet, efficient and delivering good consistent power within the tolerances required by ATX. The 600W rating will also leave me with some overhead should I decide to whack in a high-end GPU at some point in the future.

Thermal Paste: Arctic Silver 5 (£5)
I've got some really old unbranded thermal paste knocking around somewhere but decided to invest in some decent stuff for this build so the Arctic Silver was the way to go.

DVD Writer: Samsung S222AL 22x with Lightscribe (£15)
I've got 2 optical drives at the moment, both are IDE and with the new breed of motherboards (or not necessarily even the ones that are particularly new) IDE is long since dead so I've opted to get a Sata DVD writer for this build. Similar to the memory, I'm amazed you can pick something like this up for 15 quid!

Front Case Ports: Akasa USB 3.0 Card Reader (£20)
My current case has a couple of USB ports on the front, I thought it would be useful to throw a couple of USB 3.0 ports to the front of the case too. This unit also has a built-in multi-card reader so I'll no longer have to hunt for my USB SDHC reader every time I want to copy pictures from my camera.

Case Fan: Antec TrueQuiet 120 (£7)
A 12cm fan for the front of my case, I've got a slot to fit another one in so I thought why not given the heat output I'd expect from this build.

Keyboard and Mouse: Logitech Desktop MK120 (£13)
My current keyboard is PS/2 and has seen better days. I still like a simple keyboard with none of these funny curves or multimedia keys you can get these days so went for this cheap set from Logitech.

The obvious note in this build is a lack of a GPU. As I mentioned above, I've left overhead in the power supply to put in a GPU in the future should I choose to do so. I'm going to do this build and run on the GPU built into the processor. I'll be interested to see what the performance of the HD 4000 is for my needs, if it's sufficient then great, otherwise I'll be tempted towards an NVidia GTX-560 card. I guess it all depends on if I do a little more gaming then I do currently (which is next to none on the PC) and whether the HD 4000 is up to the job.

The other thing I've got my eye on is an up-rated cooler from the stock cooler supplied with the 3570K. I quite like the look of the Corsair H60 Hydro should the need arise.

Home Networking

April 21, 2012

Photo by Beth

We've just finished a fairly major project at home in doing up our living room (right). It's been fairly major in that the room is quite large and has an open stair well so we've had to include the stairs and landing too. It's been a complete overhaul with the fire you see in the picture having been fitted, the upstairs ceiling plastered, new carpets, a little wall paper hung, painted and thoroughly decorated. However, one thing I wanted to do as part of the redecoration was to run Ethernet cable between the TV point in the right of the picture all the way around the room past the door on the left to the computer point in the kitchen. Basically, I've been long since fed up of wireless being slow, if not dropping out entirely. So here follows a few notes to remind myself what I did with the hope it might be useful to someone else out there too.

I started out by planning the route for the cable and researching the kit I would need to buy in order to complete the job. I decided to channel the cable into the wall where the fire is, using a channel I had the fire fitter make behind the fire when it was fitted. For the rest of the run along the green wall and into the kitchen the cables are sunk into the back of the skirting board. Having replaced the skirting, I routed out a channel just big enough for 2 Ethernet cables and re-hung the skirting back in place.

The next decision was what type of cable to buy, Cat 5e or Cat6, Solid Core or not? I already knew I wanted 2 cables, driven mainly by the fact it seemed pointless just to run one and a lot of Ethernet wall face plates have 2 sockets in them so that's what I decided on. Then I went shopping.

I already had a couple of single metal backing boxes to mount face plates on, the rest of my shopping list consisted of the following for the sum of just under 40 quid:

As you can tell from that little list, I decided to go with shielded Cat 6 and bought 2 cables with ends already attached. I found it was cheaper to do this than to buy a reel of cable! It was simple enough to cut the ends off and as you can tell from the rest of the list I decided to use whatever length was remaining to make up some Ethernet cables using the ends and crimper tool.

CEL MT3 Multi Tool

February 22, 2011

I've been re-grouting my kitchen and bathroom recently, not in itself something worthy of a blog post. However, I discovered a power tool to make the job far easier and since a few people have already asked me about it...

The MT3 made by CEL UK is an oscillating Multi Tool with all manner of different attachments, one of which is a carbide grout removal tool. The fact the tool oscillates (rather than rotates, say like a Dremel multi) means you don't fling the grout all over the house as dust. Vibrations from the tool are enough to remove grout and drop the majority of the mess neatly out of the joints in front of you.

I think at this point you probably already get the picture so here's a fun video of someone using the tool before I splurge out a bit more detail on it:

As you can see in addition to grout removal, it can be used for cutting but also sanding, rasping and probably a whole load of other tasks too. There's a bunch of other videos on the MT3 and other tools from CEL on their YouTube channel.

As an alternative, the known branded version of this thing is the PMF 180 E from Bosch. The best deal I found on the Bosch was at Amazon who sell the tool and large accessory pack together for just under 100 quid at the time of writing. This is more or less the same price as the MT3 from CEL so here's my logic for why I didn't go for the big name product.

Accessories are expensive for both products, but the Bosch is even more expensive than the CEL. However, the Bosch is only capable of using bits supplied by Bosch themselves where as the CEL is capable of using bits from pretty much anywhere, including Bosch (they include an adapter for Bosch bits). Given this and the fact the CEL is slightly more powerful I thought I'd go for supporting the small British startup company rather than the large German corporation and if CEL doesn't survive into the future I can always buy alternative bits for the tool from other manufacturers anyway.

Now I've mentioned CEL are a small British startup, it's probably a good point to say they successfully pitched on the Dragon's Den TV programme back in August 2010. You can see the designer and company MD, Chris Elsworthy, making his pitch on YouTube. However, it seems that ultimately CEL didn't accept the offer of investment.

Dealing with CEL while buying the tool was an absolute dream, one of the best Internet buying experiences I've ever had and really shows how the personal service you can get from a small company makes a difference. I wanted to buy the MT3-C Pack which at the time was advertised as "coming soon" and is made up of the MT3 Tool, accessory pack, and a case. Buying all 3 as a pack represented a saving of around £20.

I wrote to the generic sales email address on their web site asking when the pack might be available as I was interested in buying all 3 products together. Within half an hour I had a response back from their office saying they had all three parts, they were willing to put them together as a pack and honour the advertised pack price on the web site. This is where it gets really good, in addition they also sent through a PayPal invoice so should I wish to go ahead with the purchase I just had to complete the invoice and they would send the products out that afternoon for next day delivery! At this point it was a no-brainer, I returned the invoice and followed up via email too. Again, only half an hour later I had a response saying they had received the payment and sent the product out. 8:30am the next morning arrives and I've got my new tool, brilliant!

So far the tool and dealing with the company have both been great so I'm completely sold and wish CEL every success for the future and in creating some more great kit.