Hi all,
One of the great pleasures of living in the Boston area is saying "pahk the cah" in a Boston accent any chance I get. (I also live about a mile and a half from Hahvahd Yahd, if you want to score the full bonus phrase.)
Of course, one of the downsides of living in the city with no off-street parking is having to FIND parking, and then if you're a one car family like mine, communicating to your spouse where you left the car.
So today's post revisits an old project of mine: a little magnetic parking map to address exactly that issue. I liked the aesthetics, but the problem was that remembering to move a magnet (which was around the corner from the entryway) just didn't happen. The other flaw was that I didn't have a magnet strong enough to hold my keys.
I wanted to give it another go, and I'd developed a habit of hanging my keys on a hook near the door, so the insight was that I could combine that existing habit with a way to use the key hanger as a marker. I knew I didn't want to fuss with moving a magnet, so I decided I would place hooks at each street location around the block where I typically park.
If you're curious what I came up with, see below. The rest of this blog post is about process.
Exploration
I knew from the get-go that I was going to have hooks in the map, but I wanted to explore some choices visually. I tried Gemini, Claude, and ChatGPT. They all seemed to understand the idea — at least from a text point of view — and proposed some relevant concepts (printed sheet metal, laser-cut wood, cast concrete, etc.), but when it came time to generate imagery, they all consistently placed key hooks underneath the map, rather than on the map, or worse, smack in the middle.
Why do these concepts have markers?
with some work, it eventually generated something almost useable
Execution
I'll admit that the available materials and fabrication methods in my house had a heavy influence on the final direction, but I convinced myself that I liked the look of the cast concrete concepts. I also had a 3D printer (and no laser cutter), so the line between idea and prototype grew considerably shorter.
The next step was creating some geometry. I'd taken a screenshot out of Google Maps and was a minute or two into tracing the first house when I realized there were over 40 houses on the map in the immediate vicinity (P.S. — trick-or-treating around Halloween time, my kids hit an insane number of places; they came home with a haul), and tracing each one wasn't going to work for me.
Some quick Googling and I found CADMapper.com, which lets you export DXF and other file formats for small map areas for free.
Of course, the DXF needed some minor repair (houses that spilled into the street, for instance), but a short while later, I had a CAD model.
I printed a test model of a smaller portion of the map to verify that I could heat-stake a nail into the 3D print with a soldering iron, and then kicked off a full size big print.
I had a bunch of nails from a picture-hanging kit, and a short while later — voilà — I had a new key-hook map by the entryway.
If it gets usage, I may commit to improvements like a laser-cut version, or spruce this one up with some paint and a little color.
For the bonus edition, I’ll add some LEDs that blink when street sweeping is in effect.
Best regards,
Sam Feller
aka THE Awkward Engineer